Theme:
5. Theories and methods in archaeology: interactions between disciplines
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
CANCELLED: Absurd Histories – What’s Behind Pseudoscientific and Extreme Interpretations of Archaeological Phenomena?
Content:
While at first glance concepts explaining archaeological data, landscapes or heritage like those proposed by Erich von Däniken, the Bosnian Pyramids network or nationalist groups promoting eccentric forms of ethnogeneses may seem annoying or at best amusing to the earnest academic scholar, it might be interesting to take a look behind them. Hence, this session likes to examine the context in which absurd histories appear and the actors, who share a part in their invention. We would like to discuss the reasons for their success and the power relations that keep them reappearing. Are they merely provoked by the social and commercial value of a fascination of the outrageous, or do they more often than not adhere to conspiracy theories and political or religious ideologies?
Considering them as alternative approaches of making truth about the past, it may be worth to analyse their strategies of gaining credibility, the power mechanisms of their epistemic authority and not least the deviant modes in their relation to acknowledged scientific practices. Asking how pseudo- or parascientific concepts about past societies are positioned and related towards current academic discussion may not only shed light on hidden discursive systems beyond the surface of their absurdity but also on the general state of the epistemological self-perception of our discipline’s rationality.
Keywords:
pseudoscience, para-archaeology, alternative archaeology, epistemology, conspiracy theories, ideological appropriation of archaeology
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Karin Reichenbach (Germany) 1
Co-organisers:
Michał Pawleta (Poland) 2
Affiliations:
1. University of Leipzig
2. Faculty of Archeology, University of Poznań
THIS SESSION CAN NOT BE SELECTED AT THIS MOMENT