Three Things Thursday: Notebook Jotting from Bilbao

While in Bilbao, I found myself jotting in my little notebook a good bit. Sometimes these jottings with developed from papers or conversations during the conference. Sometimes they developed in my walks around town. You can read my larger reflections on the conference here.

Three little jottings in particular stood out and seems sufficient for a “Three Things Thursday.” These are not complete ideas, arguments, or assertions, but rather 

Thing the First

Archaeology’s and modernity’s need to fragment experience as an ethical response to the profound continuity between oil, capital, colonialism, imperialism. Through fragmentation, we create a point of critique by separating our own perspective from existing points in the network defined ultimately by the seemingly infinite and totalizing character of the flow. 

Modernism, for example, and its emphasis on the discontinuities that exist in the present, offered new critical, ontological, and epistemological perspectives.

Today, we can work to de-center the “master narrative” by encouraging communication as dialogue. This means embracing plurality and works that are open-ended.At the same time, it is insufficient to simply posit dialogue as an “outcome.” This is especially true for matters of ethical thinking. How do we not only allow discussion but also frame that discussion to encourage particular outcomes?

How have our perceptions been shifted because of our exposure to oil? Does this limit the kind of dialogues, outcomes, and ethical perspectives possible?

If this is the case, do “energy humanities” constitute a distinct epistemology or even the kind of ontology that provides an escape from our patterns of thought? Can we use music, film, fiction, or new forms of scholarly writing to find new ways of knowing?

Thing the Second

Erin Riggs gave an interesting paper on the art present in the Union Carbide corporate headquarters in Danbury, Connecticut in the 1980s. She argued that the art, which looked mostly like upscale hotel art, spoke to the company’s desire to project modernity, but also their colonial aspirations. This art, then, created a context for a kind of corporate colonialism that tragically culminated in the Bhopal disaster of December 1984.

After her talk, I got to thinking about North Dakota’s own Thomas Barger and the collection of artifacts associated with his exploration of Saudi Arabia’s desert interior in search of oil. These artifacts, which Barger published in Archaeology magazine, in the 1960s, connected the discovery of oil directly to the discovery of the Arabian peninsula’s archaeological past. While it appears that Barger kept and perhaps even displayed these artifacts at his home in the US, they eventually found their way back to Saudi Arabia as part of the Thomas C. Barger gallery at the national museum in Riyadh.

The repatriation of these artifacts paralleled the nationalization of ARAMCO in the 1970s and 1980s. The case of the Barger collection tells a slightly different corporate history from that of Union Carbide. While ARAMCO was every bit as colonial an enterprise as many other large 20th century corporation, Thomas Barger’s artifacts demonstrate the role that archaeology in private collections could play in negotiating the relationship between companies and the nation state.         

Thing the Third

As I walked across the city, I became fascinated by the the presence of small books stores each with their own collection of books and thematic emphasis. I know this is not rare in larger cities (and even in some small town), but I got to wondering whether these bookstores fostered communities of readers. In other words, are the customers of these shops aware of other customers and do they consider themselves a community? 

I have blogged about reading a book with students from my Roman history class next semester and while I hadn’t thought of it this way, I wonder if it could be an exercise in community building.