ABSTRACT
What Hodder’s and Meskell’s criticisms imply is that an experience is only valid if it is the experience of an individual. This is troubling, because it could easily harmonise with the late modern fixation with self and subjective experience. The attempt to identify all of the people of the past as individuals ‘just like us’ raises the spectre of a prehistory that has been rendered familiar and comfortable. Similarly, insisting that an experiential archaeology should be exclusively focused on the lives of particular individuals rather than the alterity of past worlds and forms of human existence suggests a reduction of history to the concerns of self and subjectivity. The early twenty-first century is a time of hyper-individualism, self-absorption and emotivism. Recent years have seen such phenomena as growing apathy towards democratic politics; the rise of ‘reality’ and ‘confessional’ television; an increasing fear of crime and investment in personal security; the incursion of the market into areas of public service and the omnipresence of the language of management and marketing; a growing preoccupation with the personal lives of celebrities (epitomised by the public outpouring of emotion following the death of Princess Diana – overwhelmingly expressed in the language of personal relationships); and the increased popularity of the ‘psychobabble’ literature of self-help (Figure 6.2). This suggests a world in which the embeddedness of people in community and tradition has withered away, and the possibilities for collective political action and shared experience have been undermined. In their place, we have a public culture that valorises personal gratification, intense emotional experience, insatiable material consumption, and individual economic enterprise. The misfortunes of the poor
and the needy are put down to their personal failings or lack of motivation, rather than connected with social or economic conditions. We should be very concerned about the dangers of constructing a past that simply mirrors these preoccupations.
