ABSTRACT
The very fact that this volume exists is testament to a changing academic climate, one which acknowledges other voices and other constructions of knowledge. That they can exist side by side is the result of a postprocessual archaeology
where all voices are supposedly welcomed and a plurality of positions is considered necessary. This postmodern, multivocal milieu is inclusive rather than exclusionary, since it seeks to provide a forum for previously silent groups and those who have social and political vested interests in the construction of archaeological knowledge. From this theoretical standpoint the voices of feminists, ecofeminists, archaeofeminists, Goddess worshippers and pagans must all be considered as legitimate discourses and given validity alongside scholarly accounts of the past. My point is that whilst the intention is admirable, the outcome in reality usually falls short. At present there is little scholarly overlap and the disciplinary boundaries are firmly in place. Feminists continue to write their books on theoretical and experiential issues, including archaeology only to provide the long time depth for women’s oppression. Goddess worshippers, pagans and alternative archaeologists run their own journals and publishing houses, having little input from their institutionalised counterparts. And archaeologists continue to write their own narratives within their own disciplinary milieu, claiming intellectual superiority, either implicitly or explicitly. So where is the pluralism, multivocality and dialogue that we have been told characterises the 1990s? It would seem that this is simply wishful thinking on a grand scale. Often when academics make forays onto the sacred ground of pagans and Goddess worshippers they are met with great hostility, as if an archaeological search for meaning is tantamount to the purposeful destruction of contemporary spiritualist movements. In my own case, one article on the Goddess and New Age archaeology (Meskell 1995) became embroiled in a highly personalised and polarised battle, where I symbolised the ‘stuffy academic’ and Goddess worshippers were the bearers of real knowledge, experience and real feminism (see Sjöö 1996). We are fooling ourselves if we imagine that we all play by the same rules, or that we can sustain lively intellectual debates on topics which lie at the heart of people’s life experience. However, archaeologists are also responsible for the great divide. Generally they are not willing to take part in contemporary debates, to write for other groups in a non-academic forum, or to produce books which disseminate archaeological knowledge to the general public. There are of course exceptions, people like Chris Chippindale and Barbara Bender for example. In the academic environment, such writing is not always valorised and anyone who becomes a populariser is usually pigeonholed as such. Even the terms we use are highly loaded: popular is synonymous with superficial, non-rigorous, glossing. The fringe becomes the periphery, a no man’s land where chaos and mythology reign supreme-one is reminded of the old saying when one goes off the map, ‘there be dragons’. Unlike many, I do not see these internecine differences as revolving around reductionist concepts such as domination and resistance, or oppressor versus oppressed. From my own experience with pagans and Goddess worshippers in Australia and the UK, I know many of these people to be highly educated, articulate, mobilised individuals who have their own means of publishing and disseminating material,
organising conferences and mastering cyberspace. Surf the net and see. It is simply wrong to see academia as the oppressive ivory tower, and everyone else as agitating anarchists. Many simply do not care for our academic musings and are satisfied to create independent narratives, such as Goddess groups.
