Paper short abstract:

Archaeology has long been used (by social anthropologists and others) as the privileged metaphor through which we can understand how fragmented memories can be brought to light and then forged into coherent knowledge. In this speculative paper I'd like to try to press matters further. By taking seriously certain ethnographic commonplaces (i.e., 'divination', 'magic'), I want to consider the limitations of the notion of 'inner' when applied to an understanding of 'mind'. What would happen if we were to think of 'mind' as comparable to an archaeological site?

Paper long abstract:

Archaeology has long been used (by social anthropologists and others) as the privileged metaphor through which we can understand how fragmented memories can be brought to light and then forged into coherent knowledge. In this speculative paper I'd like to try to press matters further. By taking seriously certain ethnographic commonplaces (i.e., 'divination', 'magic'), I want to consider the limitations of the notion of 'inner' when applied to an understanding of 'mind'. What would happen if we were to think of 'mind' as comparable to an archaeological site?

In view of Levi-Strauss's centenary, it seems fitting to begin with his work of memory, Tristes Tropiques, and to move forward from there. Using the model of ethnology as so elegantly practiced by him, what I want to try to get at is the objectivity of subjectivity, so to speak. By this means I'd also like to ask whether it is possible for us to return to a/the classic role once played by anthropology in contemporary social life - that of showing how we might come to think 'otherwise'.