Five hundred million animals will be killed by the Australian fires. Several plant and animal species are expected to be made extinct through this event. Climate change and the erasure of Indigenous land management practices have a common root in ongoing extractivist colonialism.
Perhaps a new war for oil. Looking ahead to the coming crucial decade we might all reflect on how our expertise could possibly add to understanding. Those of us working on material culture brought to western museums work on the ongoing effects of extractive corporate colonialism.
So in framing our research in the 2020s, would it be possible to bring an anthropological-archaeological perspective to how we might comprehend the contemporary processes of violent dispossession, environmental loss, the end of worlds, began for the Global South many years ago?
For example cultural restitution can be seen as an question about nature as well as just about culture: in the pace at which its destructions operate, in the short-term horizons of global capitalism, in the ideology of extraction, in museum exhibitions sponsored by oil companies.
Could we see a turning-point in archaeology/anthropology/museums—abstract theory & dialogue giving way at last to sharing knowledge, challenging ourselves, repurposing institutions & disciplines—intervening where our sense of the near-past might inform the near-future? I hope so.
Maybe it's a desperate attempt to pretend that those of us who study the past or the so-called "non-western" might have some contemporary relevance. But I'm genuinely hopeful that archaeology and anthropology, despite their colonial past, might be repurposed for these dark times.
There is already a growing body of work in Anthropology here of course, although less commonly with a historical perspective. Museums, archaeology, so-called “critical heritage studies”: not so much.
