In the contributions that follow seven archaeologists, of different backgrounds and working in different ways and places, attempt to answer the question ‘Can an archaeologist be a public intellectual?’ This discussion follows a special forum, sponsored by this journal, held at the European Archaeologists’ Association annual conference in Helsinki in 2012. The participants in that forum were Åsa Larsson, Layla Renshaw, Ghattas Sajey, Audrey Horning and Thomas Meier, who was unfortunately unable to offer his contribution for publication. The published discussion is supplemented by contributions from Cornelius Holtorf, Fredrik Svanberg, Nathan Schlanger and Jaime Almansa Sánchez. We hope that this special section captures some of the spirit of lively debate that characterized the forum.
The term ‘public intellectual’ is a slippery one and it has been noted that there are few people around today who would choose to describe themselves that way. People have their own ideas about what a public intellectual is – or even whether it is a meaningful term at all. By way of introduction we would like to offer a few thoughts in that direction. First, by ‘public intellectual’ we mean something more than a person who popularizes their subject or interprets specialist knowledge for a general audience in a way that gains them popularity and recognition with the general public. A television presenter who fronts a programme about the academic area in which they are also a professor is not necessarily a public intellectual. Second, a public intellectual is more than somebody who is a brilliant thinker. There has to be an attempt to talk to wider publics and to broader issues than the normal parameters of academic discourse enclose. Intellectuals have powerful minds. They can reason, criticize, articulate. But this alone does not make a public intellectual: there must also be an active, outward-looking component, a desire to engage and influence, to shape events or at least to challenge the way that their society represents events by introducing new perspectives in a way that influences the public debate.
One of the key problems we faced in framing this discussion was to distinguish the archaeologist who is a public intellectual from a person who is a public archaeologist. The journal's editors were keen to encourage our panellists to explore not simply how best to engage the public about archaeology, or communicate archaeological knowledge, but how one's expertise in a particular field might enable one to participate in public debate and discussion on wider issues.
Some definitions of intellectuals include:
[Intellectuals] must belong to an intellectually autonomous field, one independent of religious, political, economic or other power . . . [and] they must deploy their specific expertise and authority in their particular intellectual domain, in a political activity outside it (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1989, 99).
someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug (Said Reference Said1994, 11).
someone whose claim to attention rests . . . on a mastery of words and ideas (Skidelsky Reference Skidelsky2008).
intellectuals who opine to an educated public on questions of . . . political or ideological concern (Posner Reference Posner2002, 2).
One might do worse than to say that an intellectual is someone who does not attempt to soar on the thermals of public opinion. There ought to be a word for those men and women who do their own thinking; who are willing to stand the accusation of ‘elitism’ (or at least to prefer it to the idea of populism); who care for language above all and guess its subtle relationship to truth; and who are willing and able to nail a lie. If such a person should also have a sense of irony and a feeling for history, then, as the French say, tant mieux. An intellectual need not be one who, in a well-known but essentially meaningless phrase, ‘speaks truth to power’. (Chomsky has dryly reminded us that power often knows the truth well enough [see Chomsky Reference Chomsky1967].) However, the attitude towards authority should probably be sceptical, as should the attitude towards utopia, let alone to heaven or hell. Other aims should include the ability to survey the present through the optic of a historian, the past with the perspective of the living, and the culture and language of others with the equipment of an internationalist (Hitchens Reference Hitchens2008, 46).
We have been accustomed in recent years to hearing economists, sociologists, political scientists, philosophers and natural scientists contributing ideas and opinions through public platforms, with the intention of shaping debate and policy. But could archaeologists make this kind of contribution? Archaeology has high visibility in the media and tends to have strong support from an interested public. However, the narratives we are expected to provide to the public are generally about the past, and rarely about the present. Many archaeologists even feel that the popularity the field holds with the public ironically contributes to stacking the odds against their making a contribution to a debate about contemporary issues, since the expectations of what an archaeologist is supposed to do are simply so clearly articulated in the minds of both the media and the public that it requires an extra effort to challenge those assumptions and make a contribution beyond the staked-out territory of the past.
In theory, archaeologists should be able to take the long view and to question (or promote, depending on one's political position) the natural, inevitable or fixed nature of inequalities, ethnicities and conflict. This would appear to be a strong position from which to challenge popular understandings of the world. Yet the voices of archaeologists are rarely either sought or heard in these contexts. Archaeological expertise is often considered irrelevant to contemporary questions despite the fact that the past is frequently mobilized in the construction of current identities, ideologies and political projects and has played an essential role in nationalist and colonialist mythologies.
Can we make our voices heard? Should we make our voices heard? (The history of archaeologists moving into the political sphere is not an entirely glorious one.) Do we have anything worthwhile to contribute to current debates? Can archaeologists operate powerfully enough to make interventions in the public sphere, and why has this not happened more often? Finally, what are the risks and dangers of such interventions? Are there lessons to be learned from cases where such interventions have occurred, sometimes with deleterious results?
In recent decades, public archaeology, as a movement within the field, has gained increasing momentum, to the point of constituting a strong current within contemporary archaeology. However, this form of engagement does not exactly take the form of public scholarship in the way we are seeking to discuss here. What we are interested in here is not just the promotion of archaeology to the public, or the involvement of the public in making heritage decisions, but the ways in which the archaeologist's particular involvement with the life of the mind, the world of ideas, could make a contribution to local, national, regional or global political and cultural life. ‘Public archaeology’ also has a tendency to be directed more specifically toward engagement with particular and often targeted groups. While we value this effort and direction very highly and consider it to be fundamental for the place of archaeology in the contemporary world, we are looking for public engagement in a more general sense of the term – one that more generally influences the contemporary political and cultural debate and engages also the broad issues in today's world, issues that lie beyond the territory of the past that we, in collaboration with media and the public, have carved out for ourselves. What we ultimately want to ask is: does our expertise in thinking and articulating ideas give us authority in public life? If so, how can we use it?
The term ‘intellectual’ is not always one of approbation. Different European countries have different histories with regard to the esteem given to intellectuals. France, for example, has a strong tradition of public intellectuals, people who were happy to intervene in public life, and whose recognized intelligence and education gave them authority. The French people, in our stereotypes at least, enjoy debate and discussion of ideas. By contrast, the English treat their intellectuals with much more suspicion, or even derision: ‘intellectuals’ are, in the popular English mind, removed from the real world, impractical, abstract, utopian, even ‘too brainy’, ‘eggheads’. In other parts of Europe, like Scandinavia, intellectuals are often implicitly understood as people engaged with the creative arts (artists, film directors, writers), while academics are seen as operating in an ivory tower with less of a platform for public debate, and thus likely to be insufficiently relevant or interesting to be given a voice in that public debate. Of course, these are overdrawn stereotypes: it is possible and in fact normal within heterogeneous societies to use the term ‘intellectual’ in both positive and negative ways.
Our panellists all have their own ideas about what constitutes a public intellectual and whether an archaeologist can be one – or should aspire to be one. But there are surely things about our intellectual discipline which could fit an archaeologist for the role. Maybe, above all, the intellectual has breadth. Enough geographical and political understanding to take a distanced and critical perspective on the fashionable opinions, hysterias and rhetorics of the day. Enough historical breadth to be aware of the range of possibility and the way that long-term trajectories are playing out.
When Prospect magazine published a list in 2005 of a hundred leading public intellectuals it included no archaeologists, although there were a few historians (Prospect, 115, October 2005). A new list published three years later had no more archaeologists or historians on it. The large number of Muslim clerics near the top of the 2008 list, headed by Sufi Turk Fethullah Gülen, suggests a rather uneven demographic composition – as one might predict of any list compiled primarily through the use of that well-regarded research method the online poll.
An editorial in the journal wondered whether the success of an orchestrated campaign to influence an Internet poll might indicate that the model of a public intellectual as somebody who influences with their words, ideas and willingness to speak out is out of date. Nowadays, mused Nuttall (2008), influence is perhaps more easily attained through personal networks and the Internet than through institutions and publications. However, if the role of public intellectual comes down to the ability to mobilize influence, rather than the quality of critical thought deployed, is there still a place for the public intellectual in the style of Emile Zola or Alexander Solzhenitsyn?
It is undoubtedly the case that the channels used by mid-century intellectuals to make their voices heard are less available and less significant now. Public broadcasters now make far fewer high-level discussion programmes, preferring game shows, soap operas and reality television. Non-specialist journals which deal with complicated matters of culture, politics and thought generally have tiny circulations. And perhaps the wider public is less willing to engage with difficult ideas, or complex debates, than in the past. It could be that our stereotypes of what constitutes a public intellectual constrain our ability to recognize minority and diverse kinds of intellectual. The fact that fewer than 10 per cent of the names on Prospect's list were women's may reflect a preferred style of communication, or the relative difficulty of getting women's voices heard, or the reduced political and cultural authority of women's voices in many parts of the world, including Europe. Or may it be that a female novellist, for example, is less likely to be considered an authoritative voice on wider intellectual questions than a male one? The discussion in this issue of Archaeological dialogues aims to open up some of these questions.
The forum explicitly aimed at giving a platform to archaeologists who have gone beyond desire or reflection about these issues and actually engaged in different ways with the public and political spheres to take the role of a public intellectual. For that reason, some of the contributions (Larsson, Svanberg) focus on the ‘how’ in the title, and provide instructions on how actually to reach out and create a place in the public eye and mind. Other contributors take on the difficult distinctions, and the important places of overlap, between public archaeology as a strong subdiscipline within the larger field of archaeology on the one hand, and the voice an archaeologist can have as a public intellectual on the other. Finally, several of the contributors to this discussion offer their own experiences of working in politically charged situations where archaeology is often at the heart of contested and controversial histories and are much invested in the construction of communitarian, sectarian or personal identities. Of particular note in this respect is Sayej's description of the work of the Israeli–Palestinian Archaeology Working Group, Renshaw's reflections on the role of forensic archaeology in revising recent Spanish history, and Horning's discussion of the reification of difference in the heritage of Northern Ireland. As we write this introduction (early winter 2012), riots on the streets of Belfast about when and where a flag is flown remind us that these are contexts where cultural developments can have serious and immediate effects.
