The mark of the Indian still inhabits our body: On ethics and disciplining in South American archaeology

Abstract

Constructed as “nonwhite others,” we were racialized by the same alterity-producing dialectic that established Europe as the center, or as the guiding epistemic notion, for the world. This “non-white is not necessarily Indian or African but rather an Other that bears the mark of the Indian or African, the imprint of historical subordination” (Segato 2007:23). That imprint, that mark of Indianness or blackness, is the legacy of their dispossession of territories, forms of knowledge, and the autonomy to determine their own future. The expropriation of the very body of the Indian is also an effect of this historic dispossession produced by a specific national formation of Otherness; in its othering matrix certain ethical criteria are allowed for the science responsible for providing the foundations of the sociopolitical and economic projects of modern states. In this way, the everyday production of archaeological knowledge continually brings the expropriation of the bodies of our ancestors forward into the present. This act likewise brings into the present—that is, it resignifies—the marks we bear, inflicted by the history of dispossession and plunder suffered by those who came before us and who still inhabit our bodies. Feeling “our history” in this way is what allows us to envision other ways to start thinking and acting from a standpoint beyond these abysmal ethical formations. This does not require the abolition of archaeological science, in this case, nor of other modern forms of knowledge. Rather, it demands that we use this knowledge in counter-hegemonic ways and that we promote interconnection and interdependence between scientific knowledge and other types of knowledge. Here I would like to share an example regarding cases of claims for restoration of bodies of the ancestors of indigenous peoples that have taken place in Argentina, in which I participated as a person of indigenous descent and as an archaeologist. I do so to propose, on this basis, a certain situated viewpoint concerning the relationship between the discipline of archaeology and archaeological disciplining in a specific sociopolitical context of South America.