History, Capitalism and Identity: Archaeologies of the Future

Summary

As Eric Hobsbawm expressed ‘the human body was not made for capitalism,’ and yet for over five centuries this particular economic system has adapted itself to the shifting conditions and social structures of innumerable cultures. How does one account for such a pernicious system of exploitation and surplus extraction to have been normalized into a global paradigm? And what are the comparative manners of assessing the ways that capitalism has permeated historical thought, produced ethnic identities and ultimately redefined the way we think about culture from the inside out? In analyzing the manners in which key science fiction texts use archaeology it might be possible to begin assessing the imagining of different systemic paradigms, and the role that the discipline plays in reclaiming levels of humanity lost over centuries of colonial and neo-colonial forms of domination and control.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2014   •
• ‘O Brave New World’: Archaeologies of Changing Identities

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): SYM-19,06