We Have Never Been Post-modern: Maya Archaeology in the Ethnographic Present

I want to reconsider the use of the word “post” to describe the state of social science at the dawn of the new millennium. Speaking at an academic conference on postcolonialism, aboriginal activist Bobby Sykes commented, “What? Post-colonialism? Have they left?” (quoted in Tuhiwai Smith 1999). I don’t think we are really post anything; the results of the conquest and enslavement of first peoples continue into the present day, both as echoes of the past and in new and terrible forms. In fact, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999:14) notes, many aboriginal people view post-colonialism “as the convenient invention of Western intellectuals which reinscribes their power to define the world.”