Pseudoarchaeology and Leiden

I was fascinated to read about the Egyptian response to a recent exhibit on Egyptian antiquities influence on Black popular culture. Apparently, the Egyptian state saw this juxtaposition as sufficiently offensive or problematic to ban the Leiden Museum from excavating in Egypt. As someone who enjoys a pseudoarchaeology dust up as much as the next guy, this one, in particular, is a great reminder that as a discourse pseudoarchaeology is often about race.

Of course, keen observers of the pseudoarchaeology scene recognize that certain strands of contemporary pseudoarchaeological practice are overtly racist. Denying indigenous people the achievements of their ancestors by attributing them to aliens not only invokes (and reinforces) assumptions of “cultural superiority,” but also relies on models of cultural “development” that culminate in present aesthetic and political values. The more we can appreciate some kind of artifact in the past (say, “Slavic” pottery), the more we celebrate it as a kind of timeless or “transcendent” achievement that validates the position of a past society as contributing to the long arc of “civilization.” This approach is obviously bullshit and colonial, racial, and modern bullshit at that.

That said, it is clear from the Egyptian response to this exhibit that the pseudoarchaeological discourse is not just a branch of pseudoscience, but a cultural force in its own right. Black pseudoarchaeology suffuses a wide range of cultural outputs from the music of Beyonce and Sun Ra, to the literature of Ishmael Reed and Pauline Hopkins, feature films like the Blank Panther franchise, and contemporary religious movements such as the Nation of Islam. Much as the Indiana Jones films continue to shape popular views of archaeology, so various facets of the Black, pseudoarchaeological imagination continue to shape popular views of the Black past. Of course, many forms of Black pseudoarchaeology draw upon the same genealogy, the same discursive strategies, and the same sense of social exclusion as contemporary white pseudoarchaeologists. Both forms of this (which we might call the racist and anti-racist manifestations of pseudoarchaeology) lean heavily on the same modern metaphors of irony which they share with “scientistical” archaeology in that they see the superficial figurations of reality as inherently untrustworthy. For excavating archaeology, this skepticism leads to the literal removal of layers which obscure deeper realities. For pseudoarchaeologists, this often involves stripping away the knowledge produced by “scientistical” archaeologists to find deeper and sometimes cosmic or metaphysical realities. Of course, the anti-pseudoarchaeology crowd often returns the favor by demonstrating that pseudoarchaeology itself obscures its roots in racist and colonialist ways of thinking. As so it goes.

The Egyptian state’s reaction to the Leiden exhibit suggests that Egyptian archaeology at least respects the influence of these kinds of cultural products on views of their history. It makes sense that the white anti-pseudoarchaeology crowd often tiptoes around Black pseudoarchaeology (and one can hardly blame them with so many racist pseudoarchaeologists out there). The Egyptian state shows no such sensitivities and saw this exhibit as challenge to their own racialize, nationalize, and post-colonial view of their past. This isn’t meant to justify their decision to use archaeological permission as a way to reprimand the Leiden Museum. Nor is it to suggest that a critical engagement with Black pseudoarchaeology isn’t possible or even necessary.

If I did have the confidence to make a suggestion, it would be shifting our emphasis from debunking pseudoarchaeology to recognizing how traces similar contours to archaeology itself and speaks to fraught (or at very least complicated) relationship between race and modernity.