ABSTRACT
My approach to issues of ethics at the margins of the network society will be through the lens of archaeological practice in parts of Africa. Anthropology in Africa takes ethical issues to their limits: the moral claims of colonization and enlightenment and the subsequent castigation of such positions as the epitome of unethical practice, the extremes of apartheid and the case for a "militant anthropology" (Scheper-Hughes 1995), the rise of new nation-states built around historical identities and subsequent collapses into economic disaster, dictatorship, war, or genocide, the diaspora of African intellectuals to European and North American universities, the infinite needs of education, health care, and other social services, against which claims for resources for anthropological research appear obscene. Against this, Africa has a historical identity of unrivaled depth that includes the origins of both humanity and anatomically modern humans, the longest known tradition of art, which poses complexities of interpretation beyond the conceptual capabilities of Europe's languages, the independent domestication of plants and animals in several centers, and the development of complex societies along the Nile that connected equatorial Africa to the Mediterranean, early urban civilizations in West and southern Africa, and syncretic African/Arab cultures along the length of the east coast (Hall 1996). . . .
