In the Modern era, the Western world spread to the entire planet and has accomplished a gigantesque task of embracing the other(s). That process is accelerating more and more in the present days, in every aspect of life, and it is well known. Scientific knowledge and its imagery have always tried to develop, to accompany and to represent this encounter with the formerly unknown (or known only through legends and imagination) by “us”. Drawing, painting, photography, audio and video were and are diverse means of recording, capture, and display an universe of things, past and present, that entered into the imaginary of the Westerns. That “exotic” is part and parcel of a regime of objectification and of sight (image – fixed or in movement, bidimensional or multidimensional) whose matrix is intrinsically European. Exhibition of reality and knowledge were and are twins. Taken in a broad sense, the ideas of “heritage” and “museum” are central to this “exhibitory complex”. Its core is the - somehow unhealthy - idea of freezing life, making the entire world and its exhaustive record to overlap. In other words, transforming the entire world into a setting (tourism, etc.). And yet an important point here, is: how are the “others” responding to this form of globalization? How are new ways of “local knowledge” becoming global, too? How do the “others” look at us, represent us, and relativise us? How are we, conscious of all this, trying to overcome our own tradition and building a more comprehensive image of our past and present as realities inserted into a map of diversity and complexity? Which is the next “play” that we, archaeologists, shall stage to the overture of our theatre?
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