engleski

Heritage Industry, Post-Nation and Materiality: an Archaeology of Archaeology

There is no shortage of archaeological literature discussing various aspects of entanglement between archaeology and the nation. As a matter of fact, the constitution of archaeology as a specifically modernist discursive formation is impossible to imagine outside the wider processes of modernity. The common approach taken in this body of literature is to demonstrate how past-related discourses were mobilized to achieve various goals ranging from nation-building and claims for authenticity to more extreme examples of territorial claims and extermination of whole populations. In this presentation, I will take a different approach. Rather than concentrating on discursive aspects of uses and abuses of the past, the main focus will be on the very materiality of archaeological remains and how they were mobilized to constitute various subjectivities. Drawing on various strands of more-than- representational theory, I will attempt to demonstrate how archaeology and the affordances of material remains it produces were mobilized in completely different contexts during a span of roughly fifty years. The content of this transformation is that archaeological remains are no longer mobilized to constitute a spatial setting for the constitution of subjectivity based on the modernist liberal consensus but rather now operates in the vague space of heritage industry, oriented almost exclusively towards tourism. The case study used to elaborate on some of these issues will be Zadar, a mid-sized coastal town situated at the Adriatic Sea in Croatia.

archaeology ; materiality ; heritage ; heritage industry ; nation-building

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