Recently The National Archives (UK) Blog posted a piece entitled, “Decolonising Archaeology in Iraq?” by Dr. Juliette Desplat. Whereas I am a big fan of archival research, in particular Dr. Desplat’s ongoing work on making the archive more publicly accessible through her blog posts, I was a bit perturbed by the generous use of the word decolonizing. Decolonization must be protected as a political act. The use of the word as a descriptor is naively violent if used to illustrate the manner by which bureaucracies articulate themselves in the post-colony — those are not acts of decolonization, more often than not they are in their first instances replications of previous power structures. Decolonization must continue to be thought of and contextualized as a mode of political action that, alongside dismantling colonial structures of power, provides the space for the oppressed to occupy equitable power relations. It is about reparations, it is about social justice, it is about equity, and it is about claiming power socially, politically, and psychologically.

My main concern with The National Archives (UK) post was that it was purely descriptive about the colonial archaeologists working in Iraq, their words/letters/notes, and their petulant reluctance to abide by the new rules. With the focus on description, there was a lack of criticality; for example, any mention of Iraqi archaeologists or inspectors reproduced the dismissive tone found ripe in the archive. This was perhaps unintentional, but still problematic and unacceptable. Replicating racialized sterotypes of the other is ethically problematic, and if it is uncritically presented, it continues to travel through citation embedded within other concerns, like that of excavation and artifact movement. This packaged sensibility will continue to be reproduced, for example in Paul Barford’s blog in which he re-presents Desplat’s work under the title “The beginning of the end of excavation archive partage in Iraq.” The reproduction of her work, once again without a critical lens, just continues the cycle of archival reproduction without any sense that such replication could have contemporary consequences if treated without a context or analysis.

The National Archives (UK) post started with the citing of the 1924 Antiquities act which provided quite a bit of latitude for foreign archaeologists to take back materials to the metropole and museums (the Act was written up by Gertrude Bell in 1922 while she was Honorary Director of Antiquities for Iraq). Upon Iraq’s independence (1933) however, the rules changed and archaeologists were no longer permitted to take artifacts out of Iraq and Iraqi inspectors were required on teams. These new rules caused quite a bit of frenzy among archaeologists and their home institutions (like the Oriental Institute and the University of Pennsylvania among others, see FO 371/16923), with memorandums of concern being written to the Foreign Office, and even a veiled threat by Sir Leonard Woolley who “thought it was a strong statement from the Iraqi government, and one that could discourage foreign expeditions to return to the country.” (Desplat 2017)

Unsurprisingly, the archival record posted on the blog makes archaeologists sound like bratty, over privileged school boys who are only interested in their research and antiquities over and beyond the sovereignty of a nation of people. The archival memorandums posted on the blog illustrate the ways colonial epistemic muscle expected itself to continue to work in the postcolony. The clarity of expectations is the most interesting part of the archival material. If the Iraqi’s were going to make all these demands on foreign expeditions then they themselves had to prove their own modernity in order to gain the respect of the colonists. “George Rendel, the Head of the Eastern Department at the Foreign Office, emphasized the ‘serious injury which [the law’s] adoption would obviously occasion to the cause of archaeology in general’. He also thought that ‘the attitude adopted by the Iraqis in this matter [would] be regarded by many as a test of whether Iraq is really a modern and progressive State’ (FO 371/16923).” (Desplat 2017)

Why must Iraqi’s pass a test of modernity to claim their own heritage? This doomed-from-the-start set up if often how patronizing colonialisms find their way into epistemic foundations of archaeological teaching. How many times have I heard, Why should we repatriate these artifacts to [insert post-colony here] if they themselves cannot take care of them?

This blog post is not read in a vacuum, as concerns related to museums and museum collections are not relegated only to archaeologists. On my screen, the tab next to The National Archive post is an interview of Nicholas Mirzoeff by Inês Beleza Barreiros on BUALA. Barreiros does a great job in bringing together some key insights as questions leading Mirzoeff  to outline and clarify his visual activist agenda which he brings to three main points, “empty the museum, decolonize the curriculum and open theory.” I will not expound on all of what these three points entail, but I bring this up just to say that his idea around emptying the museum is literally just that – all expropriated cultural materials should be returned to their appropriate owners. For all those of us involved in repatriation issues and the politics around cultural property, we know it is not that simple nor as easy, even though it should be — and it is also not a new hot button issue or the theory fad of the decade. It is one that communities world wide have been fighting for since archaeologists started taking their things.

Curiously however, although national shifts in excavation regulations in the postcolony are common, as was the case in Iraq, when it comes to indigenous rights and repatriation, there is a particular form of violence that emerges even within the postcolony. The nation state is most anxious and precarious when confronted with indigenous sovereignty; this is true in postcolonial settings, such as in India, as well as in settler colonies such as the United States. The State then, whether a postcolonial or a settler colony, responds with such violence toward indigenous interests that it permeates all forms of interaction, from military action to scientific research.

I was reminded of the violence of science in a recent book by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh entitled, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits, in a passage that brought tears to my eyes and profoundly disturbed me, “In his final days, the last Yana Indian begged that his body be respectfully buried. Instead, Ishi’s museum friends dissected him “for science,” shipping his brain to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. It sat on a storage shelf for decades in a jar of formaldehyde.” (2017: 14)

This is what makes decolonization imperative and necessarily political. It is not just about a blog post that should not have used the word decolonising in it’s title. It is about recognizing, acknowledging and witnessing the violence that decolonization is a response to. Decolonization is not historical circumstance, it is and must be understood and protected as a political act.

NOTE: I would like to acknowledge and appreciate Morag Kersel for bringing Desplat’s blog post to my attention. I would also like to restate that I think Dr. Desplat’s archival blogging is fantastic, it just needs to be allowed to be more critical. I hope The National Archive (UK) blog can find in itself some allowance for criticality.

Because of this intimate, longstanding affair with books, I have to admit to being slow to commit to any one dictionary online. My searches for meaning online have become more opportunistic, focused, yet strangely scattered, and entirely dependent upon where in the world I am when I am searching and which search engine I am using. The variety did not bother me because there was nothing particular about any of the online dictionary platforms, they could have all been the same because they felt the same. And then last fall, I saw Merriam-Webster across a crowded twitter-scape, and I caught my breath and thought, I never knew how much we needed a dictionary in our social lives at this moment. They won me over with tweets like:

We’re seeing a spike for both ‘ombre’ and ‘hombre’. Not the same thing. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hombre …#debatenight

*whispers into the void* In contemporary use, fact is understood to refer to something with actual existence. https://www.merriam-webster.com/news-trend-watch/conway-alternative-facts-20170122 …

I went from being an occasional user of @MerriamWebster to subscribing and following them. On March 16 I recognized my growing need to touch base with the dictionary as I read the FY18 Budget proposal from the White House. As I looked through it, excavating the many meanings embedded in words used, I felt like I was engaged in some paranoid action, but it was the best way not to panic and gave me a feeling of control through words. I found myself thinking at various points during my read of the budget proposal: words have multiple meanings and interpretations; words can combat words; we just need a good argument made of specific words; words, words, words… (although to be fair, the cynic in me rolled her eyes at the idea that the current White House even cared about words).

It is probably the only thing I do have access to, words and arguments. But where and how those words are used, needs to be reassessed and re-imagined (for example, see a recent post by Alex on intervening on Wikipedia here). I don’t think we’ve (collectively as Anthropologists) have figured it out yet, but @MerriamWebster has hit their stride.

But, enough of my love of dictionaries; back to the matter at hand. As I and many other American academics pour over the proposal for the FY 18 Budget, entitled “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again,” there has been much speculation, consideration and an anxiety surrounding the elimination of key agencies that fund, support, and maintain our research. For anthropologists, the AAA has clearly laid out some pathways for advocacy, as has the National Humanities Alliance. And these are important forms of advocacy to engage in on both local and federal levels.

In reading through the proposed budget (and before insisting that everyone get to advocacy) I thought it might be useful to have a clear sense of what agencies and programs broadly linked to Anthropology were being eliminated by these proposed cuts. The following are proposed to be cut (this list is from the National Coalition for History report – but you can read more of the blue print pages 5, 17-18 and 27-28, of FY18 proposal):

• National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
• National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
• Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
• National Heritage Areas program at the National Park Service. There are currently 49 Heritage Areas nationwide.
• Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
• Twenty individual grant programs at the Department of Education are eliminated. The proposal specifically mentions international education which includes Title VI/Fulbright-Hays.
• The Department of Interior’s budget is cut 12%. How this affects the National Park Service cannot be ascertained at this point.

It is also important to keep in mind how budget appropriations work. As the National Coalition for History says:

The major point to remember is that Congress ultimately controls appropriations. Many Republicans and Democrats on the Hill have already dismissed the Trump proposal as “dead on arrival.” The reality is the president is posturing and this budget plays to his base by delivering on his promise to “drain the swamp.” So while our community should and will fight vigorously against these proposed cuts, I cannot stress enough that there is no need to panic.

I felt a bit better having read the second half of the last sentence: there is no need to panic. But an allowance not to panic should not introduce an apathy into our approach to this. The paranoia and panic related to this administration has seeped into everything. Even the White House is not immune to the seeping paranoia that such posturing brings. This, if anything, proves that when there are actions structurally put in place to intimidate some, they intimidate all. As I read how the White House aides are hiding their phones in their drawers for fear that the phones could eavesdrop on their conversations, and using encrypted messaging services, it reminded me playground politics. These are not only issues related to paranoia, but in a very basic sense, all of this posturing coming from the White House feels like being bullied.

I immediately went to look up the word on Merriam-Webster. “A bully is a blustering, browbeating person; especially :  one who is habitually cruel, insulting, or threatening to others who are weaker, smaller, or in some way vulnerable.” It’s in the top 1% of words searched.

The US Department of Health and Human Services hosts a website called Stop Bullying. On their editorial board are the Department of Education, Health and Human Services (including Center for Disease Control, Health Resources and Services Administration, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration), and the Department of Justice. They coordinate closely with the Federal Partners in Bullying Prevention Steering Committee, an “interagency effort led by the Department of Education that works to coordinate policy, research, and communications on bullying topics.  The Federal Partners include representatives from the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, the Interior, and Justice, as well as the Federal Trade Commission and the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.”

They haven’t posted much on their website as an ‘update’ since January 26, 2017.

On March 16, the day the FY18 proposal was released, @MerriamWebster posted #wordoftheday as decry: to express strong disapproval of — and indeed, that word embodies the feeling of that day for those of us researching in the humanities, social sciences, and particularly those of us conducting research abroad (we all know someone who got through grad school and language study with FLAS). But instead of just sending messages of disapproval and anxiety to each other, we do need to ensure that our collective disapproval is heard/read/trending. And not superficially so. As researchers in earnest, there is also a need to understand the deep historical nature of Empire (in which I would include these policy changes, budget posturing and the construction of general paranoia), and it’s relationship to resistance and hegemony (check out #AnthReadIn).

There are many ways to show some love. Join in the conversation. Have a conversation of your own. But don’t just stand aside and watch all of us get bullied. Do something. If you aren’t sure what to do, the next #AnthReadIn is on March 24th, 2017. You can join in that conversation on social media (even if you aren’t an Anthropologist). Also, do check out ideas for advocacy on the AAA and NHA.

If @MerriamWebster can show some sass, certainly so can we. We just need to open up the ways in which we engage with the public, use our words, and analyse/interrogate/consider how meaning is made. Let’s not just write about the world, let’s write in it.

Where are you from?
But, where are you really from?

Along with the fantastical stories of being from somewhere else, this all too familiar pair of questions has followed me throughout my life. From all levels of schooling (and life) in the United States to checkpoints in Iraq: when one is from elsewhere, where that else is, is always in question. When I am asked this question within the context of my practice, there is often an assessment of trust, suspicion and a base line assumption that all anthropologists are spies — and guilty of that until proven innocent. As it has been laid out for me countless times: how can one trust someone with such mobility, with no grounding, with no place, and/or with the ability to move into a new socio-cultural world just for research. Of all of these, the last stings the most because it simultaneously devalues our profession of choice while underlining the privilege that anthropologists carry in our disciplinary bodies. It is that discomfort of privilege that makes me want to pause here for a moment to situate such a question, before moving on to what it means to write from such a place.

Given that my own practice has existed within the ambit of the colonial world, either writing from landscapes of settler colonialism, the spaces of colonial transit, or in former colonies, I have wondered about the relationship between land and trust as a colonial bi-product. That seems to be the tip of the iceberg. Why is trust, in the few geographies I have encountered (thus not a universal), based upon placedness? Where are you from? I used to think it was because part of the human condition was to always place people within socio-cultural structures that made sense to us — but as I have grown, I have experienced a different depth to that question. Where you are from is not about fitting into the social schema – but rather, the where-ness of it all eerily exudes some sort of ontological certainty to belonging.

If you sense some hesitation on my part as I write about this, it is because I bring this up with much trepidation and with a desire (that I am foolishly ignoring) to hedge my bets. This is (at best) a very complicated issue because it is deeply and irrevocably entangled with histories of displacement and land claims, issues of class mobility, and in my mind, a hegemony of agricultural (read: settled) societies that emerges as far back as the third millennium BCE (of course, agriculture starts earlier – I’m linking the millennium to a certain hegemonic form of power related to institutions, infrastructure and agriculture – stay tuned for a different post on those power relations). At the core of my query is a very contemporary question and that is: why the mistrust of immigrants? And what relationship does immigration have with a sense of authentic belonging? As one who has never had the ability to transition into a body of authentic belonging, for me, this will always loom as an uneasy query, and most likely without any answer.

In my own intellectual upbringing I first tried to wrap my head around questions of citizenship, transcultural and transnational identities, which can be dated to the late 90s and early 2000s based on some of my touchstone texts, like May Joseph’s Nomadic Identities, Pico Iyer’s The Global Soul, or Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship. Simultaneously I was ensconced in American minority politics finding my own understanding of a certain type of white ignorance in the US through edited volumes such as Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (among others). Thus, having been nurtured in the political efficacy of epistemological critique, when I found myself wrestling with a conflicted sense of deep meaning in the ontological turn, I was worried but curious. It worked brilliantly with archaeology, with some archaeologists claiming that we had been doing this all along. Before you roll your eyes at these claims, I would think about the colonial baggage archaeology continues to carry in its current neo-colonial avatar — and perhaps what is being tapped into here is some relationship between coloniality, placedness (that can be excavated), and some ontological certainty of belonging.

A few years ago (in 2013), I co-organized a AAA session entitled ‘Once you see it, you can’t un-see it (A. Roy): Negotiating Inequality and Coloniality in Anthropological Epistemology and Archaeological Practice’ with Sonya Atalay, Whitney Battle-Baptiste, and Jane Anderson. Part of my impetus for the paper I presented (and subsequently published with a different title in a reader for the Cyprus Pavilion at the Venice Biennial), En Route to a Manifesto: Some Thoughts Concerning Epistemic Inequality and Injustice, was to contend with such issues, in particular, the tension between the ontological and the epistemic. What were we doing with this bitter colonial aftertaste that the ontological blue pill was forcing (or maybe enforcing)? And yet, there was something very important happening in the recognition of a sort of vitality for things – or most commonly heard at the AAAs that year as ‘the thinginess of things’.  My only solace was that I could trace my pedagogical tendencies to think about entanglement, my body, and issues of labor to feminist/queer scholarship – and I became that crazy lady at archaeology conferences who kept muttering under her breath, “well, it would be nice if you cited or read Karen Barad who actually wrote about this in 2007…”

But there continued to be a nagging epistemic problem – specific to my body and belonging – a problem of deep set coloniality in archaeology specifically and anthropology more broadly. In some manner of speaking, the issue is not so much about the discipline itself, but how my practice was now part of the discipline of anthropology and yet from elsewhere because of its desire to decolonize and dismantle. What sorts of epistemological frameworks was I reigniting that maintained a distinct colonial flavor that I might be able to remove, change, re-evaluate. And how might I do this while acknowledging the vitality of everything around me. To be honest, I’m not sure I’ve figured much of this out  (although I am still working on it) – except to say that now the earth has more vitality, I am read as belonging elsewhere, and racism continues to create murky epistemic problems in the academy.

Putting the earth and the academy aside, so what’s going on here? Do we or can we belong to a place or not? If we are from elsewhere, can we belong to here?

This sets up an all too easy critique of the failure of the modern nation state, so I am not even going to bother with that. What is more interesting to me is how, in spite of the trickery of citizenship, and the bareness of life, there is still a sense of belonging that permeates our discourses. This authentic belonging is constructed and saturated with the politics of everything and the deep privilege of ascribing or prescribing identity to others. And those of us who continue to embody multiple prescriptions (which I would argue is most of us – although some more than others), learn how to switch. But this is not about code-switching and identity. This is about always belonging to somewhere else.

It is not a coincidence that I write this while I live in the UAE. It is also not merely a turn of phrase that I have chose to write about ‘living’ here rather than saying I am ‘doing research’ or that I am ‘in the field’. It is precisely because I live here that I now have a different stake in cultural work, including archaeology, that happens around me. It is because I live here that I work with collaborators and colleagues as we co-construct some understanding of the ancient and contemporary.

And yet, I still do not belong. When I write about here I am writing from elsewhere. For so many others here, who also may not belong, I cannot help but wonder where they are writing from. Perhaps what we all have in common are our exciting seafaring grandmothers, housekeeper aunts, roaming mystic sisters, and raging Marxist mothers. Or perhaps there is something to seeing the color of your soil on another body that holds us in place for a moment as we recognize something familiar and dangerous.

The chill of the 2016 US elections is still in my bones. Glued to any and all forms of media, I watched what Van Jones and Judith Butler have called, “whitelash” unfold in graphs, charts, and all forms of measurable outcomes. I watched as the states of my country turned red one by one. This was not the first time I had seen this, but there was something unique about this time. This time, it was not just me and people who looked like me, who felt precarious, but rather I watched as the whitelash was aimed at and betrayed the white Left/Center Left. I watched and felt the hush over the newscasters in the newsroom as they realized the precarity of the first amendment, particularly of free speech and thus, their very existence.

Without intending to, I consumed/embodied that hush. I could not respond or say anything about the election. My inbox was flooded with messages of coping, my social media was a manifest of betrayal, blame, violence, fear, and ultimately action. I was still silent. For me, as a Muslim woman of South Asian descent who has been working for decades on issues of social justice, sometimes through decolonizing anthropology, sometimes through collective action outside the academy, these results were not surprising. I wish they were more surprising. I wish I was surprised by white supremacy in America. I wish my idealism in the human spirit could have learned to forget or misplace that constant in my life. What I found myself wishing instead was that this outrage on my social media feed had coincided with the mapping of police violence, particularly on black bodies. Or the ways in which indigenous people are being arrested and violated for peacefully protesting the Dakota pipeline. Or the rising issue of domestic violence, or really anything, except the reiterating fact that the (white) Left was taken by absolute surprise, and that they did not win. As a person of color in the United States, I have never won. Obama was probably the closest thing to winning I came to, and even he ended up with drone issues (among others).

As more political news flooded my world, I realized that the impact of our elections were not just about the American Left but a global crisis with the Left. This was clear as the far right parties from around the world started congratulating the President-elect, and a quick tally of all the countries that had already voted in right wing governments or policies (Turkey, India, Brazil, Ecuador, UK etc). The silence engulfed me as I realized the implications far beyond issues related to US race relations and white supremacy (although these are very serious, should not be taken lightly and can also be extrapolated globally). This impacts all of us everywhere. All of us women, all of us LGBTQIA folks, all of us differentially documented folks, all of us people of color, all of us anthropologists… all of us for as far as I could imagine who ‘us’ would/could be.  This was fascism. This is fascism.

To mediate the violence of that realization, my silence had a meditative impact. It kept secure my small flickering light of idealism, hope, and love. I could not speak because every time I did, I found people lashing out and blaming each other. I was silent as a way to safeguard myself and my years of work. But suddenly, I was out of my league in terms of estimating impact and what it might mean to build solidarity across movements, and I was questioning if there was anything radical at all about the Left.

It was in that moment that I quietly entered the yard of Al-Serkal, to Cinema Akil, 11,000 kilometers away from where I sent my absentee ballot. I sat under an open sky to watch Malik Bendjelloul’s film,  Searching for Sugar Man (2012). The co-founder of Cinema Akil, Butheina Kazim opened the film with a short introduction, talking about Leonard Cohen, the elections, their impact on the world, and with a voice full of emotion, she brought the words of Toni Morrison to lend weight to the enormity of the crisis, and located her own position within that discourse: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self pity, no need for silence, no need for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

Listening to the words of an American poet, in Dubai, as a statement of action of what we do in times of crisis, just before a film about a Mexican-American singer from Detroit who was big in South Africa, made by a Swedish-Algerian film maker, cracked my silence. But what brought me here, to this post, was the story of Sixto Rodriguez, who taught me through his actions that it could never be about winning in the here and now. The struggle is in the every day, and there is an intense beauty to that labor, and there is meaning in that action that makes it art. His seemingly seamless shift from manual labor in Detroit to concerts in South Africa demonstrated that for him these were not different actions. They were both poetry. They were both art. They were both part of the same struggle.

As someone long prepared for the occasion;
In full command of every plan you wrecked –
Do not choose a coward’s explanation
that hides behind the cause and the effect.

And you who were bewildered by a meaning;
Whose code was broken, crucifix uncrossed –
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.*

I don’t know if Rodriguez knew Cohen personally. I don’t even know if they crossed paths. But the two of them, one by passing and one by pausing, created the space in my slowly collapsing world for Toni Morrison’s words to resonate, and for me to find meaning again in what I do.

And what I do is write.
And what I do is love.
And what I do is dream.
And what I do is resist.
And what I do is labor.
And what I do is anthropology.

*Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson, Alexandra Leaving (Ten New Songs, 2001).

Note: An edit has been made to the original post to correct information by the author.

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between form, aesthetics, and belonging. In my own archaeological practice (Rizvi 2015), I have enmeshed the notion of resonance with new materialism, empathy as linked to aesthetics, and belonging. As I have argued, resonance emerges as an intangible affect that the material thing has beyond its formal boundaries within larger planes of perception creating dynamic relationships among humans/nonhumans and illustrating cultural decisions of material as vibrant matter (c.f. Bennett 2010). In so far as the material has vibrancy and frequency, it has then the capacity to evoke an emotional and affective response to a similarity of material, style and/or form. Such response can be coded as a sensory aesthetic empathy that links to constituting subjective belonging. This argument had been posited with the ancient world in mind, but I have recently been applying archaeological theory to the contemporary, particularly within art and design.

As my anthropological concerns have found themselves situated within the United Arab Emirates (UAE), I have found myself working through contemporary things and assemblages in order to understand the past within this political geography. More often than not, working through such questions falls within the ways we understand critical heritage discourse – an intersection of perceived distance or lack there of, between the time of now and that of the past. As such, and not surprisingly, I have found contemporary art and design in the UAE deeply engaged with and within the constructions/discourses of heritage. Right now, my social media feed is full of reporting on Dubai Design Week. As a part of the thematic, there is a strong focus on using local materials that have local resonance, local meaning, local heritage, and local technique. Even the design of the space is being lauded as keeping a local environmental sensibility in mind. There is a sense that what we are experiencing is some negotiation and an authorizing of what constitutes Emirati vernacular design as Rahel Aima might argue (see her piece in Frame – summer issue), or as Laura Egerton reports in Vision, Dubai Design Week becomes a space within which forgotten crafts have the potential to change the future. It is easy to see the relationship  between contemporary design, uses of heritage to be future-oriented (and arguably, on fleek in that hipster way), and the ways in which a local aesthetic has been co-opted for contemporary design so it can speak to a local market and sensibility. The form taken by the local aesthetic significantly lends itself to an empathetic sense of belonging, which is integral to these conversations. Interestingly, however, the contest of heritage in the contemporary is less about what is authorized, but rather, what form can account for commitments of time, place, and access to these conversations.

In order to complicate and think through this theory of resonance within the contemporary commitments I mentioned above, I decided to look to sound artists who utilize resonant materials to create sounds that are not necessarily locally acoustically resonant. The sound becomes the by-product and not the defining feature of the piece. It is the material artifact that holds the key to understanding the possibility of belonging. It is an assemblage then that belongs to a material history of the region and is the conduit of aesthetic empathetic responses. In order to test some of these ideas, I looked to the work of Fari Bradley and Chris Weaver, a British sound art duo, who are not part of critical heritage discourse in the region, and yet, while in residence in Dubai a couple years ago, utilized some of the tropes developed through local discourse. I have been following Bradley and Weaver since their New Media Residency (2014-15) at Tashkeel (Dubai), which culminated in an exhibition, Systems for a Score (Jan-Feb 2015). I reached out to them earlier this year (Spring 2016) in an effort to think through their practice vis-a-vie my own.

Linking form, sound, and politics to aesthetics, is particularly tricky in some parts of the world, and Dubai is no exception to that rule. Bradley and Weaver’s work delicately treads those lines and focuses on the politics of sound, amplification and material. As Bradley recently commented, “For us, the material properties of an object provide a way for a sound work (employing the material qualities of that object) to interact with the physical environment (indeed this method is an excellent way for an environment to “push” back against a work, through physical forces: e.g. heat, wind, moisture, dust, movement, reflecting sound etc)…To try to simply have sound existing in some immaterial vacuum, has resonances with a certain type of political view point.” (March 3, 2016, email interview) This shifts our attention from resonance being singularly constitutive of belonging, to it being linked to forms existing in spaces where existence would/could be possibly impossible.

Models for a Score (2014). Photograph by Jerry Baloch.
Image courtesy of artists.

In a curiously shifting installation, Bradley and Weaver’s Models for a Score (2014), integrates sound art inspired by al-sadou (Bedouin weaving and significant for my interests, on the UNESCO 2011 List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding) with an adapted Atari game console (circuit bent by Weaver to make it touch sensitive). Utilizing two key material forms, technologies, and ways of situating oneself in time, the duo rigged the console to utilize visual information from the weaves, read as an abstracted form of music. Although the video had no sound, the long hand printed scores on black cloth indexed a form of music that would be urban industrial. The sound suggested was at once resonant of an urgent intangible cultural form. Models for a Score (2014) can be displayed in different ways given that it is considered both a space of perception as well as one of production. Significant to it’s display however, are the vertical lines that are digitally reproduced in dual color forms, mimicking the Bedouin weave. These articulations are not only arbitrarily produced, but in creating these spaces of production, the artists aimed to open spaces for collaborative sound making or what one might consider to be articulations of an urban public space within the white cube.

Red Tide (2014). Photograph by Jerry Baloch.
Image courtesy of artists.

What is most interesting (and politically astute) is that not much of their early work, particularly that which was in the Tashkeel show, actually produces sound that is easily perceivable. However, the interaction with volume shifts with Red Tide (2014-15). This piece is linked to Bradley’s own personal history and desires, “Red Tide, 2015 is really an extension of our practice pushed to its most sculptural level. On arriving in UAE I had pored over different kinds of maps (historical, geopolitical, topographical etc) to understand the Gulf at every side and our physical proximity to Iran where I was born and hoped to visit for the first time since leaving as a small child.” (February 26, 2016, email interview) In creating this piece, there is a subtext of understanding oneself and a desire to see a place where one comes from, importantly including fantasy, “In England we have a long tradition of people swimming the English channel to France, and (we) fantasised and we talked about what it would take to swim, or sail in a Dhow from Dubai or Ras al Khaimah whose northernmost part is so close to Iran.”(ibid) Personal stories tend to resonate a bit louder than others (one must still lean into the piece to hear it), and yet the duo are cognizant of the piece not coming off as didactic, but rather they would prefer the focus be the materials themselves that in producing sound are also entrenched in the politics of amplification.

The piece itself reflected the fantasy, utilizing a map, some electronics, copper wires, and a light box: “we decided to chart a straight line in the sea from where (we) were living in Dubai to Iran. Each of the three red copper wires was pulled taut in order to carry three unique sounds: the sounds of space matter in orbit, the sound of tectonic plates in motion and extracts from the first ever insurance document known to man, written in the Gulf by Hammurabi.  By feeding the sounds into the strings we allowed them to become distorted and diminished in volume by the wires. We designed the piece to fit in a corner, the wires casting a shadow from the map to the control box, which held three musical tuning pegs for strings. The print of the map we placed on a light box to highlight the map, and allow for low lighting to cast a shadow of the strings on the corner. We had to plan in very fine detail the angle of the box, strings and maps. This way onlookers would have to lean in; to read the map, to decipher the sounds.” (ibid).

The need to listen closely to understand where one might come from, and all the attendant sounds that reflect other forms of mobility, whether in space, geologic, and/or historic, uniquely capture an emotional aesthetic of belonging elsewhere, but speaking from here. The choice to require a close listen was explained to me with regards to a politics of amplification; as Bradley said, “from our perspective, after years of working with sound in different settings, speakers offer a false sense of trust to those viewing them [the speaker] while listening. The sound and it’s source appears removed from the speaker which is the end result (acousmatic)…That speakers convey sound un-colored is a myth; even while listening our ears, the receivers are colouring the sound, so to constantly strive for a kind of uncoloured, ‘pure’ playback, if followed through to its logical conclusion, can only end in removing the listener because your perceptual processes colour sound.” (ibid) Following her note, Weaver continued more explicitly, “Loudspeakers have traditionally had a role in authoritarian societies. PA systems and the artificial amplification of the voice are used to transmit the “correct” ideas, the “truth”, states version of history.”(February 26, 2016, email interview) And so within the politics of amplification, the idea that there is a purity to any sound form could be considered as a false consciousness of sorts. Each sound has a color, a timbre, and forms of complex information that contextualize it, if you know what you are listening for, and know how to hear it. If you really want to know what’s what, you have to strive to listen because often, only authorized heritage is amplified. It contests the position of a priori knowledge: if you don’t know what you are listening for, how might you know what to listen for?

Earlier this week, my Emirati Arabic teacher told us that in contrast to MSA (Modern Standard Arabic), the ways in which we pronounce words in Emirati are less pronounced – the fluctuations in sound and tone are more subtle, and are seemingly flat, even though they are not. It is in knowing those very precise and yet historically variable fluctuations in sound that separate one as non-native speaker. In contrast, in art and design, the historic nature of representations have varied depths and histories in a new federation (UAE was formed in 1971): an aesthetic language only now being encoded into an authorized heritage.

And so, this is precisely where the durational commitments of time, place and access to these conversations are placed: at the intersection of now and then. By examining work like that produced by Bradley and Weaver, that is made utilizing the resonant forms of here, but is of and from elsewhere, we are able to locate the potential of contemporary art to be critical heritage discourse. For artists who are not of here, but were here while longing for a visit elsewhere, there is something remarkable in Fari Bradley and Chris Weaver’s ability to find that articulation through an acoustic material vocabulary in the UAE. I would argue that these works could not have been made any where else but here. There is something about their borrowing of resonant forms that provide a vocabulary and soft articulation of longing, that is unique to the empathetic aesthetic forms of resonance of the UAE.

References:
Bennett J (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London : Duke University Press.

Rizvi, U.Z. (2015) Crafting Resonance: Empathy and belonging in Ancient Rajasthan. Journal of Social Archaeology. Vol. 15 (2): 254-273.

Acknowledgements: Much of my thinking about UAE contemporary art and design has been influenced and challenged by the participants of Campus Art Dubai (CAD), where I have been one of the lead tutors since 2014, and most significantly, my co-lead tutors and collaborators in CAD, Murtaza Vali and Lee Xie.

There is a violent ambiguity that frames these discourses, training, and analysis about how to prepare for a scenario in which one is confronted by a person on a mission to get a high body count. According to the Department of Homeland Security, an “Active Shooter” is defined as an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area. I thought of Orlando. They cannot tell you exactly what to do but through these training sessions, they give you some idea of what to expect, and make some recommendations. Based on the accounts of the survivors, the ‘shooters’ are not really interested in negotiation, but rather to just methodically kill people. This is not always the case (and if you are interested, you should check out the NYPD publication). As I was listening to the statistics about the shooters, the names and categories of guns, and tests of what sorts of things might prevent the bullet from getting to you (filing cabinets are the best officer furniture: cubicle partitions, not so much), I noticed how each one of the sounds was unique.

One of my favorite reads on the topic of ‘gun sounds’ is work done by Lawrence Abu Hamdan. In one of his recent works, How Can I Forget, he writes about the use of Glide — the app that unintentionally recorded the sounds of the shots that killed Michael Brown in Ferguson. The use of the real-time video texting service app was intended to record the person saying something else, but as the sound of bullets permeated the articulation of words being recorded, their sound became witness to the crime. There is a moment in which desire and violence overlap, intermingle and intimate, and it is one of the more poignant moments in American sonic history that so clearly defines America’s relationship to Black History.

Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement a group of concerned faculty, students and staff curated and hosted a series of talks, films, readings, and conversations on our campus, which culminated in a two day teach in for Black Lives Matter (for an up to date listing of sources on BLM + Anthro, see the most recent Around the Web Digest, posted by E. Chong).  And so for the past year, we had uncomfortable conversations about race and privilege, we built bridges, we found collaborators, we identified issues that students, faculty and staff were facing, and we drew up demands. And there was some backlash — even at a private. progressive art school in Brooklyn, there was backlash and micro aggression that manifest itself in the strangest places. But for the most part, there was support and the demands we made to the administration are being taken seriously. However, it was the public backlash and vague threats that we received that made some of the faculty/staff from the BLMPratt leadership (myself included) decide to attend this training.

The most important notes from the training were to work in groups (that is, if you are confronted with an active shooter and you have no other option to escape – work collaboratively to take the person down), and secondly, and most crucial to the survival was ‘situational awareness’. Mired in issues of contemporary American masculinity, one of the best cliff notes version of how to understand situational awareness is on the blog, The Art of Manliness (incidentally, they also have a good posting on how to roll up your shirt sleeves –  a good skill for archaeological field work). In my mind, situational awareness is something we, as anthropologists, are already trained (disciplined, if you will) to do and often, especially in moments of trauma or panic, we immediately turn to our own muscle memory, i.e. observation as thick description, a running narrative in our head. I know that in my own experience, spaces of trauma have brought out the archaeologist/anthropologist in me like no conference ever has. Situation awareness, in my mind, is not only an issue of physicality and knowing where you are, where the exits are, etc – but it’s also knowing the context, the histories of conflict or collaboration, etc. For those of us who have worked on collaborative projects, it might be easier to envision what an organic collaborative environment might look like and how it can be activated if needed – or maybe that is one of my take-away comforts from the training.

The recommendations that the officer provided for schools generally, was to install more security, more surveillance, to have us report on each other, bio metrics, more gates, and other ways to protect ourselves. Engendering more fear and suspicion on our campus does not sound like a good idea and impacts all creative and critical thinking. And certainly, bringing more guns onto campus, in my mind, is not going to solve this problem (although there are reports of spikes in gun application requests for concealed weapons in Orlando after the shooting). I urged our staff to keep in mind that reporting based on suspicion leads itself to, more often than not, rely upon stereotypes and racial profiling.

I do worry about an active shooter coming on to campus. In a post-Columbine world, I do worry about young children in school. However, based on research published by Borum et al in the article, What Can be Done About School Shootings? A Review of the Evidence, the year of the Columbine shooting, 17 students were killed at school, but over 2500 young people (ages 5-19) were murdered outside of school, and more than 9700 were killed in accidents (Borum et al 2010: 27). So where does that leave me and my desire to protect my students? The likelihood of my students being killed outside the classroom is higher than them dying in my classroom. And what of my students of color, in particular, my black students?

I can assure you, there is nothing more ironic (and yet fully American in that contradiction) than having NYPD explain to you how to protect yourself against someone who might come in to shoot you for talking about police violence against unarmed black bodies.

I might not have flinched while the officer was walking around me, but I knew that my publications, tenure, or even my PhD was not what he was looking at or concerned with. I knew that I would have to prove my innocence and my right to be in that room before he let his guard down. It was only once the Director of our Security department spoke to me in a familiar and relaxed manner, that the officers hand stopped its slow pendulum movement of instinctively reaching around his badge on his belt to the right, revealing both the over reliance on his right hand and the location of his concealed weapon.

There is something in the ways in which we have been trained in Anthropology that mirror some epistemic relationship with the military. It is most clear in these moments.

Dedicated to Joan Gero (1944-2016).

It was early morning in the late fall of 2014, my  friend Emily asked me if I wanted coffee, and if so, did I want her maternal or paternal grandmother’s recipe. It was about 6 AM, I had spent the entire previous day and night at a checkpoint trying to get in to Ramallah, and completely unsure of how to answer that question. She looked at my silence with pity and then announced: We will have my maternal grandmother’s coffee. I watched and listened to her as she proceeded to talk to me about how this coffee had to be made to her grandmother’s specifications. She helped me imagine the entire process and the materials used by her grandmother: the coffee grounds, the cardamom, the length of the boil, then the waiting, the number and duration of the re-boils, the bubbles, their color, and the aroma.

Earlier that month my sister snap chat an image of a cappuccino and sent it to my other sister. Waste of digital space, I told her. After 10 seconds it disappears, she retorted. This is ridiculous; I bet no one but my sisters use this silly app, I thought to myself. Turns out, I was wrong: over 60% of US 13-34-year-old smart phone users, use snap chat. Also, now snap chat keeps your image or video for up to 24 hours, allowing you a full day within which you might calibrate your own recollection time. Choosing how to recollect within a 24-hour experience seems to be positioned as a very long time in this 13-34-year-old statistic.

In my experience, how we recollect has never been something we have been able to calibrate. Over 20 years ago in Karachi, I heard a bullet go into a body and the body fall to the ground. I could smell the blood and gunshot residue. I watched as a pool of blood slowly fought its way into focus through the dust and dirt on the surface of the ground next to the car I was hiding behind. I must have been crouched behind that car for less than 10 seconds, looking at the blood pool for what felt like 500 years.  My friend and I went back to the spot less than 24 hours later in an effort to try to understand what had happened; there was a fruit vendor selling fruit at the spot in front of the cafe, and there were no visible traces left of the blood, the body, or the gun residue. We stood outside the cafe feeling slightly uncertain of ourselves, decided to order a Nescafe, got back into the car, and silently drove away.

Mamhoud Darwish starts his prose poem, Memory for Forgetfulness. August, Beirut, 1982, with dreaming and waking up to only be in a nightmare of war. As he tries to push toward dawn, he evokes the desire for coffee:

I want the aroma of coffee. I want nothing more than the aroma of coffee. And I want nothing more from the passing days than the aroma of coffee. The aroma of coffee so I can hold myself together, stand on my feet, and be transformed from something that crawls, into a human being. The aroma of coffee so I can stand my share of this dawn up on its feet. So that we can go together, this day and I, down into the street in search of another place.

How can I diffuse the aroma of coffee into my cells, while shells from the sea rain down on the sea-facing kitchen, spreading the stink of gunpowder and the taste of nothingness? I measure the period between two shells. One second. One second: shorter than the time between breathing in and breathing out, between two heartbeats. One second is not long enough for me to stand before the stove by the glass facade that overlooks the sea. One second is not long enough to open the water bottle or pour the water into the coffee pot. One second is not long enough to light a match. But one second is long enough for me to burn.

As Emily made me coffee that morning, and the mornings that followed, I noticed that every day I felt I was getting to know her family. The making of coffee as a form of hospitality is one that, in its process, builds relationships. Every morning I would hear stories or even just an aside, that linked her to the coffee grounds, to the practice of boiling, to the copper vessel, and to the sensory impact of the aroma of coffee.  I know how significant the everydayness of that exercise was for me in those days in order to ensure some feeling of safety and security. It was as if coffee attested to an insistence of sheer existence – as ephemeral as it may feel in a space of constant violence. Knowing you can have your coffee in the morning makes one feel normal. I began to recognize echoes of particular slivers of time in Karachi, Iraq, and Ramallah during times of violence and how they deposited in layers atop one another in my memory and recollection. I began to understand the experience of a war that I did not witness but gleaned an insight to through prose-poetry.

I want the aroma of coffee. I need five minutes. I want a five-minute truce for the sake of coffee. I have no personal wish other than to make a cup of coffee. With this madness I define my task and my aim. All my senses are on their mark, ready at the call to propel my thirst in the direction of the one and only goal: coffee.  (Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness August, Beirut, 1982)

The link between coffee and poetry in the Middle East is not a light and frothy matter. Quite the contrary: it is the root of statecraft, politics, and links to landscape. In my current work in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), I have been utilizing poetics as a way to encounter unfamiliar landscapes. The use of art, poetry, and literature to learn about a history of a place is not a usual methodology for archaeologists, but my usual training led me towards silent landscapes – and it has only been through art and poetry that the landscape has opened up to me. In Nabati Poetry: The Oral Poetry of Arabia, Saad Abdullah Sowayan discusses the manners in which poets engage themselves in some labor or crafting to aid in composition… or they make coffee. Sowayan goes on to discuss in detail the rituals in composition of both coffee and poetry: “The way a man makes his coffee is his numas, since it reflects his nimbleness, alertness, composure, tact, and taste. A man takes as much pride in his coffee making as he does in his poetic composition.” (1985: 96) This link between masculinity and the making of coffee is something that Darwish reflects upon as well, as he describes the interstitial moments of boiling: Swelling and breaking, they’re thirsty and ready to swallow two spoonfuls of coarse sugar, which no sooner penetrates than the bubbles calm down to a quiet hiss, only to sizzle again in a cry for a substance that is none other than the coffee itself—a flashy rooster of aroma and Eastern masculinity. Masculinity is, of course, far more complicated than coffee, but these claims and links make Emily’s grandmother’s recipes all the more significant and reflective of intersectional politics within the fleeting moment of dawn.

Over 15 years ago, another dawn in a different place and pushed into a different time, I stood with my friends Praveena and Peter on the Iron Age mound at Gilund (Rajasthan, India) and they pointed to various spaces in the trench and spoke of ephemeral layers. They had called me over from my trench to talk through what an approach to excavating ephemerality might be. We stood for a while talking about how we had no idea what to do with these layers. We must have stood there a bit longer than our director liked because he walked over. He took one look at it, looked at us, and then said: document it and keep digging until you find a floor or a wall, then call me. We all nodded at his wisdom and got back to work.

I don’t remember much about what I dug up during that season (I think I was working on a wall), but I do remember the ephemerality of the Iron Age mound. It was not a trench I worked in or on, nor had I experienced its time or the effort to reconstruct human events – but in its ephemerality it left a long lasting image within layers of my memory.

I also still remember the rose in cappuccino foam.

You got to make the morning last

(Paul Simon, Feelin’ groovy/The 59th St Bridge Song)

I grew up with vinyl. My family was an aspirational almost hippy immigrant family.  The 1966 album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme was a ‘go-to’ album, as was the (also) 1966 album Revolver. Seemingly child friendly, Simon and Garfunkel and the Beetles infused our household with songs in which we were encouraged to slow down, talk to lamp posts, and live communally in yellow submarines.

Late capitalism has done everything it can to eradicate that possibility from my life.

I heard these songs in the deep recesses of my mind as I was preparing my tenure file earlier this year. My entire being entered into a space of stillness, staring resolutely into the belly of the beast in order to maintain some semblance of resistance to the deep anxiety that is structurally integral to the evaluation process of tenure. I took longer walks, barely responded to emails, slowly stopped talking to others and preferred to count my breath. With every formatting issue or question related to the subjective criteria of excellence, I slowed down even more, questioning in each moment why academic labor had entered into these frameworks of exploitation. The first person I saw upon submission of my file was a colleague of mine who is brilliant, and an adjunct who teaches at three colleges just to make ends meet. My self-indulgent slowness entered into a space of silence. 

I have been thinking and working with a design collective called slowLab, and in doing so have been reconsidering how one might approach slow archaeology. As an archaeologist, I have always considered transdisciplinarity the key to a successful field project. And so, in the same way I meet with ethnopaleobotanists and geologists, I met with artists and designers to talk about possible collaborations related to slowness. This active step was taken after years of thinking and writing about intimacy, ingestion and slowness in relation to the archaeological process. I wanted to explore how a regime of care (as per Alejandro F. Haber’s suggestion) might unfold. At the time, I was also starting up my second research project on the East coast of United Arab Emirates (UAE) and it felt like slowness as critical theory would be significant in understanding my process in that new context.

In the past five years, slowness has emerged within the literature mainly through archaeology of the contemporary as a methodological feature that allows for a deeper and more nuanced approach to recording and experiencing information. This has also manifested itself in relation to sensorial archaeology, such as Yannis Hamilakis’s work, or deep phenomenological approaches, like the use of peripatetic videos in Chris Whitmore’s work. Some, more public articulations of slow archaeology, such as Bill Caraher’s blog posts on The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World, are still mired in discourses of expediency and return to the seemingly pragmatic aspects of archaeological work, which in my mind, misses the mulitvalent posibility of this concept within critical theory.

Working now in the UAE for the past few years, on a resistant coastline, I cannot consider efficiency the hallmark of knowledge production. The landscape is not inhospitable, but rather, it continuously and graciously offers provocations and interrogates my assumptions related to decolonizing methodologies. I say it is resistant because it does not efficiently provide archaeological knowledge. In slowing down and getting to know these landscapes, knowing must be understood, as Donna Haraway has encouraged us to think through multi-species-becoming-with or co-making, as a sym-poiesis of sorts. I would include all things. By that extension, the coming together of information and knowledge sharing is part of a response-ability of the landscape itself. A part of understanding that response is to be able to understand our relationships with these landscapes and their responses, rather than demanding more and more information from them in an exploitative manner.

I’m still working much of this out for myself in relation to what it might mean in the UAE context, and more immediately local, what it might mean for me to consider my junior colleagues work for tenure in a less exploitative manner. In slowing down, we not only resist the late capitalist desire for an exegesis of everything, but we might also be able to appreciate things simply for what or who they are.

Maybe The Yellow Submarine was just written as a children’s song and not an exposition on drugs or war.

When Rodgers and Hammerstein first produced this song in 1959 on Broadway, they may not have been thinking about debates related to ontology – but how wonderful to be able to list in the same breath raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens as favorite things.

Speaking of kittens, I recently watched the film Statues Also Die (1953), directed by Chris Marker (who is obsessed with cats) and Alain Resnais. A brilliant filming of a series of sculptures, masks and other things from Sub-Saharan Africa, set to music, edited to match the tempo, and a narrator posing many thoughtful questions. Through the use of music, playing with light and shadow, the directors of this film were able to  animate the masks in such a manner that allowed the things themselves to mount an anti colonial critique. One of the central questions of the film, why African art should be placed in ethnographic museums and western art should be placed in art museums is a question that continues to crop up even today.  The impact of this early questioning was so profound that the second half of the film was censored in France until the 1960s. I suspect it was not only because it was an anti colonial critique, but rather the manner in which it unfolded in film might have much to do with it as well.

There is something unflinchingly uncompromising in the face of things that we have in some way wronged or failed to recognize. It is remarkably uncanny. And I am only human to find some humanity in these sorts of encounters.

 The animate quality of things runs through many of Marker’s films, for example we see this also in Sans soleil (1983), in which we watch dolls piled up to be burned in order to repose their soul. The burning takes place at the temple of Kiyomitsu consecrated to Kannon (the goddess of compassion). Each doll is focused on with such compassion and understanding mixed with love and loss. This gaze unsettles western ideals of dolls and through this lens, we are able to witness the souls of these dolls being transmitted to planes of eternal rest through a public burning. As I watched this film , I could not help but think of my dolls who were never honored in such a fashion. It is through the public act of burning that these dolls souls are recognized. I cannot forget the smiling face of one of the dolls sweating/melting as the fire leaped around her.

There are some images that are burned into my mind.

Burning dolls is now one of them.

Another one is a white shirt crumpled in a cave in which Ethiopian guerrilla fighters (against Italian colonialism) were staying (and subsequently killed) in Zeret, Ethiopia. This was a slide shown by Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal at a 2010 TAG conference at Brown University where he presented his (then) current research (the paper was subsequently published in 2011 in World Archaeology as “A Social Archaeology of Colonial War in Ethiopia”). The clothing in these caves were all linked to skeletal remains and often burned. Perhaps it is the intimacy of the cloth to skin, the feeling that cloth is a skin of sorts or the ability for crumpled cloth to look like crumpled bodies that makes the image of cloth so very powerful.

I was reminded of Gonzalez-Ruibal’s work when I saw Steve McQueen’s photographic series Barrage (1998) at the Pacific Design Center in LA, last week. The series of photographs document rags, gutter barriers and dams that are left along the sides of drains in the streets of Paris. The crumpled nature of the cloth, the aside-ness of it all, the ability for it to be invisible, made me think of those who actually clean the gutters and their invisible humanity.

Sometimes being human is not enough to be seen. Or touched. Or photographed. Or filmed.

And then there are some things, that we must touch to know. I am thinking now of Harun Farocki’s film, Transmission (2007) – an excellent testament to our desire as humans to touch affect. Whether it is placing our hands on memorials (Vietnam Memorial); placing a foot in the devils footprint in Frauenkirche in Munich ; placing hands in stone statues such as Bocca della Verit in Rome; or touching the monument that is heated to 98 degrees at Buchenwald concentration camp — each of these moments, and there are many that are thoughtfully brought together in this film — insists on the desire to be the recipient of something transmitted to us by the things themselves.

Sometimes things resist transmission and sometimes things transmit rebellion. We censor them – and then later, once controlled, celebrate Disobedient Objects in museums.

Haroun Farocki passed away late last month (July 30th 2014) – he was only 70 years old. I watched Chris Marker films as a way to honor his death. And thought of things.

When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture. [Statues Also Die (1963)]

[Click on highlighted text for links]

Indeed, that is what I thought as well, when I first stumbled upon this show earlier this year.

The screen clears as we see silhouettes of three men sitting in chairs backlit and another male sitting on the right at a desk appears as the commentator tells us a bit about the show, and introduces us to Froelich Rainey, the director of the Penn Museum and host of the television show. From there Rainey takes over, introducing the show and the panel of experts. As each object is introduced to the television public, it is engulfed with smoke and mysterious music — othered beyond itself. We (the watching and listening public) are told what it is, where it is from and what its function might be. After we are told, the panel of experts must prove their mettle, and we watch three ‘expert’ men hovering around an artifact, ‘guessing’ provenance, date, and function.

I cannot tell what irks me more, the fact that my alma mater is what has created this orientalist archaeological public or that I did not know about it up until now.

The museum received letters for years talking about how much people loved this show. Froelich Rainey was very serious about bringing archaeology to the public – and his public loved him for it. This television show was not his only such endeavor; he also started Expedition Magazine in the Fall of 1958, and it continues to produce quality work for an educated but not necessarily academic public. With Rainey as Director, the Penn Museum oriented its programming towards public education, which unfortunately also meant the continued othering of contemporary populations (such as Native American groups). There was, during this time (and arguably in every time), a very clear sense of who a museum going public was and for whom this education was being constructed.

One year after the CBS/Penn Museum television show aired, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) modeled a similar game show between 1952-1959 entitled, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. This show was hosted by archaeologist Glyn Daniel – and in the episode linked to the title here, the panel of experts included Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Professor Sean P. O Riordain, and V. Gordon Childe. The show itself conducts itself in a very similar fashion, except that it was slightly more proper. The panel of experts on the BBC do not hover over objects, but rather, pass them among themselves. Reading about the history of the programing, I learned two things that really rattled me. Firstly, that V.Gordon Childe committed suicide and secondly, that Sir Mortimer Wheeler was voted TV personality of the year in 1954.

I am an archaeologist who works in South Asia with a focus on decolonization: my relationship with Sir Mortimer Wheeler is decidedly problematic. Most of the stories that I have heard about him from India and Pakistan have made him out to be a strict disciplinarian, a military dictator in the field. In Ancient Pakistan (1948) he writes about how lazy and somewhat stupid the local workmen are and how one must stay on top of them to get them to do any work in the field.

I watched in some combination of horror, amazement and astonishment at how Sir Mortimer Wheeler made the audience laugh with funny comments and seemed to be a great, jovial, somewhat mischievous colleague. As part of this new (for me) visual public, I began to enjoy him and thought him charming and witty. As a part of this public, I too overlooked a history I actually knew and was willing to grant him ‘a product of his time’ pass. Reading his figure in a contemporary moment, I was seduced by the production of a cult of personality that such a visual moving culture has the ability to conjure.

All of these men in these shows, all of whom I have read countless times, critically engaged with their ideas and demonstrated how they, being the products of their time, actually constructed Western centric, racist and sexist views of the past. Many of us in archaeology have been spending our time understanding our own epistemic underpinnings to re orient the way in which we might look to the past. It turns out, we archaeologists are not the only ones interested in doing this. Contemporary artists interested in issues related to postcolonialism/decolonization, social justice and social practice are as well.

One of my favorite artists, Pablo Helguera, did a project entitled, What in the World? (2010) as part of Philagrafika 2010. This project was inspired by the 1950s television series and the history of the Penn Museum. Through the use of objects he uncovers stories related to the people who discovered them, the politics around such discoveries and the ways in which these stories enrich our relationships and entanglements with these archaeological things. Perhaps my favorite is episode 2 (of 6) in which we learned about the relationship between a knife named “Ghost of Courageous Adventurer,” and Louis Shotridge, a Tlingit national (southeastern Alaskan).  There is much about his coming to terms with modernity in museum practice, and the conflicting reality of being and performing Native in Philadelphia, at the Penn Museum, and his then resultant relationship with his native community back in Alaska. Most poignant are the final scenes and thoughts over his death and legacy.

When V. Gordon Childe retired from the Institute of Archaeology, London University in 1956, he returned to Australia. According to Bruce Trigger (1980), Childe was unconvinced and somewhat disillusioned in his ability to develop new Marxist analysis of prehistoric pottery. He fell 300 meters to his death from Govett’s Leap in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, on the morning of 19th October, 1957.

I assign Childe’s article, The Urban Revolution (1950) in all my urban studies classes. I know the text inside and out. And yet, I never knew about his suicide.  RIP.

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I cannot find words to express how such blatant racism makes a parent feel. It does not matter what we do for our children, it does not matter how educated we are, or what our politics are or really anything. What matters is the color of our skin. My heart goes out to Michael Brown’s parents and to parents world-wide who have the misfortune of having to contend with a child who has been shot for no reason other than for being different. In this case, it is not just about being different – it is about contending with a heritage of enslavement, the resultant race politics, and issues around police brutality in the United States. And this is not just about people of color: there is something unique, systemic, and targeted about the treatment of young African-American men in this country. And there is something awful about the violence of having to watch it happen over and over again on the television, on YouTube, in your Facebook feed, or on the blogs you read.

I remember watching Rodney King being repeatedly beaten by the LAPD in 1992. I was an undergraduate at the time, and I recall one of my professors likening the publicness of police brutality to the necessary publicness of lynching. Neither the image nor that statement have left my mind.

At the beginning of each semester I inevitably have some undergraduate students in my Introduction to Anthropology class try to convince me that their generation is post-race. This places my students of color in very awkward positions. As a result of this (privileged) pattern, I have started to build my course around the African Burial Ground (ABG). It is the perfect four-field case study to build an introductory class around allowing me to integrate Critical Race Theory including issues related to recognizing privilege and intersectionality, as well as providing students with the tools to read, understand, and analyze archaeological and physical anthropological reports from the excavations, African-American heritage and ethnography, and what a successful community based and public project can achieve in a contemporary world. Most importantly, it highlights the role that anthropology can play in making sense of, critically engaging with, and providing space for an empathetic encounter with difference and for my purposes, talk directly to issues related to race in NYC which a vast number of my students believed to be a post-race, progressive, liberal city.

Teaching about the ABG has had a remarkable impact on my students as they feel connected to a history of resistance in the city. For example, in 2011, one of my students sent me an email letting me know that before joining other students at the Occupy marches at Foley Square, a group of them from my Anthropology class paid their respects by having a moment of silence at the monument.

Having utilized the ABG as the perfect teaching module that it became in my mind, I began taking my friends and colleagues when they would come visit. I knew all the park rangers, I knew the security personnel and I knew the commuters. After 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot in early 2012, I found myself gravitating to the ABG for a different reason. By this point I was a parent and the idea of someones child being shot weighed heavy on me. I began to sit by the monument looking at the map of the 6.6 acres etched into granite. I like how the monument claims the space upon which Lower Manhattan is built in the map of the burial ground.

I like to sit by this monument and recognize its sacredness: a peace, a tranquility that is like no other in my city. It feels different because it is different. It is a space that provides solace, that provides some sense that resistance is possible, and that even when things are completely against you, there is some hope for the future. I am not African nor am I African-American. I have gained strength from the ABG as an American. The culture of being American is deeply linked to ideals of resistance.

The reality of this resistance is that the monument, museum, and art works, claim a space in the Ted Weiss Federal Building. The listed major tenants of this building are the EPA, FBI and IRS. The non listed tenants include Homeland Security and the CIA. It is like these latter agencies are squatters that everyone in the neighborhood knows about but does not report. Across the street, there is a children’s playground at which there are never any children. It covers the underground high security prison for ‘enemies of the state,’ and the many picked up in the city’s post 9-11 frenzy. They are stationed there, I was told by a guard, because the underground tunnels link the prison to the court-house and so these ‘criminals’ are never exposed to the public for fear of riots.

Prior to the Fall of 2001, in April, I  remember 19-year-old Timothy Thomas being shot by the police in Cincinnati, and the subsequent riots that took over the city.

How much of our history are we going to forget? The archaeology conducted at the African Burial Ground gives me hope that even if buried under, there are ways for us to always remember; it is just a matter of time.

Ferguson, MO, my heart is with you.

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In April 2011, Abu Dhabi hosted the 17th GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) stamp exhibition, a well attended and received event. The newspapers covering the exhibition remarked on how significant stamps were to heritage. On display were stamps from the national archive, demonstrating ‘national consciousness’ prior to becoming a nation (i.e. pre-1971), as well as representing a more global and cosmopolitan outlook. Postal services in what is now the UAE began in Dubai in 1909 by Great Britain but administered by the Government of India. Neil Donaldson, in The Postal Agencies in Eastern Arabia and the Gulf (1975), discusses how throughout the 19th century (until 1946), Political Residents and Political Agents living in the Gulf states were all appointed from the Indian Political Service. As postal services became necessary, it was the Indian Postal Department that opened up offices in Muscat (1864), Bahrain (1884), Dubai (1909) and in Kuwait (1915).

Civil mail from Sharjah went through Dubai until 1963.

July 10th, 1963 Sharjah opened its own postal office, issuing its own stamps and postal stationary under the name of Sharjah and Dependencies (which included Kalba, Khor Fakkan, and Dibbah). During this time, there were also some unauthorized overprints that were in circulation. Although Sharjah and her Dependencies joined the UAE in December of 1971, it was not until July 31st, 1972 that the UAE assumed full postal responsibilities. Since most of Sharjah’s visual stamp culture was not really UAE specific, many UAE stamp catalogs do not list them.

These (below) are some of the first stamps issued by Sharjah in 1963, all of which I have “collected” images of from Ebay:

From left to right, the first has a portrait of Sheikh Saqr (III) in the top right corner, with the flag of Sharjah fluttering over a map of the Trucial States, and is a 1 n.p. (naya paisa or new money/currency). It seems to be a reasonable and well placed first issue: it establishes the figure of authority, the symbol of authority and the location of that authority. The next three stamps, the World Health Organization (WHO) and fight against malaria campaign (illustrated by the mosquito and the WHO emblem), the Freedom from Hunger campaign, and the International Federation of Red Cross/Red Crescent Centenary stamps immediately propel Sharjah into international concerns and through the issuing of such stamps, places Sheikh Saqr as one who commands authority in issues related to international well-being. The visual representations on stamps can be coded as, what Michael Billig calls, banal nationalism (1995), that is, the everydayness of nationalism and national rhetoric. Pauliina Raento and Stanley Brunn also used this framework to look at the visual culture of stamps in Finland (2005). However, in the case of Sharjah and her Dependencies, 1963 continues to be pre-federation (and thus pre-nation). Through the issuing of these stamps, Sharjah establishes distinct visual registers for domestic and international codes. Codes that are indicative of an autonomous region, not one subservient to British (or regional) interests.

In line with this observation, 1963 marked another very significant moment in my Ebay stamp image collecting. I found this stamp image (shown below) in memoria of the assassination of (US) President John F. Kennedy. This stamp is considered a overprint. The overprint says, In Memoriam John F. Kennedy 1917-1963. Overprinting is technically something that makes a stamp inauthentic and not collectable. And yet, this stamp is used and it circulates at the time (as per the cancel marks on these stamps – also seen on Ebay). It is at this juncture that Ebay begins to provide me with a new visual public history, one that is simultaneously geo-politically informative and intimate.

JFK’s death left a very deep impression on Sheikh Saqr. Not only were stamps issued in memoria, but on the first year anniversary, a coin was also minted with JFK’s portrait on one side, and on the other, the flags of Sharjah. This first year memorial coin is written about quite a bit by coin collectors on various sites because it garners much interest for its subject matter and unexpected minting location. However, it is considered inauthentic by some because it was not authorized by the British. Its minting was authorized by Sheikh Saqr.

This linked Sharjah’s interests with the US and directly against Britian but in a manner that Britain could not politically protest. I could just leave this suggesting a political move, but after reading a bit on Sheikh Saqr, I actually do think he was deeply moved by JFK’s assassination. Although after the fourth year of commemerating JFK’s death anniversary (see below), there are not many more stamps for JFK circulating on Ebay.

I am particularly fond of the overprinting and the unofficial (and thus unauthorized and inauthentic) stamps and coins. In this counter heritage Ebay narrative, Sheikh Saqr emerges as a worldly, scientific and thoughtful man — at least in terms of making decisions about what gets issued on a stamp, and the sorts of global ‘stamp’ discourses Sharjah (and her dependencies) may engage in during that time.

Counter heritage is necessarily fleeting and so I do not despair when I find stamps and they are only available for 22 hours. I know they will resurface and will circulate. And I will continue to be on the look out for them as they belong to a decade (1963-1972) that provides a glimpse into an unacknowledged aspirational postcolonial state.

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In reading news about Gaza, Syria, and Iraq (among other places), I have been actively searching for spaces of humanity and hope in the world around me. Where is that space in which we trust other human beings, the people we do not know and may or may never intersect with again? I have been thinking about how we might design trust and co-operation into our urban fabric and the ways in which we traffic ourselves through our every day.

I am in Sharjah at the moment and there are a few things that one cannot escape mentioning about being in the UAE during summer: the sheer heat and traffic (arguably the latter is a year-long concern). Last week while in traffic, bemoaning world politics with the air conditioner blasting, I considered how we merged into a roundabout. This one very simple urban traffic structure forced all of us to be considerate of each other, watch and anticipate each others’ movements, and continue to move in a direction together with the ability to peel off when desired.

As a form of urban design, roundabouts have their own history, upon which is layered another, local, culturally specific history. Most roundabouts out there in the world, are considered to be modern roundabouts, that is “a one-way circular intersection without traffic signals in which traffic flows around a center island.” (definition from the US Institute of Transportation Engineers Briefs on Roundabouts and click here for a fun Flash timeline of Roundabouts). Roundabouts come from a very specific lineage and were not always ‘modern’ – in fact, the first circle, called the Circus, was designed in Bath, England in 1754 and was a pedestrian centric design. Today, it is a Grade 1 listed building with the city on the World Heritage List.

My introduction to the Circus at Bath came in 1985 at the British Council Library in Karachi. That summer (also one of sheer heat, traffic, and load shedding), for the love of air conditioning, I had decided to read every book in the Fiction section. I learned about the Circus in Bath while reading Georgette Heyer’s, Bath Tangle (1955). Against the backdrop of this ancient city of circular pedestrian walk ways, healing airs and amazing waters, the Regency Chick-Lit provided some serious discussion of class, gender, and society.

The Circus at Bath sets up a certain form of heritage for later roundabouts. These are spaces where there is a history of publics, and these publics seem to acquire distinct shapes. Although I am trained to think of a public sphere, when imagining a public space, I think of squares. Interestingly enough, roundabouts, in many Gulf contexts are also signed as squares. For example the sign for Kuwaiti Maidan in Sharjah also says Kuwait Square and in colloquial speech, called Kuwaiti roundabout. The use of square is a holdover place-name from when these areas (pre-roundabout, c. 1950s) were much larger squares or a maidan/maydan, a word with roots in Arabic, Persian and Urdu/Hindi (not surprising given the history of the region and it’s inhabitants).

According to Dr. Bassem Younes, the 1950s and 60s saw the construction of many roundabouts in the UAE as spaces to organize traffic, as well as for sculpture and flowerbeds, with Sharjah having arguably some of the largest roundabouts in the world. The 1950s were a time of civic development in Sharjah, although much of this happened with the aid of the government of Kuwait who provided the means to build schools, hospitals and various social institutions. In fact, the Kuwaiti roundabout was constructed in the mid-1980s, built in recognition of Kuwait’s contribution to the development of Sharjah.

There is something about roundabouts/maidans that may, despite what urban planners design, provide a space for dissent through co-operation. One only has to look to the protests in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kiev, or to the after effects of pro-democracy rally held at the Pearl roundabout in Bahrain to recognize that these every day, vernacular spaces where co-operation may become powerful, are the ones that military aspire to control through force or design. This is true about cities in which there is escalating domestic civic violence such as at  chowrangi (Urdu word akin to roundabout) checkpoints in Karachi, or ad-hoc military stations created on roundabouts in the residential suburbs of Aleppo. The roundabouts, once activated as public spaces of potential co-operation move into spaces of control and violence and are no longer really about driving around, but rather, standing and claiming a place.

It continues to be very hot here in Sharjah. I drove around some roundabouts today and noticed that when it is ridiculously hot outside, people drive in rapid short spurts. This leads to some driver confusion in the usual co-operative strategy of driving around at a constant speed, yielding into and out of traffic.  As I drove around the large and lush green circle with the double masted Dhow surrounded by a small fountain and a Kuwaiti landscape, I thought even amid some driver confusion, starts and stops – there was some sense that we were all in it together. And given what was happening at so many other roundabouts in the world, quite lucky.

Kuwaiti Roundabout, Sharjah UAE August 1st, 2014 Photo by Uzma Z. Rizvi

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