Statement 65

"What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?" Prospero, William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1610)

Shakespeare’s remarkable drama of a single aboriginal living on a nameless island and his encounter with the shipwrecked Duke of Milan and his daughter still invites long debates about how we see our earlier selves. But for the most part, scholars today like to think that we have put aside many of the tropes that once characterized our discourse. Even though the destruction of ancient societies, languages and cultures is hardly a thing of the past, postmodernist and post-structuralist anthropologists would like us to think that at least as intellectuals we stand – finally though admittedly precariously – on the other side of centuries of biases. And while I would hope there is some truth to this, it is worthwhile and perhaps even necessary to review the full depth of the crisis of confidence that we should have in the various disciplines that profess to tell us something about our most ancient past. In a very real sense, the fight is still very much in the future and more monumental than one might imagine. The issue here is not just a historiographic critique of disciplines like anthropology, archaeology and even history, but something deeper and philosophical that is brought to the surface about the nature of our humanity.