Ethics and Archaeological Praxis

Bibliographic Information

Title

Ethics and Archaeological Praxis

Editor(s)

Gnecco, Cristóbal and Lippert, Dorothy

Year of Publication

2015

Chapter Pages

258

Publisher Name

Springer-Verlag

Publisher Location

New York, NY

Web Address (URL)

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4939-1646-7

Additional Information

Language

English

Source Type

Edited Volume

Notes

Volume 1 in the Ethical Archaeologies: The Politics of Social Justice series. World Archaeological Congress.

Book description:

Restoring the historicity and plurality of archaeological ethics is a task to which this book is devoted; its emphasis on praxis mends the historical condition of ethics. In doing so, it shows that nowadays a multicultural (sometimes also called “public”) ethic looms large in the discipline. By engaging communities “differently,” archaeology has explicitly adopted an ethical outlook, purportedly striving to overcome its colonial ontology and metaphysics. In this new scenario, respect for other historical systems/worldviews and social accountability appear to be prominent. Being ethical in archaeological terms in the multicultural context has become mandatory, so much that most professional, international and national archaeological associations have ethical principles as guiding forces behind their openness towards social sectors traditionally ignored or marginalized by their practices. This powerful new ethics—its newness is based, to a large extent, in that it is the first time that archaeological ethics is explicitly stated, as if it didn’t exist before—emanates from metropolitan centers, only to be adopted elsewhere. In this regard, it is worth probing the very nature of the dominant multicultural ethics in disciplinary practices because (a) it is at least suspicious that at the same time archaeology has tuned up with postmodern capitalist/market needs, and (b) the discipline (along with its ethical principles) is contested worldwide by grass-roots organizations and social movements. Can archaeology have socially committed ethical principles at the same time that it strengthens its relationship with the market and capitalism? Is this coincidence just merely haphazard or does it obey more structural rules? The papers in this book try to answer these two questions by examining praxis-based contexts in which archaeological ethics unfolds.

Entanglement of sorts: archaeology, ethics, praxis, multiculturalism / Cristóbal Gnecco
Indigenous anthropologist's perspective on archaeological ethics / Joe Watkins
Both sides of the ditch: the ethics of narrating the past in the present / Caroline Phillips and Anne Ross
Against global archaeological ethics: critical views from South America / Rafael Pedro Curtoni
Archaeology and ethics: the case of Central-Eastern Europe / Arkadiusz Marciniak
Europe: beyond the canon / Víctor M. Fernández
New worlds: ethics in contemporary North American archaeological practice / Neal Ferris and John R. Welch
Archaeology and capitalist development: lines of complicity / Alejandro Haber
Archaeology and capitalism: successful relationship or economic and ethical alienation? / Nicolas Zorzin
Trading archaeology is not just a matter of antiquities: archaeological practice as a commodity / Jaime Almansa Sánchez
Differing forms of public archaeology: where we have been, where we are now, and thoughts for the future / Carol McDavid and Terry P. Brock
12. Ethics in the publishing of archaeology / Mitchell Allen
Patrimonial ethics and the field of heritage production / Michael A. Di Giovine
Archaeologies of intellectual heritage? / Lesley Green
Just methods, no madness: historical archaeology on the Piikani First Nation / Eldon Yellowhorn

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