Against the domain of Master Narratives: Archaeology and History in Antarctica

Abstract

This chapter aims at exploring the relationship between typological thought and the construction of the master narratives of the Antarctic past. Antarctica was the last continent to be incorporated into the space dominated by modernity. Its official discovery, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, marks the beginning of a history that presents certain particularities, not only in its content, but also in the way that it is usually told. We identified the master narratives that in their written and material dimensions produce and reproduce the visible and accepted history of Antarctica. As classifications and exclusions, these narratives structure a way of looking at the past that is accepted as true, rarely questioned, and assumed as representative of a whole. Our perspective proposes to make explicit the artificial nature of categorizations and established orderings, generating new analytical proposals and forms of knowledge. We present the studies of material culture and archaeology as a disruption in the schemes of thought that are implicit in the Antarctic history. At the same time, we propose to challenge forms of typological thought that obscure plurality and present a homogeneous past of Antarctica.