ABSTRACT
Locating Africa somewhere in a story about evolution, participating not only in a scientific discourse, but in a kind of imagined construction of the shared origins of humanity. In 1991, Nick Thomas published Entangled Objects which argued against the determining discourse of alterity in both archaeology and anthropology. Thomas's work is part of a minority trend in anthropology which has highlighted the way in which the presumption of cultural difference, and most specifically its deployment as an analytic frame, has served to function as the denial of coevalness or co-presence. The democratic traditions of the West are not only recent in their character, universal suffrage including women was introduced in 1920 in the US, in 1928 in the UK and in 1944 in France, but the founding principles of democracy retain their imagined connection to an Athenian past, and their equally fictitious connection to contemporary aspirations for world freedom.
