Ethics and Aesthetics in the Anthropocene

I really liked this recent piece by Þóra Pétursdóttir and Tim Flohr Sørensen in Archaeological Dialogues (2023) titled “Archaeological encounters: Ethics and aesthetics under the mark of the Anthropocene.”

I have plenty of friends who will likely find this kind of article unconvincing or, at very least, not compelling, despite its genuine efforts to address concerns raised by scholars who see “the material turn” as a way to sidestep urgent ethical and political questions. That said, I think the case for a more aesthetically engaged way of thinking about the present that draws upon more creative ways of considering agency and materiality.

In doing this, Pétursdóttir and Sørensen stress that the relationship between ethical judgements and empirical knowledge is fraught. This is an observation that many have made concerning pseudoarchaeology as well, when they attempt to argue that pseudoarchaeology is unethical because it is unscientific (and largely imply the converse that archaeology is ethical because of science). Of course, I understand that the issue with pseudoarchaeologists is not ONLY that they’re unethical, but that they claim to be scientific (and also in many cases advocate for various forms of (pseudo)scientific racism and the like) when they aren’t.

The article is too rich and dense to summarize here, but I would encourage anyone who is reading it to check out note 1 and their brief but salient critique of the contemporary. It seems to me that the authors extend their aesthetic argument, albeit briefly, to the notion of time which undermines (heh) the ego-reference point approach to archaeological work which locates the archaeologist in the present (and the past beneath them). This approach, of course, is laced with cultural assumptions not the least of which involves the expectation that the archaeologist themselves is separate — stratigraphically and temporally — from the material that they seek to excavate. There are all sorts of ethical reasons to avoid an uncritical acceptance of the concept of contemporaneity in relation to both archaeology and the Anthropocene. As Amitav Ghosh famously quipped in the context of a world shaped by climate change: the poor experience the future first. I’m hoping that the Graham Harman and Christopher Witmore, Objects Untimely: Object-Oriented Philosophy and Archaeology which drops later this month (or sometime next month or whatever) will shed additional light on the issue of objects, archaeology, and time.

Finally, this article gives me some food for thought as I start to tentatively look ahead to my next writing project which I’ve pitched here on the blog. I want to see if I can write in more interesting ways that support more speculative and open-ended views of archaeology. My hope is that this doesn’t somehow suggest that empirical and “scientistical” approaches to archaeology do not contribute to the formation of a more ethical discipline, but to instead show that the route to a more ethical and meaningful discipline has to proceed along multiple pathways.