
Cosmopolitan Archaeologies (Material Worlds)
Lynn . Ed(S): Meskell
The contributors describe various forms of cosmopolitan engagement involving sites that span the globe. They take up the links between conservation, natural heritage and ecology movements, and the ways that local heritage politics are constructed through international discourses and regulations. They are attentive to how communities near heritage sites are affected by archaeological fieldwork and findings, and to the complex interactions that local communities and national bodies have with international sponsors and universities, conservation agencies, development organizations, and NGOs. Whether discussing the toll of efforts to preserve biodiversity on South Africans living near Kruger National Park, the ways that UNESCO’s global heritage project universalizes the ethic of preservation, or the Open Declaration on Cultural Heritage at Risk that the Archaeological Institute of America sent to the U.S. government before the Iraq invasion, the contributors provide nuanced assessments of the ethical implications of the discursive production, consumption, and governing of other people’s pasts.
Contributors. O. Hugo Benavides, Lisa Breglia, Denis Byrne, Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Alfredo González-Ruibal, Ian Hodder, Ian Lilley, Jane Lydon, Lynn Meskell, Sandra Arnold Scham
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About Lynn . Ed(S): Meskell
Reviews for Cosmopolitan Archaeologies (Material Worlds)
Timothy Clack
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
“Cosmopolitan Archaeologies is an interesting work and engages with many ideas of heritage management as well as illustrating how material culture and places are ascribed multiple meanings by different groups of people.”
Sarah Carr-Locke
Muse
“The range and quality of the case studies is impressive, and they are in fact very cosmopolitan in the sense that they include great diversity but still form a coherent whole. Lynn Meskell provides a lucid, well-written introduction. . . . One of the exceptional values of Cosmopolitan Archaeologies is that it contains its own critique. . . . In the end, I cannot dismiss this volume as simply old wine in a new bottle, because the wine here is very, very good. These papers do an excellent job of critically considering the political nature of heritage and of archaeological practice. And, although such considerations are not new in archaeology, they have not become nearly commonplace enough.”
Randall H. McGuire
Journal of Anthropological Research
“What emerges out of these finely argued and selected essays is a reinvigorated sense of the applicability and importance of archaeology, beyond its subject boundaries. Functioning in an interdisciplinary manner each essay reaches out to philosophy, literary theory, politics, and economics, among other fields, to nourish a better understanding of cultural and global capital and flux.”
David S. Mora
Ameriquests
”New pathways that unsettle prevailing state-centric discourses of ownership, memory and history are urgently needed. Cosmopolitanism Archaeologies represents an important and thought-provoking addition to this program. Its encouragement to academic researchers and practitioners alike to be more engaged and reflexive about the contemporary political and economic contexts within which they operate is a trajectory I wholly endorse. . . . Cosmopolitanism Archaeologies brings the past and the present together: calling for an engagement with the political, a sensitivity to the ethical and a reflexivity towards possible complicity; difficult, but essential questions all of us working in the arena of cultural heritage must continue to address.”
Tim Winter
Cambridge Archaeological Journal