Writing Wednesday

I spent the holiday weekend doing some almost random reading as I continue to feel my way forward in my emerging project that explores the genealogy of certain ideas that are central to the pseudoarchaeology movement as it emerged over the course of the middle and late 20th century.

As readers of this blog know, my work has developed both to expand the context for many ideas central to pseudoarchaeology and to show that pseudoarchaeology has and can continue to offer “counter-myths” that challenge the limits of traditional archaeological thought and practice. The goal is to produce a pseudoarchaeology that complements conventional archaeological thought and subverts more racist currents present in contemporary pseudoarchaeological practice. 

Lately, I’ve been reading and thinking about Rastafari and other mid-century movements that combined spirituality (and spiritual practices) with both literal and metaphorical calls to return to Africa. Some of this comes from the Garveyite tradition which advocated an “Africa for Africans,” and which advocated for at least a partial return to Africa and the formation of an independent African state. In Rastafari thought, this manifest itself in literal calls “to return” to Ethiopia and ultimately more spiritual calls that saw the relationship between members of the African diaspora as the heirs to Ethiopia religion and culture.

The veneration of the Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie I, as the incarnation of the messiah among Rastafari connected Biblical spirituality to the physical landscape of contemporary Africa. In other words, it made physically manifest the spiritual and solidified a landscape in which Ethiopia is Zion (and by comparison, Jamaica and “The West” is Babylon). What I’m keen to explore and understand is whether the social, political, and economic definition of Babylon maps onto Garveyite views? Does Ethiopia as Zion physically manifest both Rastafari (and other “Israelite” thinkers of the 20th century) views of social and political order?

My interest in mapping Garveyite (and other Black political thinkers) thought onto 20th century spiritualism is to determine whether this offered a model for moving from the spiritual (or even mythological) realm to the material(ist). To make this argument compelling, of course, I need to have a stronger grasp of Garvey’s complex (and expansive) thought.

That said, it remains clear that other forms of mid-century esoteric Black religion did look for material manifestations of their beliefs. As I’ve noted earlier in the blog, Nation of Islam has maintained not only clear attitudes toward bodily discipline, but also beliefs in the Mother Plane or Mother Wheel that insisted on its materiality rather than its existence as an allegory or myth. Some Rastafari did settle in Ethiopia as Eric MacLeod has studied and Sun Ra did travel to Egypt. Whether these journeys represent pseudoarchaeological engagements with the materiality of Africa or not is open to critique, but it demonstrates that the spiritual and esoteric ideas held by mid-century Black thinkers were not entirely abstract in character.

In fact, they share certain similarities to notions of Zion that helped shape the American West (particularly in the hands of Mormon settlers). Far from being a purely abstract notion of Zion, the American West represented promised land for white settlers looking for religious freedom, economic opportunity, and political sovereignty. In this case, the materialization of a Biblical site involved the transposition of one landscape onto another. While Early Christians enacted similar geographic transfer through their efforts to create liturgical landscapes that mapped Holy Land sites on to the topography of Roman cities, modernity accelerated the liquidity of these landscapes by both making global travel more possible and by celebrating the construction of new cosmopolitan spaces.

The World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago is perhaps the most obvious example of how places could be literally deterritorialized and reinscribed in a cosmopolitan setting. It is hardly surprising that scholars have seen this event as a trigger for certain pseudoarchaeological discoveries — such as the Kensington Runestone — and contemporary with the great upsurge of early 20th century spirituality, esotericism, and religion. We can loosely associated these phenomena with Modernism movement which sought to both challenge materialism at the heart of modern life and to reestablish the connection between a deep and meaningful past and an increasingly alienated present.

In this space and context, pseudoarchaeology emerges as another strategy to materialize the criticism of modern life. This is, of course, relevant to our present situation as many of the same ambivalence that characterized early 20th century life persists today. We continue to struggle for racial equality, economic and social justice, and the results of excesses of modern life have become existentially evident in climate change and environmental degradation. Of course modern “scientifical” archaeology can play an important role in producing a more just world and helping us to understand and mitigate climate change.

At the same time, if we are to take the calls for counter-myths seriously, then perhaps there is an important role possible for a reformed, more expansive, and critically engaged pseudoarchaeology. The capacity of pseudoarchaeology to materialize spiritual life, to make manifest the complex history of imagined communities, and to help visualize alternatives to the contemporary situation would appear to be particularly significant to world today as we are increasingly told “there is no alternative,” face displacements on a massive scale, and see faith weaponized and marginalized in the service of political agendas.

In this way, pseudoarchaeology represents a contribution to the archaeology of the contemporary world.