COMMENT

Norwegian Archaeological Review, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2000

Consequences of Styles of Thinking

On the Relative and the Absolute in Archaeology at the End of the Twentieth Century
MARIA HINNERSON BERGLUND Department of Archaeology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and the Greenland National Museum and Archives, Nuuk, Greenland
The article discusses relativism and absolutism in archaeology on the threshold of a new millennium. The point of departure is Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology and a consensus document from the Lampeter Archaeological Workshop advocating a relativist attitude in archaeology. The author considers that relativism is closely related to indifference and is far from as positive as it is represented. On the basis of Feyerabends concept of Denkstil (style of thinking) and the fondness of post-processual archaeologists for manifestos, the article considers archaeology under Maoism in China, and whether Ian Hodders appeal for an archaeology for all sheds light on views of professionalism and the training of archaeologists.

THE SITUATION The struggle between good and evil continues in archaeology. Behind the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus (see Bintliff 1993) the warriors have mustered, armed on both sides with everything from stone axes and bone implements to atom bombs and tanks and not least with lots of words. The casus belli is a number of provocative statements that can be read, for example, in the publication Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology (Kohl & Fawcett (eds.) 1995), a book which here at the end of the 20th century tries to sum up the role of archaeology as a service discipline for the state; and not least for what, along with the growth of democracy, will come to gure as the absolute hallmark of our century: the totalitarian states and their breaches of human rights. The book features views which mount a direct attack on archaeologists who call themselves post-processual,

and it is their relativist attitude that comes under re, with the help of formulations such as If we abandon our standards for choosing between alternate explanations, we abdicate any right to exclude explanations that promote bigotry, nationalism, and chicanery (Anthony 1995:88). Thus, as a relativist, one is said not even to have a right to dissociate oneself from evil or to oppose Nazism and Fascism. Of course the postprocessualists have reacted to this, and it is the group around the Lampeter Archaeology Workshop, among others Michael Shanks, Cornelius Holtorf and Mark Pluciennik, that has gone to the counter-attack. Armed with a consensus document, it condemns the naive and caricatured picture of post-processualism that is become ever more common in the archaeological literature (Archaeological Dialogues 1997-2). Before going into this dispute in greater detail, let us take a look at the concepts that help to constitute these current approaches in archaeology.

106 Maria Hinnerson Berglund THE POST-PROCESSUAL FIGURE Post-processual is often linked with relativist and set up as the opposite of processual and objective. In archaeology the concepts processual and post-processual have therefore come to replace the more general scientic terms positivism and hermeneutics. The terms are not quite congruent, but like hermeneutics, post-processualism also aims for the subjective, the interpretation and the individual. Processual, on the other hand, describes the scholar who, like the positivist, inclines towards hard data, towards what can be counted and measured and called objective; and by linking this with the surroundings nature and the environmental conditions we get a concept that has become synonymous with processual: the New Archaeology. But . . . is it really so simple? Are objective and processual so inextricably bound up with the quantiable and must the post-processual archaeologist be a relativist? Post-processual archaeology grew out of the post-modernist currents of thought in the 1980s. Old truths were no longer valid, the boundaries among different ideologies became more uid, political systems collapsed and everything was permitted. This was expressed in a mixture of all sorts of styles in the visual arts and music as well as in party politics and clothing fashions. For example, young girls could dress at the same time in long imsy dresses and military boots, and those who had defended a strong public sector began to argue for private initiative and market liberalism. In archaeology and other disciplines this was manifested in the way the boundaries between different disciplines became less strict. Theoretical archaeology became a concept and eclectic approaches were accepted. But this did not happen without resistance. A lively debate ared up in periodicals and books, especially in publications from British universities and not least in the Norwegian Archaeological Review. The methods, traditions and tasks of archaeology were discussed, as were its demarcations from anthropology, ethnology and history (e.g. Hodder 1994:108). The issue of theoretical versus practical archaeology was much debated and Eugene Kolpakov (1993), for example, considered that theoretical archaeology was much ado about nothing. One of the rst post-processual texts was the provocative article by Ian Hodder, Archaeology in 1984 a title that was meant to recall George Orwells 1949 novel 1984, the nightmare vision of a future in a total dictatorship. In the article, Hodder discusses the limitations of an archaeology that works with supposedly objective investigations and only tests hypotheses against data (ibid.:26). There is a consensus in the archaeological community that in some mysterious way accepts that certain assumptions are not to be questioned, he also thinks, and adds that, as a result archaeological data can still never be completely neutral: All statements about the past involve adding to archaeological data in the process of interpretation. It is always a question of saying more than is actually there (ibid.:2531). This is then linked with the question of who creates prehistory, i.e. with archaeology: a white Anglo-Saxon man belonging to a limited social stratum. Hodder underlines that the past is created in the now and is not socially neutral, and he argues for a new attitude to people in general, to ethnic minorities and to women. The point is that prehistory belongs to everyone and that different views should therefore be given a hearing. A post-processual archaeology would make this possible, he thinks, in an archaeological community motivated, not by fears of anarchy and attacks on the control of neutral knowledge, but by the vision of the past as an arena for the playing out of different social values and interests. Hodders comrades-in-arms Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley (1987) advocate similar ideas. With concepts like contextual embeddedness and the valuable past and

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many appeals, they give an account of a number of techniques for arriving at ones goals, and in nine points they present what can be called post-processualisms manifesto. Empiricism is not just a matter of hard data, they say for example, and archaeologists should see theory and facts as two factors that are dialectically interdependent (ibid.:98115). THE VARIETIES OF RELATIVISM AND STYLES OF THINKING TRUTH Hodders, Shanks and Tilleys relativist approach is a kind of democratic relativism that can be linked with the philosopher Paul Feyerabends (192494) model for science. In Against Method (1975), Feyerabend expressed his opposition to positivism and its way of distinguishing between science and non-science. Anything goes is the only principle that can be defended in all circumstances and at all stages of human development, he wrote. A statement that is often misconstrued and interpreted as if everything is permissible. What Feyerabend says is that pluralism and theoretical anarchism, not law and order, are what create further progress in science (Feyerabend 1977/ 1975:15). . . .knowledge is not a gradual approach to Truth. It is rather an ever-increasing ocean of mutually incompatible [and perhaps also incommensurable] alternatives, each single theory, each fairy-tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation, and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness (ibid.:32). Plurality should thus be a part of our understanding. This is also the view of Rom Harre & Michael Krausz, who in Varieties of Relativism (1996) focus on the debate between advocates of relativism and their opponents. As a common concept for all types of anti-relativism they use absolutism (ibid.:vii). Absolutism takes several forms and when we argue against these, we at the

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same time single out four varieties of relativism. Briey, they are (ibid.:6470): 1. Semantic relativism: Meaning is relative to language and the content of a linguistic expression is part of a whole linguistic/ cultural system. The Hopi Indians, for example, classify plants according to medicinal criteria, while Linnaeus point of departure is morphology. 2. Epistemological relativism means that one cannot distinguish between what is knowledge and what is considered knowledge. There is no complete or absolute knowledge base, and truth is relative to the person representing it. 3. Ontological relativism is conceptual. It has to do with conceptual images and conceptual worlds. For the person who believes in Santa Claus, he exists. For the ontological relativist, beings such as brownies, witches, gods, etc., exist in reality. 4. Moral relativism means that all judgements about right and wrong are relative to the context. There is no universal morality. What is good in one context can be evil in another. Does this, then, mean that there are neither boundaries not truth in the world of relativism? On the contrary, says Feyerabend (1978), it is all about judgement, democracy and the right to choose. What is to be taught at the university, for example, is a matter for democratic evaluation, like what is right and wrong. Truth is also a question of judgement. For Feyerabend truth is what knowledge is for Harre and Krausz: some thing you decide on. The expert must be given a hearing but not the last word on truth, just as the expert opinion can be rejected by a democratic decision (Feyerabend 1978:8687). In Feyerabends terminology, judgement is based on a style of thinking (Denkstil), a concept that comes from his comparison between science and art (1984). Like art, says Feyerabend, referring to Alois Riegls theory of art, science has developed

108 Maria Hinnerson Berglund a wealth of stylistic forms alongside one another. When a scientist chooses a certain style, whether on the basis of intuition or more consciously, then just like the artist he or she has an ulterior motive to represent Truth itself. Truth, reality and objectivity are all concepts with many meanings, associated with certain styles of thinking. Feyerabend sees objectivity as an indication of style a social act (ein sozialer Akt) in a particular historical situation. It depends on the historical situation, it is now and then a relative deliberate process (sie ist gelegentlich ein relative bewusster Vorgang) You consider different possibilities and then decide for one - most often it is a direct action owing to a strong intuition (sie ist viel ofter direktes Handeln aufgrund starker Intuitionen (ibid.:7778, my translation). ARCHAEOLOGICAL STYLES OF THINKING: THE DISPUTE If we now go back to the picture painted in the introduction, we can describe the controversy between the group around the Lampeter Archaeology Workshop and its opponents as a struggle between different styles of thinking, classied here as postprocessualism and processualism. In principle, we are dealing with a pair of opposites, absolutism and relativism, but this does not mean that one side is objective and neutral while the other is subjective and partisan. The objectivist strives for absolute knowledge and perceives reality as independent of the eye that sees. The relativist knows (!) that knowledge is uncertain and thinks that everything depends on the eye of the beholder, but an objectivist need not be devoid of partisan interests and the relativist is not necessarily subjectivist, and vice versa (Bernstein 1987:31). In the rst debate article from the Lampeter Workshop (Archaeological Dialogues 1997-2), the consensus group (Shanks, Holtorf, Pluciennik et al.) drew up a comparative overview of the caricatured views which it says constitute the attack on the group. Besides criticism from Kohl & Fawcett, the relativists have felt obliged to quote Anthony (1995), Bernbeck & Pollock (1998), Bintliff (1988), Chernykh (1995), MacDonald et al. (1995), Renfrew (1989) and Trigger (1995). The selected quotations express views such as that an archaeology which has lost its former objective approach has now opened the oodgates for unreliable popular-science reinterpretations of the past. With the entry of relativism into archaeology, everything is accepted and anyone can construct the prehistory he or she wants. They also think that if archaeology adopts a philosophical framework which rejects established criteria for the evaluation of knowledge, then it undermines the very basis for criticizing racist, sexist and other discriminating versions of prehistory. Ironically, write MacDonald et al. (1995:7) Hodders, Shanks and Tilleys supposed left-wing sympathies, their relativist views and emancipation ambitions leave the door wide open for the entry of Fascism into archaeology. As a counter-argument, the Lampeter group says that the post-processual movement is diffuse, not unied this is inherent in its nature. But even if all those who count themselves as part of it would not necessarily rally round the same denition, there are explicit features which distinguish the post-processualism of the consensus group. These features are the view of material culture as active and symbolic and the view of the social agency, as well as the groups position in favour of social theories which work on the basis of the structuring concept (for example Giddens). To this it can add a generally critical and reexive attitude. As for the caricatured picture that processual archaeologists have painted of post-processual archaeology, this is based partly on the processualists naive understanding of relativism (Lampeter Archaeology Workshop 1997: 164) and partly on a few early works by Hodder, Shanks and

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Tilley; so early that at least Hodder himself did not quite know what it was that constituted relativism ((LAW) ibid. 1997: 168). Looking at some later texts by the authors in question (Shanks & Tilley 1989, Shanks & Hodder 1995), we can get a picture of the way their ideas developed. The publication from 1989 takes its point of departure in previous articles and is a (yet another) manifesto with many appeals. It underlines the great importance of material culture, and a programme for the 1990s is set up. One of the headings is Interpretative Politics (ibid.:611) and in the text from 1995 this interpretation has become very important. Interpretation is linked with understanding, meaning and making sense, all wellknown post-processual concepts. A new theme in this context is, however, performance, which relates to the past as an activity in the present. What was produced in the past must (in some way) be made present and living today. We have to discuss how the characters of the past are to be portrayed, and the authors ask what kind of ` mise-en-scene one should choose: what is to be made of the play? (ibid.). The processual archaeologists must of course also ask themselves the same kinds of questions, but the debate does not deal with that; nor with how the New Archaeology has changed since the term was used for the rst time. CONSEQUENCES OF STYLES OF THINKING FOR ARCHAEOLOGY What the processualists focus on in their criticism of the post-processual style of thinking concerns archaeology as such, the archaeological profession and power within the discipline. But the criticism is also about power in society outside the archaeological world and about the political implications of the choice of thinking style for all human beings. If we start by looking at the consequences for archaeological discourse, it is convenient to take our point of departure in

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the need for a newer archaeology that grew out of the New Archaeology. It is clear that processualism despite (or thanks to) its access to all the natural-science methods did not only benet archaeology. The perspective changed but was not widened. Paradoxically, the new methods led to limitations of the eld in some ways. Much of it came to concern cold facts and the results were often reports with many tables and accounts of facts, but little scope for interpretation. The New Archaeology created a picture of mankind as an efcient but passive animal controlled by the laws of nature, and at the same time legitimized Western technocracy and made it universal, writes Hodder (1984:30). In this way, prehistory, too, became western and many people throughout the world have been given and must remain content with a European or North American interpretation of the past in their countries. The partisan past does not only make its impact in colonial and post-colonial contexts but is also expressed in archaeologys attitude to the public and to the museum visitor, and in the educational situations of the western world. One ambition of the post-processualists seems to be to try, with the aid of their relativist attitude, to change this. Relativism, as the Lampeter group understands the concept, requires and encourages other discourses, also anti-hegemonist ones, wherever they come from, from within as well as from outside the academic world. This is in line with its (culturally) liberal and (politically) democratic approach (Archaeological Dialogues 1997-2:168). And that is easy enough to say. But what does it mean in practical reality? According to Hodder, it is not a matter of producing endless series of arbitrary prehistories. But one should be able to build up several interpretations alongside one another in different social contexts, he thinks, and takes women and ethnic minorities as examples of alternatives to the white middleclass male English archaeologist. This is in fact a complex of problems that the post-

110 Maria Hinnerson Berglund processualists pass over all too lightly, in my view. I agree that archaeology would probably become richer if we admitted many points of view and let more be heard. Different people ask different questions and the answers thus also differ. But one asks other questions, not because one is a man or a woman, a westerner or an easterner, but because as a human being one has different experiences. The most important thing is that peoples knowledge differs and, as I see it, should be respected precisely because it does so; this applies to professional knowledge as much as life experiences. Questions of occupational knowledge and professionalism become important, I think, in connection with post-processualisms desire for a future where the past belongs to everyone (Hodder 1984:31). But professional knowledge as such is not discussed among the relativists. It would be interesting to know how they view training, professionalism and occupational skills. Perhaps they think that professionals and amateurs in principle have the same qualitative knowledge? Perhaps they deny that professional knowledge has any special value? In that case does it apply to all occupations: the doctors and the bricklayers, the violinists and the seamstresss, as well as the archaeologists? When the post-processualists talk about womens and ethnic groups right to create their prehistories, I wonder on whose terms this is to happen. It is in itself interesting that both these groups are counted in the same category (dominated/oppressed?), but here it is perhaps most important to establish where in the creation of prehistory these groups come in. Should it be at the beginning of the interpretation phase, in the organization of exhibitions or in connection with some kind of performance, for example? Why not as early as the preparations for and implementation of excavations? Are they simply to plunge into the past or are they to be trained rst? Should Saami students, or the Greenlandic students of whom I have experience, for instance, have a different kind of archaeological training than people from the rest of Scandinavia? Who should be responsible for the teaching in that case, and what should the requirements be in terms of professional skills for those who teach in this kind of context? Are there ethnic or for that matter class-related methods of excavation? Can and should one divide up the discipline of archaeology on the basis of such categories? Who wins and who loses by this? As I see it, the post-processualists social and political ambitions may seem self-evident at rst glance, but when you try to carry their ideas over to a practical level, they end up rather close to what I would call reverse discrimination. It should also be pointed out here that in Scandinavia (unlike England evidently) there is nothing rare about women in the ranks of the archaeologists and that those whom Hodder describes as liberal white men from a limited stratum of society can originate from different social groups (even though the labour movements ambitions for increased numbers of university graduates with a background in the working class have come to grief). But whatever ones gender and wherever one has ones roots, during ones studies one is trained within a social pattern with its quite special codes and traditions. Learning the codes and adapting to the traditions are crucial to whether the system makes you or breaks you. Just the right amount of originality and rebellion can be intriguing in the context but in archaeology, as in society in general, those who adapt are those who are rewarded. It is my view that we live within an ideology; not necessarily in the strict Marxist sense of a false consciousness (Bloch 1983:30) but within a system of ideas that includes rules and value judgements which serve the interests of a certain group (Hallberg 1991:42). Ideology has two levels: a consciousness where one can make up ones mind, and a more hidden level which is usually not recognized as ideology but is represented as Truth itself. Ideology is hege-

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monic (Gramsci 1967) and has agents of reproduction in all areas of society (Nygren 1979:33). So when the Lampeter group talks about emancipating anti-hegemonic discourses, a contradiction is inherent in the statement which exposes the cynicism of the relativist approach, and it becomes clear on what terms the others will be allowed to speak. With their slogan about the individual at the centre, the relativists also end up in the same ideational context (and style of thinking) as the free-market liberals whose ideas of freedom ooded into the world at the beginning of the 1980s with Thatcherism, a movement which with its calls for privatization and its Im all right, Jack attitude resulted in the dictatorship of the global market. In Sweden it has resulted in the widening of the class gap in terms of both economics and health. The public sector has been stripped down and left to the whims of the market; art and culture have been particularly affected by the arbitrary project funding that followed. Continuity is threatened, only the strongest survive and there is nothing self-evident about protecting the interests of ethnic or other minorities. Solidarity and equality have decreased in importance and as relativist terms they have lost their content. It is in this context that the post-processual archaeologists appeals should be judged, and it is on these premisses that I believe we should view the criticism directed against them now at the end of the 20th century. Feyerabend (1978) takes up the issue of the criticism of relativism. Relativism is often attacked, he says, not because people have found errors in it, but because they are afraid of it. The public is afraid of relativism because it sees relativism as cultural (social) decline; and intellectuals are afraid of it because it threatens their role in society (ibid.:7980). The Lampeter group around Shanks also sees the criticism of its own ideas as an indication of the processual archaeologists fear of losing authority and power; not only in the discipline of archae-

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ology but also in society. But they problematize the issue and point out that the processualists need to protect their own professions can also have other causes. The attack on the relativists can, for example, be viewed in the light of the fact that the processualists, in general left-wing/liberal scholars, have in recent years witnessed how contempt for knowledge and metaphysics and other extreme schools of thought have spread through a social environment where the academics are being marginalized more and more (Archaeological Dialogues 19972:182). THE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF STYLES OF THINKING The most serious charge against the postprocessualists is that their relativist attitude opens the door to Fascism and other totalitarian systems. Nationalist or racist agendas are only encouraged in an intellectual environment where the real world is visualized as a web of competing ideologies, all of which are equally true and all of which are equally false, writes Anthony (1995:85), for example. In principle, this claim implies that relativism, but not its opposite, could lead to Nazism and racism a poor, if well-formulated argument. It is understandable, I think, that one wants to guard against a style of thinking that one believes can result in evil, racism and totalitarian political systems. But the arguments are much too crude, especially if they are put in the historical perspective and applied to all the terrible events of the 20th century. The articles in Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology provide a perspective on this. The whole book is one long proof that it is neither relativist nor processual archaeologists, but archaeologists who are loyal civil servants who support the dictatorships all over the world. It makes no difference whether the dictator is called Salazar, Franco or Hitler, whether it happens in the Peoples Republic of China or in the Soviet

112 Maria Hinnerson Berglund Union; it is the loyal, pragmatic scholars with no civil courage who follow the reins of power. And precisely this last point is very easy to make when you are sitting in a cosy room and only have yourself to answer to. To go against the mass (the majority of the people, public opinion, etc.) can involve an inconceivable effort in a certain context, while in another it costs nothing. What is unlikely to have fatal consequences in a democracy becomes much more complicated in a dictatorship, where it can be a matter of life and death:
Science is a cause ghting for truth. One must be free of fear, even of offending God. (Li Shu/Tong 1995:177)

The quotation is from Thirty years of Chinese archaeology (Tong 1995) so the God may well be Mao Tse-Tung. The article describes archaeology in China from the beginning of the Peoples Republic in 1949, through the Cultural Revolution until three years after the death of Mao Tse-Tung in 1976 a period characterized by great archaeological activity, when many young archaeologists were trained and archaeological museums were established in every province (ibid.:177). For the rst ten years China followed the example of the Soviet Union with Stalinism and dogmatic nationalism. After the rupture between the two countries in 1959 the Chinese academics replaced the personality cult of Stalin with holding high the banner of the great leader Chairman Maos thoughts. For more than twenty years after this period, Chinas academics were guided by propaganda slogans about the class struggle and the fostering of the ideology of the proletariat. This meant that one had to root out counter-revolutionary ideologies, and focus on the new, not on what had gone before. A common slogan was Let the past serve the present! One of the reasons I choose to dwell on China is that several of the Maoist slogans recall the western post-processual archaeologists ap-

peals. Another is that when I was young, I lived for a while in Peking. This was during the rst hectic period of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and I recognize much of what Tong describes. With my own eyes I have seen how the struggle against the past took a form where, among other things, old monuments were torn down. I saw how the Imperial Summer Palaces richly ornamented garden balustrades were hammered away and painted over, and I experienced how people with counter-revolutionary views retracted and were persecuted. The archaeological authorities in Maos China never questioned either evolution or revolution. Their task was to serve the proletariat. The work therefore involved proving that Chinas history and prehistory had followed Marxs social theory of the inevitable development of history towards the classless society and communism. In 1972 the archaeologist Xia Nai wrote that the great leader Chairman Mao teaches us (archaeologists) that it is the people and the people alone who have created world history. The working people are the masters of history and We must adopt the viewpoint of class and class struggle to investigate social phenomena reected in archaeological data, to wipe out all the abominable inuences of the distortion of history by the bourgeois and other exploiting classes. . . (Tong 1995:182). Xia Nais declaration was in other words written during the Cultural Revolution, but it still has a strong inuence on Chinese archaeology. Only when it has emancipated itself from this kind of statement can China have the colourful prehistory that the countrys many ethnic groups and different regions justify, writes Tong (ibid.:191). And only then, I would add, can the appeal (below) from Mao Tse-Tung of which I suppose every true relativist must approve perhaps become reality.
Letting a hundred owers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and the sciences and a ourishing socialist culture in our land.

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Different forms and styles in art should develop freely and different schools in science should contend freely. We think that it is harmful to the growth of art and science if administrative measures are used to impose one particular style of art or school of thought and to ban another. Questions of right and wrong in the arts and sciences should be settled through free discussion in artistic and scientic circles and through practical work in these elds. (Mao 1966:302303)

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was Fascist Italy. So with the individual as the point of departure, it becomes evident that relativism and Fascism do not t together at all. On the other hand, one cannot ignore the fact that relativism, with its strong focus on contextuality, and on explaining and thus understanding its objects of study, also risks forgiving everything, the evil as well as the good. ON THE THRESHOLD OF A NEW MILLENNIUM In summing up the debate between the Lampeter group and the processualists, one senses increased understanding between the opponents on both sides. While John Bintliff (1998) continues to argue for a third way and brings in his mentor Ludwig Wittgenstein (cf. Bintliff 1993), he underlines that there are good ideas in both traditions. He sees the consensus document from Lampeter as demonstrating increasing convergence between processualists and postprocessualists. Perhaps there is also a will to reconciliation in the proposal to replace the concept post-processual with interpretative archaeology (Shanks & Hodder 1995), Ulrick Veit (1997) at any rate offers a reconciliatory hand and says that the post-processualists no longer represent science as political action. Just like processual archaeologists, they now seem prepared to distinguish between science and politics. When we go beyond the Lampeter debate to the New Archaeologys key gure Lewis Binford in 1998, we see that he, too, has renewed his thinking. Of his own teaching, he says that in the 1960s it was about technology and statistics, while today he devotes it to theory formation and philosophy (Sabloff 1998:43). Perhaps post-processualism has thus become a normal scientic style of thinking. On the threshold of a new millennium, though, the pendulum continues to swing from absolutism to relativism. Relativism is described by its advocates as open and gen-

The Chinese example is just one of many showing that reality often turns out to be more complicated than ideas about it. As I see it, a pragmatic relativist and a dogmatic absolutist can end up on the same side in political reality. But no such view is described in the debate between the Lampeter group and Kohl et al. Instead, both sides argue that it is only their view that can prevent extreme political movements. For example Cornelius Holtorf (1998) writes that epistemological relativism makes it more difcult for political extremists to use prehistory for their own ends, since relativism rejects absolute truth. With a scientic, objectivist rationalism, on the other hand, the Fascist can more easily power his argument. It is objectivism and a strict scientic methodology that can be dangerous, since it rejects both political and ethical values in the interpretation of the past (ibid.:15). Without being a relativist one can also defend relativism against associations with Fascism, for example by starting with the individual. One of the absolute (!) foundations of relativism is individual freedom. But the basis of Fascism is corporativism. Fascism thus builds, just like communism, on the collectivity, on the collective human being. Corporativism is characterized by the fact that social and economic interest groups are autonomous and form the units on which other social bodies are based. In this case the community takes precedence over individual freedom, and protectionism and the planned economy are advocated. There are radical corporativist movements, for example syndicalism, with strong trade unions, but the best example of a corporativist state

114 Maria Hinnerson Berglund erous. For me, it is related to indifference. When relativism assures all traditions the same right (Feyerabend 1978:106), I must dissociate myself from it. For me, democracy does not mean that all movements, in the name of ontological relativism, must have the same right to spread their message. Neo-Nazis who claim that the annihilation in Hitlers concentration camps never took place must be forbidden, and not be allowed to teach at the universities, for example. Nor is science, as Feyerabend thinks, one ideology among others which, like religion, can be separated from the state (ibid.). Human beings use their perceptual organization to structure their surroundings and create meaning, and science is a kind of methodical structuring. What is in focus is, however, determined not only by explicitly adopted positions, but also by hidden needs and interests. In this sense, science, just like politics, cannot be separated from its context, nor can it live independently of society and state. This is particularly clear in the works that have formed the point of departure for the Lampeter debate. Kohl & Fawcetts book shows clearly how value laden archaeology always is, and how great is the responsibility of the individual archaeologist. As a human being, one chooses; even if one refrains from explicitly adopting a position. The debate discussed here cannot be regarded simply as a manifestation of established archaeologists jealously guarding their preserve. The few female participants do, however, add a new slant to the dialogue and I would like to see more of archaeologys women involved in this kind of discussion of the practice of archaeology in terms of nationalism and politics. Issues that should be given more breadth in the future are the social ambitions of archaeology and post-colonialism in relation to nationalism. It is important to distinguish between nationalism and the legitimate demand that democracy should also apply to indigenous populations (see Kohl 1998:33). Home-rule systems and the creation of new states as well as an archaeological practice viewed against the background of western capitalism and imperialism should be themes for future studies. But the debate should not be held in the form of a consensus, a concept that paves the way for coteries and forms an obstacle to Feyerabends idea that an ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives should force everyone into greater articulation and thus develop all our consciousnesses. REFERENCES
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