"We always need someone who can look at “us”, survey and advice about the product of our work, from a different standpoint...
I think honesty prevails after all... the important is this passion we all share to see clearly... And if each one is aware of his/her serious effort, we need not to have any complex or obsession about the idea of to agree or to disagree...
My personal “drama” was the fact that being Portuguese actually I am (I always was) in a sort of periphery... But I have tried to get advantage of that, because it has also obviously its advantages.
Although I will be 60 years old in a few days (time fades dramatically...) I feel like a student. So what I try is to go forward, not denying the value of other archaeologies, but to try to find my own path and to connect it with others. We would do nothing if we were working in a void, if there was nothing to face to... And I want to contest what I feel imperfect, in a certain way, which is not personal, but it goes well beyond that.
This is not false modesty. I know that what I have made is still in need of an enormous elaboration and the fact that my English ifs deficient troubles me a lot. You know, to be able to write in Portuguese would be different. But indeed this "Babel condemnation" that we suffered was a terrible thing, the worst one after the Fall, to use Biblical metaphors...
In fact, for me, for instance, the word “postmodern”, born in architecture as you know better than me, means practically nothing...it is just a convention to put at ourselves at a certain distance from certain principles that governed Enlightenment and that were practically considered like a religion, I mean, a replacement of theology by science.
That does not mean t project my Ego in things. That is just to admit – I think - an undeniable truth: the observer is necessarily implied in he observation, something that the “rationalist” tradition would never admit for historical reasons.
Also, I do not believe that we may be modelled entirely by machines, as the cognitivists do. Machines (computers) have no intimacy, no sense of shame... And that distinguishes human from animal dramatically, although we are in the continuation of nature... So, we make an effort not to fall into the vicious circle of self-indulgence (solipsism, autism, etc), trying to keep improving rules of objectivity, and those rules are plastic, always enlarging and changing, not even in their detail, but it that which frames them, which nurtures them... Indeed.
But at he same time, at a broader level, we can not avoid – and I think that this is good - this mitigated "relativism" which is very different from the superficial relativism of “anything goes”, and that is the core of our modernity, differently from the earlier modernity.
Another loss of innocence, perhaps, but those losses were and will be infinite for the sake of the improvement of knowledge. So, taking a as basis previous thoughts and interpretations, we try to move to something that has more of a presentiment than of a certitude...
Including our own emotion in the general interpretation we probably “approach” (=imagine) more the men and women of the past (that are dead forever and that we can not interview... and even if we could interview they could always mistake us, as most of social anthropology was mistaken by the presence of the other...).
The past is just another name for the present, a conventional name for our drive into a different present, a present peopled by memories, by the consciousness of the obvious fact that the world has a history, that it started well before us, and that we need for a sake of mental health to built some "model" of that process, in order to make a cartography of ourselves and to make sense of our own lives...
This does not make tabula rasa of previous methods and perspectives, this presupposes a choice that each researcher needs to to, honestly, a deal with his/her innermost sense of truth: what is the sense of what I was taught to do? How can I go now in order to improve that knowledge? Is the very point of departure something settled, or should we try another one, just to verify?...
I think that we shall overcome the sense of loss that underpins archaeology – be it modern, postmodern or whatever – and that each one of us, independently from his/her position/experience/ recognized authority, etc, shall ultimately be the only responsible for finding his/her own way. And in that he/she is not being narcissistic or self-indulgent, it is is simply being honest, answering to two advices that come from inside:
- First: be just and fair to those who have preceded you;
second: in the moment of deciding, do it alone, by yourself, taking full responsibility of your faults, and assuming the very historicity of your own options and results...
It is this difficult equilibrium that I am constantly searching for: understanding well what the others have to teach me, to show me; creating my own trajectory because otherwise I would feel like a fool, a lost person, a waste of myself.
Doing so, maybe I will give no significant contribution at an international level, conditioned as I am for so many factors and circumstances. But at least in (and for) Portugal I think that I have made something... But my books are in Portuguese. As for papers, I publish more and more collectively, because I feel that he work surpasses me, it must be made in conjugation of many efforts and capacities, some of which I do not have.
I mean the old idea of a director with his/her students making small scale excavations is something of the past. Since 1998 I work integrated in a team where I am the senior, yes. But the first huge work coming out of it is a book, a consistent work that will contribute, I am sure, to the development of the research of the monumentalized hills of Iberia (Los Millares type), oversimplified from a long ago under the “umbrella” of fortresses... That book was made by one of my students.
I hope that you like the books that I have sent you (which does not mean to agree with its contents...). They are actually not mine, but the product of a collective effort (sessions of TAG 2005 - Sheffield - and of TAG 2006 - Exeter), where I was much indebted to Julian Thomas, because I am an outsider, of course, in the world of British archaeology, and he has helped me quite a lot.
Wish I had been your student myself, at the time where I was preparing my PhD (70's and 80's) for instance !!!
I try to recover from many difficulties we find here to research (time, money, space, books, everything) and furthermore I want to pass the enthusiasm to a group of “students” that Susana and me we have created here. That is the most important! "
I think honesty prevails after all... the important is this passion we all share to see clearly... And if each one is aware of his/her serious effort, we need not to have any complex or obsession about the idea of to agree or to disagree...
My personal “drama” was the fact that being Portuguese actually I am (I always was) in a sort of periphery... But I have tried to get advantage of that, because it has also obviously its advantages.
Although I will be 60 years old in a few days (time fades dramatically...) I feel like a student. So what I try is to go forward, not denying the value of other archaeologies, but to try to find my own path and to connect it with others. We would do nothing if we were working in a void, if there was nothing to face to... And I want to contest what I feel imperfect, in a certain way, which is not personal, but it goes well beyond that.
This is not false modesty. I know that what I have made is still in need of an enormous elaboration and the fact that my English ifs deficient troubles me a lot. You know, to be able to write in Portuguese would be different. But indeed this "Babel condemnation" that we suffered was a terrible thing, the worst one after the Fall, to use Biblical metaphors...
In fact, for me, for instance, the word “postmodern”, born in architecture as you know better than me, means practically nothing...it is just a convention to put at ourselves at a certain distance from certain principles that governed Enlightenment and that were practically considered like a religion, I mean, a replacement of theology by science.
That does not mean t project my Ego in things. That is just to admit – I think - an undeniable truth: the observer is necessarily implied in he observation, something that the “rationalist” tradition would never admit for historical reasons.
Also, I do not believe that we may be modelled entirely by machines, as the cognitivists do. Machines (computers) have no intimacy, no sense of shame... And that distinguishes human from animal dramatically, although we are in the continuation of nature... So, we make an effort not to fall into the vicious circle of self-indulgence (solipsism, autism, etc), trying to keep improving rules of objectivity, and those rules are plastic, always enlarging and changing, not even in their detail, but it that which frames them, which nurtures them... Indeed.
But at he same time, at a broader level, we can not avoid – and I think that this is good - this mitigated "relativism" which is very different from the superficial relativism of “anything goes”, and that is the core of our modernity, differently from the earlier modernity.
Another loss of innocence, perhaps, but those losses were and will be infinite for the sake of the improvement of knowledge. So, taking a as basis previous thoughts and interpretations, we try to move to something that has more of a presentiment than of a certitude...
Including our own emotion in the general interpretation we probably “approach” (=imagine) more the men and women of the past (that are dead forever and that we can not interview... and even if we could interview they could always mistake us, as most of social anthropology was mistaken by the presence of the other...).
The past is just another name for the present, a conventional name for our drive into a different present, a present peopled by memories, by the consciousness of the obvious fact that the world has a history, that it started well before us, and that we need for a sake of mental health to built some "model" of that process, in order to make a cartography of ourselves and to make sense of our own lives...
This does not make tabula rasa of previous methods and perspectives, this presupposes a choice that each researcher needs to to, honestly, a deal with his/her innermost sense of truth: what is the sense of what I was taught to do? How can I go now in order to improve that knowledge? Is the very point of departure something settled, or should we try another one, just to verify?...
I think that we shall overcome the sense of loss that underpins archaeology – be it modern, postmodern or whatever – and that each one of us, independently from his/her position/experience/ recognized authority, etc, shall ultimately be the only responsible for finding his/her own way. And in that he/she is not being narcissistic or self-indulgent, it is is simply being honest, answering to two advices that come from inside:
- First: be just and fair to those who have preceded you;
second: in the moment of deciding, do it alone, by yourself, taking full responsibility of your faults, and assuming the very historicity of your own options and results...
It is this difficult equilibrium that I am constantly searching for: understanding well what the others have to teach me, to show me; creating my own trajectory because otherwise I would feel like a fool, a lost person, a waste of myself.
Doing so, maybe I will give no significant contribution at an international level, conditioned as I am for so many factors and circumstances. But at least in (and for) Portugal I think that I have made something... But my books are in Portuguese. As for papers, I publish more and more collectively, because I feel that he work surpasses me, it must be made in conjugation of many efforts and capacities, some of which I do not have.
I mean the old idea of a director with his/her students making small scale excavations is something of the past. Since 1998 I work integrated in a team where I am the senior, yes. But the first huge work coming out of it is a book, a consistent work that will contribute, I am sure, to the development of the research of the monumentalized hills of Iberia (Los Millares type), oversimplified from a long ago under the “umbrella” of fortresses... That book was made by one of my students.
I hope that you like the books that I have sent you (which does not mean to agree with its contents...). They are actually not mine, but the product of a collective effort (sessions of TAG 2005 - Sheffield - and of TAG 2006 - Exeter), where I was much indebted to Julian Thomas, because I am an outsider, of course, in the world of British archaeology, and he has helped me quite a lot.
Wish I had been your student myself, at the time where I was preparing my PhD (70's and 80's) for instance !!!
I try to recover from many difficulties we find here to research (time, money, space, books, everything) and furthermore I want to pass the enthusiasm to a group of “students” that Susana and me we have created here. That is the most important! "
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