Undisciplining archaeological ethics

Abstract

The question is: What comes after the language of ethics? Put differently: How do we develop a conversation around questions of care, accountability, and responsible or "right" action in the world, outside of the framework of a professionalized discourse on ethics? In this paper I explore the status and meaning of the ancestral dead, and their potential to act as points of mobilization of a set of counter claims. Addressing the questions above, I think about the ways in which ideas and practices in relation to the ancestral dead begin to articulate an ethics "after ethics": Notions of accountability, forms of empathetic connection, and non-disciplinary regimes of care which take us beyond the formulations of a professionalized set of disciplinary concerns. More generally, I explore the unexpected centrality that the ancestral dead have come to play in a postcolonial politics of memory and identity, as figures around which to organize local resistances and a set of claims from the subaltern side of the colonial difference. As a way of opening discussion, I discuss two case studies: One from the historical archive of archaeological practice in South Africa, the other involving contemporary developments in the city of Cape Town.