Archaeology’s Empire of Sectarianism

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Social historians demonstrate the historical contingency of sectarianism, which may be defined as a process and discourse that entwines religious sects and identities with political ones, on the ground and in state arrangements (Makdisi 2000). Despite this contingency, academic, government, and public circles doggedly reify sectarianism as “the” principle of the Middle East—i.e., social worlds are transhistorically segregated and explained by sect (Makdisi 2017, 2019). Using bioarchaeological and archival evidence, I trace the shifting coordinates of sectarianism and its entwinements with other processes, revealing tensions between life and death on the ground, Ottoman and Euro-colonial imperial knowledge-making, and archaeology’s politics of knowledge. I argue that archaeology is among circles that inappropriately—and subtly—reify sectarianism as “the” principle of the Middle East, and this reification is related to imperial practices. I thus call for a revision of the subtle workings of archaeology’s knowledge, as well as the power and identity politics and milieus that sustain it. Taking sectarianist truths as objects of inquiry is an effort to attend to subtle reconfigurations of violence in multiple registers. It is to engage sectarianism’s agility as “imperial duress” (Stoler 2016) that shapes (inter)state structures and landscapes, violently enfolding lives, deaths, and relations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38981.0