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Cancer in the Neolithic?
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Evergreen Dazed
1881 posts

Re: Cancer in the Neolithic?
Jan 27, 2017, 13:51
tiompan wrote:
Evergreen Dazed wrote:
tiompan wrote:
Evergreen Dazed wrote:
tiompan wrote:
Evergreen Dazed wrote:
tiompan wrote:
Evergreen Dazed wrote:
tiompan wrote:
Evergreen Dazed wrote:
tiompan wrote:
Evergreen Dazed wrote:
tiompan wrote:
Evergreen Dazed wrote:
tiompan wrote:
Evergreen Dazed wrote:
tiompan wrote:


Is Pomo losing it's grip ?.


I sincerely hope so. (pun intended)

http://www.metamodernism.com/2015/01/12/metamodernism-a-brief-introduction/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Sincerity




In Franzen's "The Corrections " Chip sells his collection of critical theory books for a small fraction of their original cost , the money going on a fancy salmon to impress his girl friend .
Maybe starting soon , if it didn't start some time ago the pomo texts will start to fill up the second hand bookshops and the dosh spent on a nice bit of scran . Can't think of better use .
As for it's impact on archaeology , millions of student /lecturer hours spent attempting to understand it and a similar amount attempting to apply it unsuccessfully to the discipline. Then we have to wade through the resulting verbiage to discover , nothing .


Correct me if i'm facing in the wrong direction (and I do mean that) but I always imagined it was not so much directly applying postmodern thought to archaeology, as an explosion of subjectivity in light of all aspects of postmodern society?
Archaeology almost taken along in the flow, if you like.

Is discovering 'nothing' a fair thing to say?


It was more than just subjectivity , we had that before PoMo , it was obfuscation , verbiage and shoehorning ( most often post structuralism or sociological theory) into an already threadbare archaeological one .
From volume too value , maybe not nothing , but not much more .


Obfuscation, most definitely!

But without the development of the post-modern would Cope ever have written The Modern Antiquarian for example? (You may or may not be a fan).
Maybe if the new archaeology audience that book created are largely interested in the interpretive, is that a bad thing for archaeology? I'm just thinking aloud at this point, not trying to put words in yr mouth or support any particular argument.

If we look at Burls books, Prehistoric Avebury for exmaple (as it's been mentioned) would you call his approach post-modern?



I have never read TMA but I very much doubt I would describe it as being influenced by POMO or that it had any impact on the reason for it being written . Again I don't know, but doubt if there is any mention of the central figures e.g. Lyotard, Derrida , Foucault , Baudrillard or even their contemporaries who had an impact in sociology/anthropology and thus archaeology but who are a bit less pm e.g. Bourdieu , Gell etc . As for Burl , definitely not .



re Cope I was thinking about him being directly influenced by postmodern philosophy. Maybe i'm wrong. I agree about Burl.




Sorry , I missed out the mention of the bibliography from TMA which I doubt would contain refs to the usual suspects .

In what way might he have been influenced and by whom ?



Rather than him explicitly referencing particular figures or works in TMA (although he may do, I read it a long time ago), I mean he seems to have adopted themes which, to my mind, are based upon postmodern philosophies - Celebration of the individual, suspicion of institutions and religions, questioning established ideas about freedom, especially western ideals, an anti-capatilist, what could possibly be called 'new age' viewpoint.


With one possible exception I don't see any of these as being essentially pomo , and all predating it by a long way .
Celebration of the individual is at the latest a modernist concept and more associated with romanticism and capitalism . In pomo the individual has become the “decentred subject “
Suspicion of religion is modernist /Marxist or to lesser extent even older .
Anti capitalism /western ideals is modernist / Marxist / critical thory “ etc
Suspicion of institutions is as old as the hills but one classic pomo concept is Lyotard's “incredulity toward metanarratives.” , which is mainly concerned narratives but could arguably include institutions .


The distinction seems (to me) at times to be subtle, and the ideas entwined, but the 3rd paragraph below within the *** seems to fit in terms of what I am saying about Cope.

http://www.bdavetian.com/Postmodernism.html

..Postmodernism, like modernism, follows most of these same ideas, rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness. Postmodern art (and thought) favors reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, and an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject.

But--while postmodernism seems very much like modernism in these ways, it differs from modernism in its attitude toward a lot of these trends.

***Modernism, for example, tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history (think of The Wasteland, for instance, or of Woolf's To the Lighthouse), but presents that fragmentation as something tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a loss. Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, and meaning which has been lost in most of modern life; art will do what other human institutions fail to do. Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn't lament the idea of fragmentation,provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The world is meaningless? Let's not pretend that art can make meaning then, let's just play with nonsense.***



The book appeared at the height of pm but the qualities you referred to earlier are all modernist , not pm .

From a stylistic view surely it isn't " rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness. "



I accept your first point but not necessarily your second. I would say pastiche, irony and playfulness are all there in that book. Perhaps i've got it wrong, i'd like to hear other opinions on this.

Would you agree that modernism is a more conservative construct, in terms of order/disorder and grand narratives, things which pomo seeks to reject?

I'm no expert (as you can tell) but i'm sure I detect elements of pomo thinking in copes work!


The style of the book seems to be a gazeteer with observations by the author , that in itself puts it into the frame of a grand narrative , particularly if there is a "message ".

Irony ,pastiche and playfullness etc are all found in pre pm stuff . Their presence alone isn't enough to characterise it as pm .
A pm tma might have been an 19 th C diary showing the perspective 12 year old apprentice(with the same name as the author ) to a engineer named Aubrey Stook who has been commissioned by a railway company to work on the feasability of building a railway line near ancient sites like Stonehenge . Alternate chapters would be about a 21 st C archivist who discovers Stook is actually in the pay of Napoleon 111 and the diarist was later imprisoned for selling for faked diaries of antiquaries . etc .


George, I think we're talking about different things.
My thinking is that Cope has been personally influenced by postmodern thought and that some of the themes can be detected in his work, in this particular case the MA book.
You seem to be describing an author conciously adhering to certain rules in order to complete a piece of 'postmodern writing', which is not what I am talking about, at least.
I'm going to have to call halt as i'm trying to continue this conversation in snatched moments whilst working (as I was doing yesterday) and it's very difficult to switch satisfactorily between the two!
Perhaps we could continue another time.


By all means .

Yes the hypothetical book was what you might expect from a PM writer ,
ludic , ironic etc.

PM has had an influence on us all but I can't see how it would be particularly noted in the ma book given it's overall grand narrative style .


Ok, maybe I need to go away and find out what i'm trying to say as it's a bit feather in the wind at the moment.
Just a quick question to help me out (and i may not get back on here this afternoon) if we consider the movement or whatever it's best called of the 'new age', does that imply a category (modernist or postmodern) in terms of its broad themes, or is it dependent upon the individual aspects within, can there be a modernist and a postmodern approach to the same themes or ideas and beliefs which make up the collective movement?

I'm trying to understand where to draw lines, what would be good examples of modernist and postmodern thinking about feminism for example?
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