Didn't someone write a book about some kind of intellectual game played with
beads... Glass beads...? Herman hesse ring a bell...
I just did a paper on foucault where - among other things - I pointed out
that the french literary movement of the 1960s which spawned post-processual
interest in literary theory and all that, basically just theorised what
people like james joyce, TSEliot and others had put into practice back in
the 1920s and 1930s - with the implication that, if archaeologists started
picking up on it without sufficient critical and scholarly caution, we're
liable to start making big mistakes...
One of the points I especially took offence at was tilley's argument that,
since foucault's texts are hard to read, ours should be too... Foucault's
not necessarily difficult to read, if you can read french and are used to
that academic tradition (ie. Context) - but to translate him into english
and somehow equate a foreign writing style and/or literary tradition with
erudition or wisdom (or whatever) was clearly a mistake - just as all those
foreigners turn up their noses at the simplicity and lack of
academic/scholarly merit in the clearly written texts anglo-american science
has been so good at (stephen jay gould and stephen hawking being two
examples I can think of off hand) -
I also railed against the political effects of abusing the language, via
orwell, etc., as is my wont...
But you end up getting this glass-bead effect when you start stringing all
these unrelated bits of info together - in the style of bowles and von
daniken - and one of the points hesse was trying to make was that it all
ends up being so lifeless and sterile - I don't think the irony comes thru
in the english translation, and hesse was so tied with hippies and whatever
that people keep looking for mysticism where it isn't necessarily there -
And the reason why I was looking at all these literary sources and/or
antecedents for tilley's interpretations (and misrepresentations) of
foucault was that, ultimately, the results aren't really all that much
different...


geoff carver - SUNY buffalo
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-----Original Message-----
From: Archaeology List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bob
Skiles
Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2003 09:49
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Athena .. born of Zeus


I hope that Mr. Bowles and Erik von Daniken are both thoughtful enough to
donate their brains for scientific study after death. I am sure there must
be some sort of very similar defect that ought to be studied ... some
weirdly perambulating neurons that tend to string together unrelated bits of
history like a hippie necklace made from the wildly disparate beads and
buttons one can find in the bin at the back of a Goodwill store.