- Fowles, Severin and Kaet Heupel. In press. In the absence of modernity. In Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Modern World, edited by Paul Graves-Brown and Rodney Harrison. Oxford University Press.
- Kiddey, Rachael and John Schofield. 2010. Embrace the margins: Adventures in archaeology and homelessness. Public Archaeology 10(1)4–22.
- Zimmerman, Larry, Courtney Singleton, and Jessica Welch. 2011. Activism and creating a translational archaeology of homelessness. World Archaeology 42(3):443-454.
- Liboiron, Max. 2012. Tactics of Waste, Dirt and Discard in the Occupy Movement. Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest 11(3-4):393-401. [See also Liboiron’s extended photo documentation of Occupy garbage politics at http://discardstudies.wordpress.com/ ]
- Gledhill, Jim. 2012. Collecting Occupy London: Public Collecting Institutions and Social Protest Movements in the 21st Century. Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest 11(3-4):342-348.
- De León, Jason 2012. Victor, archaeology of the contemporary, and the politics of researching unauthorized border crossing: a brief and personal history of the undocumented migration project. Forum Kritische Archäologie 1: 141-144. [Available at http://www.kritischearchaeologie.de/repositorium/fka/2012_1_19_DeLeon.pdf ]
- Drake, Nadia. 2011. Immigration tracked through desert detritus. Nature [Available at http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110411/full/news.2011.225.html ]
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the contemporary past (anth 6651) 
I found Max Liboiron’s reading of “trash” and “dirt” in Tactics of Waste, Dirt and Discard in the Occupy Movement particularly insightful. He mentions the long history of the conflation of dirt/trash/uncleanliness with the lower classes and the use of that label as a political weapon, but I wish the idea would have been fleshed out more (though I realize it was a very short article that may not have had space to do so). For instance, he describes the “occupy tactic” of “calling out ‘dirty’ money” (396) but then spends the majority of the section Occupy Tactics describing the physical cleanliness of the Occupy site and the lengths that people go to maintain a certain level of hygiene/sanitation/cleanliness. The protestors are invested in appearing clean—in a physical sense—so that they don’t appear “dirty” in a metaphorical sense. However, what about the owners of “dirty money”? We might not assume that a clean-shaven banker in a well cut suit is physically dirty, but the lower classes and Occupiers—especially today—are not ACTUALLY dirty. Sure, many Occupiers may have camped out for days without showering, but they are objectively no more physically unclean than the banker who just spent all night in his office, sleeping on the floor under his desk for 3 hours. The conflation of dirt with “dirt” isn’t warranted in one group any more than it is the other. While the political power of the epithet “dirty” cuts both ways, it is only when used by those in power, aimed at those without power, that it takes on its double meaning. In this kind of study it would be interesting to see the idea fleshed out of when, how, and for whom “dirty” takes on its different valances.
All of the readings this week are extremely interesting, but, naturally, the one I have the most to say about is Jim Gledhill’s piece about museums. On the whole, I was disappointed that he did not engage with the issues he raises in a deeper, more provocative way. Of course museums are extremely politicized; of course there is going to be tension between upholding the museum’s stated mission and not offending the people who fund the institution. None of this is anything new! With the Occupy movement, Gledhill has the opportunity to dig into these issues and reveal what was going on at this significant moment in history. Instead, he barely touches on the most interesting questions:
Was the Museum of London actually pressured, either internally or externally, to not engage with the movement or to only engage with it in an “impartial” way? Or was the tension only in the minds of the museum professionals in the field? How did the New York museums respond to the Occupy Museums protests? What were the criteria for determining if an object was “historically significant” and worthy of collection? And what happened to these objects after they entered the museum collection? What stories do the objects tell and whose voice is going to tell it? Did the museum adopt any policies for curating “born digital” material?
Ultimately, Gledhill fails to fully interrogate the process of collecting Occupy and its consequences. It seems that the museum curators chose to pay attention to the things Occupiers made and used, not the things they discarded or left behind. Moreover, it seems that the curators made an effort to let the Occupiers tell their own story through oral history, yet Gledhill smoothly, unquestioningly integrates the story of the Occupy movement into a broader narrative of the history of social protest movements, relegating it to being a part of a whole, one moment in a larger series. The museum’s decision to not remove the last remaining part of the Banksy installation and instead “treat it as an active part of the protest” was a more enlightened choice than I would expect of most museum collectors and just about the only part of the article that impressed me. And still, the language in Gledhill’s sentence is not explored – namely, the implication that this object should not be collected because it is “active,” but objects that are “passive” and/or “dead” are fair game. Overall, I was disappointed with Gledhill’s analysis and wished that there had been a more meaningful engagement with the tensions that arose for museums in this unique situation.
Rose Matzkin:
Jason De Leon’s project concerning immigration (as described in his article as well as the Nature article) reminds me of the projects we studied in past weeks about documenting “regular” trash. I think the two projects are an interesting comparison. On the one hand, Leon’s project documents a very specific kind of garbage–it is specific to place, race, socioeconomic status, time (both as in the time period we’re in in general as well as the specific times of year one can make the crossing and times of day one travels), as well as political climate and legislation. On the other hand, the other garbage projects document a wide range of people and situations. Yet both projects get information about people from garbage–specifically information that is somehow taboo (in the case of the former it’s taboo in the sense that the migration being documented is illegal and covert; in the latter, it’s taboo in the sense that it violates a kind of privacy that we either take for granted that we have or perhaps don’t really have at all–a kind of privacy which is an illusion).
I also found the studies about the occupy movement interesting, since that was such a mainstream counter-culturalist movement that it shook up a lot of social norms in various arenas such as economics and notions of public/private place/space–and it interacted interesting with archaeology as well, bringing the archaeology of the contemporary past more notoriously into the forefront than many other contemporary past projects, which often occur on the fringes of contemporary society instead of in the thick of it (as with the articles for this week concerning homelessness, or Kaet’s work with the native american and hippie communities).
Video of Rachael’s Project on Turbo Island
I wanted to show it in class, but I am not sure we will have time with Mark speaking about his Occupy Movement.
Project…I left a word off the end…