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Preface: The Future is Now: Common Problems, Common Threads
Int J Histor Archaeol
Preface: The Future is Now: Common Problems, Common Threads
Stephen A. Mrozowski 0
LouAnn Wurst 0
0 L. Wurst Department of Anthropology, Western Michigan University , Kalamazoo, MI , USA
1 ) Fiske Center for Archaeological and Research, Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts , Boston, MA , USA
The papers in this special issue provide concrete examples of what using archaeology to do history backward might look like. No doubt there will be subsequent attempts that will build on these efforts with improved results. As a group the papers are varied in their focus and in some instances time frame, but what they share is a common concern for the future. The uncertainties and anxieties surrounding the future are clearly evident in the case studies presented by the various authors. They reflect the authors' deep concern that the future of our existence is imperiled by policies and ideologies couched in rhetoric that is all too familiar. That familiarity stems from the common problems and common threads that bind the papers as efforts to transcend the boundaries of past, present and future, as well as other boundaries such as society and nature. Wurst and Ridarsky set the stage for the papers that follow by examining the rhetoric of the New Deal by first governor, then President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt and his advisors confronted the problems of the Great Depression through a variety of programs that involved a massive infusion of government funds. In areas such as upstate New York, efforts to aid the plight of rural farmers involved the government purchasing unproductive farms. The formula used to classify which farms would be deemed unproductive is consistent with the Neoliberal axioms of our own time. Rather than using government funds to help farmers who wanted to remain farmers, Wurst and Ridarsky found that those who really benefited the most were successful commercial farmers. These policies were justified by a progressive rhetoric similar to that being invoked today as a model for how to tackle our own challenges. The formula used in New York for determining marginality stands in sharp contrast to a different reality revealed by a combination of archaeology and historical research. As Wurst and Ridarsky demonstrate quite convincingly, many farm families who were deemed
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marginal appear to have lived lives that were stable and satisfying, calling into question
the basis of the rhetoric that many on the left look to with hope.
The power of rhetoric is also central to the paper presented by Quentin Lewis.
Focusing on the early nineteenth century community of Deerfield, Massachusetts,
Lewis critically examines the rhetoric of improvement and its links to scientific
farming. Situating his study within the broader topic of climate change, Lewis evokes
the Marxian concept of the metabolic rift between humans and nature to argue that
Capitalisms insatiable appetite for energy is to blame for our current environmental
crisis and that by using archaeology we can study this process backward. What he finds
is that the ideology of improvement was strongly associated with more commercial
forms of agriculture in which greater productivity was deemed more important than
maintaining the long term fertility of soils. The growth of scientific farming was led by
merchant agriculturalists who speculated in land and sought to use credit and more
intensive production to accumulate wealth. In this instance the ideology of capitalist
accumulation tended to abstract nature to the point where it was seen as something to
be manipulated and improved through technological intervention. Although these did
indeed produce greater wealth for the few, it was at the expense of sustainable farming
practices that have resulted in the loss of farming as a way of life that continues in the
region today.
Randall McGuire begins his paper by confronting the stark reality of the decline in
workers wages, rights and protections in the contemporary world of fast capitalism. He
argues that capitals anti-union agenda is framed in the context of the monstrous lie
that workers no longer need unions since all of these rights have already been granted
to workers by the capitalists themselves or the government. Instead, he uses the
examples of archaeological work at Blair Mountain, the Lattimore Massacre and the
Ludlow tent colony to remind us that workers rights were only granted through serious
and engaged class struggles and that they often paid for them with their blood. McGuire
suggests that connecting ideas of workers rights present and past is vital to our
recognition that contemporary struggles are a continuation of those occurring at these
and other sites, and that this memory work is instrumental in fostering the solidarity
necessary for the political action to fight back.
Margaret Wood addresses a different, but not unrelated topic by examining the role
of material culture in struggles over (...truncated)