ABSTRACT
Politics play a pivotal role in the archaeology of the contemporary past. But not all politics are the same. It is argued here that the stance of some contemporary archaeology is actually closer to what can be defined as post-politics or soft politics. Multiculturalism, localism, the celebration of choice, and the political agnosticism of some neomaterialist perspectives are all related to the practice of soft politics. In this chapter, five operations are proposed for making contemporary archaeology more radical, which are compounded under the terms dissensus, disclosure, defamiliarisation, desublimation and descent.
