During Easter I received an invitation to participate in a session at the 112^th American Anthropological Association annual meeting in Chicago, IL, November 20-24 2013. The session is called The distress of things: materiality, agency & ethics. It is organized by Rui Gomes Coelho, Binghamton University (rgcoelho at binghamton.edu). He also participated in the Urban Variation conference in Göteborg earlier this year. Discussant will be Ruth Van Dyke, Binghamton University. Here is the abstract for the session in case you wish to participate (I need to take a look at some of the ethical issues with object-oriented perspectives, OOO ethics for the AAA):

Anthropologists, archaeologists and other social scientists have been discussing issues of materiality and agency for at least two decades. In fact, it has been a long time since the Cartesian dichotomies of human-object and culture-nature were challenged. More recently, some scholars have been preferring to look at material agency by assuming human intentionality as the edge of the discussion. Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency (1998) became a central piece in those contributions, offering the concept of “extended mind” to understand how objects are created and manipulated as conveyors of ideas. Others, however, defend more radical positions in terms of materials’ autonomy. For instance, Bruno Latour and his works on Actor-Network theory (ANT) have been quite influential among anthropologists. In a broad sense, researchers engaged with ANT appreciate the idea that the role of human actors in the world might be considered more equally along with non-humans. In this way, human intentionality is no longer decisive when it comes to determine who has the determinant role in a human-object relationship.

These discussions are also raising ethical issues. Following the fall of Socialism and the triumph of the neo-liberal economic models in most of the world over the 1990s, social sciences became hostages of the “end of history”. Thus, the increasing attention on the role of material culture in society’s lives can be regarded as part of an epistemological post-human turn, where things tend to be an intellectual escape from the political correctness of the hegemonic economic and social model. Social scientists start to fantasize about the dynamics of an apparently inert, material world as an alternative to the turmoil of engaging with their own societies. However, things themselves proved to be as inconvenient as people. We may ask ourselves how far the idea of an autonomous material world is leading us, and we should consider the ethical consequences that such approaches may carry to contemporary social problems that emerged out of late capitalism: social inequality, economic exploitation, political surveillance.

With this session we intend to bring people back to the discussion of materiality and agency with a set of papers that explore different historical and anthropological contexts.

Now that April 1 almost is over throughout the world I will only mention that the previous post was an April Fools’ joke. I left some clues. The whole joke revolves around a number (you know how much 2012ers love numbers…). I focused on the amount of days that passed between December 21, 2012 and April 1, 2013. It was 101 days. The first clue for you is that I mention that the new correlation constant is 99 days later than the Lounsbury-Thompson correlation constant (GMT+2), i.e. 99+2. The only thing that I associate 101 with is an old Disney movie: One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Remember the former French-Croatian (Dalmatian) employee? The dog deity (which astually is known from other codices) was also described as white with black spots. The main dog character in that movie is Pongo and since I have seen the word ngô several times in Vietnam I decided to include the fictive historian Pố Ngô in my made up history (León de Rosny is the only actual historical figure). Further, the Calendar Round date mentioned in the text was actually yesterday’s date according to the “normal” GMT correlation constant (the one used for the 2012-circus). Sorry if I fooled you (Stanley Guenter was not fooled and I did not moderate his comment until this morning).

Today’s date is 2 Ik’ 0 Pop, so we have a new year, the first ha’b (haab) after the pointless 2012 circus and Don Alejandro’s failed prophecy of 13 Ajaw (two days ago). Please move on with your lives if you still cling on to this nonsense.

People who still follow the 2012-circus know that yesterday was the day when Don Alejandro’s prophecy was believed to be fulfilled (it may still be “yesterday” for those of you west of CET since I am posting this right after midnight local time). From yesterday and 60-70 hours onwards the sun will be hidden and we shall enter the Fifth Sun. It was 13 Ajaw (Junajpu) yesterday according to the contemporary tzolkin  among the Kiche’ which is used for the GMT correlation. However, we know that this correlation between the Gregorian calendar and the Long Count is wrong. Needless to say, the sun will not disappear for 60-70 hours. From what I can tell Australian media has not reported on a missing sun yet.

Followers of this blog may recall that I went to Vietnam last year. What I did not mention in my posts was that I met Pố Ngô, a Vietnamese historian at HCMC University of Culture. The university library has in its possession a previously unrecorded codex (the “Saigon Codex”). According to Ngô, the codex was originally stored at Bibliothèque royale in Paris, together with the Paris Codex. Both were acquired in 1832. In 1886, the year before León de Rosny printed a chromolithographic version of Paris Codex, the Saigon Codex was reported stolen. It is believed to have been brought to HCMC/Saigon by a former French-Croatian (Dalmatian) employee at Bibliothèque royale whose family settled in Vietnam in the early 1890s. The HCMC library was given the codex after the American War. Ngô has been studying the codex for several years and contacted me in 2011 to discuss its significance for the correlation issue between the Gregorian Calendar and the Maya Long Count (which has been discussed many times before on this blog).

The exact details of Ngô’s work on the correlation issue will be published later this week. Basically, the codex contains a Venus table where the Maya dog deity Tzul Ajaw appears in white colors, covered with black spots. This deity is associated with Venus as an Evening Star and in this table the deity howls at the moon. What makes this extraordinary is that this glyph is associated with a Calendar Round date (1 Imix 4 Wayeb). That particular Calendar Round date only appears together with the first appearance of the Evening Star twice in the past millennia. The howling at the moon can be taken as evidence that the Evening Star is close to the moon itself. That removes one of the possible dates in relation to the Long Count. It is only the 584384 correlation constant that anchors this particular event in the Gregorian calendar. This is 99 days later than the Lounsbury-Thompson correlation constant. Hence, according to Ngô’s correlation constant, 13 baktun ends today.

I have been hesitant to reveal this information in times like this since “2012ers” (or 2013ers as they should actually be called) may associate the new 13 baktun date with the current events in North Korea. This is why I reveal it on the same day as the 13 baktun ends since I do not want to feed dormant doomsday prophets. However, the full extent of Ngô’s research will not be available until after 13 baktun has ended and I thought people interested in these issues should know about it in advance.

I have been invited by the Zagreb-based theatre collective BADco. to talk about water as object and hyperobject in the ancient Maya area. April 18, 19:00, at Skogen, Masthuggsterrassen 3, Göteborg.

One day has passed since the vernal equinox and three months have passed since the “end of the Maya calendar”. I thought that maybe there would be some increase in blog traffic regarding the 2012-phenomenon around the vernal equinox. It actually dropped a bit instead. Someone googled the search terms “march 20, 2013 john major jenkins.” That is a sign of grasping at straws, still clinging on to contemporary mythology. The only 2012-related blog post that attracted some notable traffic yesterday was my post on Terrence McKenna. I now expect the 2012-related blog traffic to decrease even more. I will probably be back to report on the summer solstice.

”It is ironic that Derrida, the arch-postmodernist, chooses absolute temporal uniformity, and that the physicists adopt relativity” (Birth 2012:31).

For Derrida time is impossible without space. Time needs to be spatialized in order to flow. Duration means that something remains across a temporal interval and only space can remain. Without temporalization a point would not be able to remain the same as itself or to exist at the same time as another point. Hence, the simultaneity of space is a temporal notion. Derrida’s trace is therefore the co-implication of time and space. Since every temporal moment ceases it must be inscribed as a trace for it to exist (Hägglund 2011:118f).

Like other postmodernists (and modernists for that matter), Derrida is caught up in the correlationist circle and Kant’s faculties. For Kant, time and space are pure intuitions of our faculty of sensibility. In the non-anthropocentric and object-oriented perspective outlined by Harman, both time and space are tensions between objects and their qualities (along with essence and eidos). There is no longer a temporal uniformity. In fact, Harman’s time, inspired by Heidegger, means that at every moment and situation there are already preexisting objects (“the past”) that are torn in two directions. Although the objects pre-exist the situation they also obtain meaning by being referred to the potentialities of other objects. This projection is “the future,” i.e. what is added to the past (the givenness in the present) by another object (Harman 2011:56).

The irony here is that Derrida’s view of time is dependent on objects that shape temporality (clocks and calendars). He is not actually dealing with time “itself.” We all tend to make the same mistake. Archaeological chronologies are entered into a Gregorian calendar whereas the ancient Maya used another calendar to chart important events (where quite often the calendar itself set the conditions for events, such as Period Endings). However, both systems are dependent on the structure of a calendar (an object), rather than time “itself.”

Birth, Kevin K. (2012). Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality. Palgrave Macmillan: New York.

Harman, Graham (2011). The Quadruple Object. Zero Books, Winchester.

Hägglund, Martin (2011). Radical atheist materialism: A critique of Meillassoux. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Eds, Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. re.press: Melbourne, pp. 114-129.

As you may notice I am not blogging very often these days but I thought I should provide a brief summary of what I am currently doing. There are two reasons for my absence; I did not just loose interest in the 2012-circus at the beginning of this year, I also lost interest in blogging in general. Internet (the blog and facebook in particular) takes more time than it deserves. The second reason is that I am currently writing articles for two anthologies, doing the final editing of roughly ten other articles for various journals (and other anthologies), two book proposals, preparing a couple of speeches, and writing a new project application. The project has been given the tentative title of “The necromantic ordering of days”. Here is the introduction in its current state:

“Now that the supposed “end date” of the Maya Long Count calendar has passed and its associated New Age- and “end-of-the-world” hype have diminished since December 21, 2012 (Normark 2013), one ought to take a closer look at the foundations of that said calendar. As Birth (2012) says, a calendar is a necromantic device. It is an object formed by people, long dead, but whose contributions affect temporalities long time thereafter, even in recent years in the case of the “2012-phenomenon.” The Maya calendar(s) were designed to order the days, i.e. the passing of time.”

Earlier today I presented my paper on “the rotted town and the congregated town in early Colonial Yucatan, Mexico.” Before the abstract was printed I had added “Settlement topology” to the title. I decided to skip the discussion of what I mean by that term to keep the presentation simple and straightforward. However, I will add that discussion in the article I will prepare for the future anthology that will be the result of this conference. What is settlement topology? It is the opposite of settlement typology…

I will also include a discussion of what the actual rotted “towns” (or communities) were. I suspect they were locations where we today find late Postclassic miniature shrines, such as Nohcacab, Sisal and Yo’okop in the Cochuah region. Nohcacab is particularly interesting since this site is located in-between Ichmul (which became a cabecera de doctrina in 1579) and one of Ichmul’s visitas, Sacalaca.

I will give a brief public speech at Nordstan here in Göteborg during Vetenskapsfestivalen (“The Science Festival”). Here is the title, abstract, location and time:

Hur spansk gränskontroll i Mexiko påverkades av dinosauriernas utdöende
Efter den spanska erövringen av Yucatan tvångsförflyttades mayabefolkningen till samhällen som centrerades kring tillgängliga vattenkällor. Detta innebar att den spanska gränsen kom att sammanfalla med hydrogeologiska formationer som har sitt ursprung i Chicxulubnedslaget som utrotade dinosaurierna.

Nordstan, Scen, Nordstanstorget

April 25, 16:35-16:50

Some of my earliest blog posts concerned the relationship between archaeology/history and heavy metal. In the latest video by the German metal act Helloween they manage to create a mess of everything. On the cover of the song Nabataea they are standing in front of Petra but in the video Petra is not seen anywhere. Instead we see Maya (or rather Mayanesque) buildings, the Aztec Calender stone (used as a turning disk), Greek columns, Scandinavian Iron Age ornaments, the usual pumpkins, etc. The Nabataean kingdom is also described as the first democracy, 3500 years ago… (how hard is it to use Wikipedia?). Had I known this back in 2001 I could have told Michael Weikath and Andi Deris some facts about the Maya as I was sitting near them on my flight between Mexico City and Amsterdam. Anyway, the new album is OK.

We have a winner among the false 2012/2011 prophets. Some of my oldest posts can be used to show the basic tendencies in the post-2012 era. Calleman’s peak came in October 2011 (his end date was October 28). That month my first post on him had 614 hits. Last month it had 29 hits, a drop of 95.3% from his end month. Since he set the end date earlier than others the general “Mayan calendar” mythology was still going strong and it helped this post to continue to receive more attraction than it should have done otherwise. My only post on Geryl peaked in March 2011 with 605 hits (perhaps it received many hits from an internet forum or the like, I do not remember). In december 2012 this post had 380 hits and last month it dropped to 56, which is a drop of 85.3%. My only post on McKenna had 754 hits in December and 214 last month, which is a drop of 71.6%. Unfortunately I never wrote a similar post on JMJ, Argüelles or Pinchbeck…

Conclusion: McKenna has the best chance of surviving the post-2012 era even though he is no longer with us…

As noted by Gavin Lucas in an article in CAJ, archaeology often deals with two temporal planes: the particular event (such as the production of the single artifact or its deposition or the sinking of Titanic) and the structure as an enduring set of practices or beliefs (cosmology and/or ideology). Lucas formulates the archaeological event as something not defined by its particularity but rather about reversibility. The event is the temporal concept that keeps us grounded in the archaeological data since we are dealing with residues of events. Events are assemblages of people and objects that persist for various durations. Archaeological events are tied to the degree of reversibility in organization that effect residuality. Change occurs more readily in assemblages with greater reversibility (such as a book collection or a floating iceberg). They also leave less material residues in the archaeological record. Assemblages with greater irreversibility changes little (traffic system or ocean going passenger lines) but they also leave more physical traces.

If we follow Whitehead’s definition of an event, an object is an event in itself or rather a series of events. An iceberg is actually happening, it is always a fresh creation, an event. The iceberg has a time in relation to Titanic. The time it takes for the collision to occur is not a continuous flow but rather an event.  As time “moves on” the objects are recomposed and they can seldom be decomposed to their former objects according to Harman. The iceberg and Titanic formed a third object/event that changed the constitution of them both. One can never recompose this event/object on April 15 1912.

Lucas, Gavin (2008). Time and archaeological event. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18(1): 59-65.

“Clocks and calendars are necromantic devices-tools by which the dead think for the living, and the dead’s thoughts deflect the living’s attention from the cycles in the present. This is a consequence of the mediation of cognition by artifacts, and it is a feature of how artifacts can distribute cognitive models across time, culture, and space” (Birth 2012:35).

I received a package of books from Amazon today. In it were five books, two of which will be important in my upcoming project application on “neuroarchaeological” aspects of the Maya calendar(s) that I mentioned here one year ago. The quote above is found in one of these books; “Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality” by Kevin K. Birth. Seldom have I found a book that is so well suited for my own purpose. The author even mentions the Maya calendars (and 2012…), but the main source is Rice’s may-cycle model which is not supported by most Mayanists, including myself.

The second book is “The Encultured Brain: An Introduction to Neuroanthropology,” edited by Daniel H. Lende and Greg Downey. Both books, along with my previous readings of the works by Lambros Malafouris, other “neuroarchaeologists” and Tim Ingold will be combined with object-oriented ontologies in order to study how objects and hyperobjects of various sizes affect the way time is perceived and “codified” in calendars, how these calendars then, as real objects, create(d) various sensual objects and how these real and sensual objects eventually came to transform the accumulative Long Count calendar into the cyclical Short Count calendar. Not only were the calendars necromantic devices, but so were the ruins surrounding the Postclassic Maya. The ancestors not only bore the burden of time, they also shaped and transformed time for those who lived among them.

I am back from a short vacation in The United Arab Emirates. My wife, son and I went there in order to celebrate my wife’s birthday. This is also the first time I have stayed at a Hilton hotel (Hilton Ras al-Khaimah Resort & Spa to be specific). Hence, we stayed in Ras al-Khaimah, which is one of the seven emirates of this young country. Most people probably know about the city and emirate of Dubai, only 1.5 hour south of Ras al-Khaimah. Dubai is not the capital of the country, that is Abu Dhabi, but it is home of some of the world’s most interesting contemporary architecture and landscaping. A visit to Dubai without seeing Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, is impossible. It was also impossible to get the full height of this 829.8 m tall building in my camera lens. Let’s see if the building remind us that pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

Right next to Burj Khalifa we have Dubai Mall, the world’s largest shopping mall (in terms of areal extent). The waterfall inside the building was really nice.

The world’s only 7-star hotel can also be found in Dubai, Burj al-Arab. Apparently there is another 7-star hotel under construction in Ras al-Khaimah.

Most of the time in the country we spent at the hotel which had a private beach. This short vacation was way better than last year’s short vacation to Egypt…

I have lost ALL interest in the 2012-phenomenon and I am tired of corresponding with people who believes in this nonsense despite the fact that the “end” date has expired. Two weeks ago I said that I will continue to follow the phenomenon for sixth months at least but now I cannot see myself put more effort into this stuff. My main concern has been the “distortions” of the calendar from an archaeological perspective (which then turned into “blogging about public archaeology”). For those people interested in the contemporary religious aspects I understand that their interest will remain. To me, however, this is probably over. I think I end my coverage now (on the blog at least). I may let comments through if they are not outrageous. Let’s see if I bother to put together a book, but don’t count on it.