One of the most pervasive (and perhaps pernicious) implications of the development agenda is that somehow it implicates in a much more powerful fashion the third world than it does the first. This assumption in itself is an inherent result of the hierarchical manner in which the development enterprise situates itself in the global order. By over-emphasizing the changes occurring in the third world, among ancestral communities and re-formulated minority and native identities, the actual shifts and changes occurring in the first world actually get erased or covered up. This particular form of discursive denial is essential for several reasons that are inherent to the development paradigm.
Prime among these reasons is the belief that somehow the third world is at the receiving end of the resource exchange, eliding the manner in which those same native communities have been decimated by centuries of capitalist exploitation that have secured the uneven access and exchange of development resources today. Another crucial element in the development enterprise is that of racial identification. In the sense, that the development scheme once again retells a global narrative of compassionate white stakeholders helping out black and brown skinned others to achieve a higher level of development outside of their own internal grasp. Of course, this denies the fact that a significant number of development workers (even from first world countries) are not white, that the overall state of poverty is more widespread in the world today (even after five decades of development work), and the ethnocentric base of evolutionary schemes of development, civilization, and modernity.
Based on the above, archaeological sites in the first world present interesting analytical cases in which to assess the uneven exchange of cultural resource contained within the development enterprise, and also the manner in which cultural identification itself gets reproduced in highly uneven fashion. In this manner, the site of Pompeii, in southern Italy, (perhaps along with Stonehenge) allows for an initial understanding of the complex ways in which first world archaeological enterprises also get marked and redefined within the new transnational order of things. It is perhaps equally telling how the site of Stonehenge is completely off-limits to all but a few archaeologists, precisely because the state has become rapidly aware of the volatile nature of the site’s historical identification possibilities.
The Roman site of Pompeii presents itself as an interesting site of multiple and ambivalent identification. Above all, the splendor, mystery, and sheer mon-umentality of the site puts it on a scale of its own within the European landscape. As a result of having worked there on several different projects, the author was immediately struck by the tens of thousands of Italians and foreigners who flock to visit and walk its streets each summer, visiting a city that was almost instantly stopped in its track by the Vesuvius explosion two thousand years ago. As a result of that natural accident, the site would seem to present a window into a similar, yet different, way of life that took place in today’s modern Mediterranean landscape. Not surprisingly, it is the awesome historical seduction of the site that justifies the thousands of euros that visitors pay to visit Pompeii and that support the rest of Italy’s archaeological sites and enterprises.
However, one of the most profoundly explicit elements at Pompeii is how much the site, and visiting it, is not about the past but rather about the present. In a way the site proudly expounds a moment in time when the Roman (i. e., Italian) empire was at its global height, not only in terms of monumental achievement but more importantly of territorial and global domination. This particular manner of understanding Pompeii, and the Roman past, is essentially related to the rather secondary place that Italy now plays within the new European Union, and the almost third world identification it has inherited since World War II to the present day. In this fashion, Pompeii serves to ambivalently state, to Italians and foreigners alike, a narrative about national superiority that is impregnated with imperialist nostalgia about the past and burgeoning feelings about a misplaced fascist history of the present.
At the same time, the site elaborates a more global narrative of archaeological grandeur in a manner not unrelated to its European geography. In this way Pompeii is also ambivalently situated within an emerging postnational identification of a modern Europe at the same time that it presents an empirical backdrop from the imagined past that modern history came from which and has evolved. This particular ambiguous identification is an essential marker of a development scheme that is pervasively present throughout the world in its modern reconfiguration. On the one hand, Europe (and the United States) must maintain a superior distinctiveness that both expresses and reflects their greater resource possibilities, while on the other hand they must also express an element of democratic identification that makes development not the uneven exchange that it always has been, but rather a more humanitarian enterprise of democratic self-fulfillment.
In such a complicated landscape of discursive possibilities, archaeology and centrally produced sites such as Pompeii play an essential role in both justifying and enabling such narratives of unequal cultural exchange. That is why it is so easy for visitors at Pompeii to be awed by the grandeur of the site which tells of a luxurious past in tune with a prosperous territorial present. Yet this present historical narrative is not completely true, and that particular reality is made more visible in the landscape of Pompeii, where the northern sensibilities of the continent are far from being espoused, and are often openly ridiculed. It is also in this manner that the archaeological landscape of Pompeii opens a series of questions about what is the nature of the site’s archaeological representation, and ultimately what does this representation actually accomplish.
In such a fashion, first world archaeological sites and not only third world ones are imbued with significant discourses about national and global identification. In this sense, Pompeii, as with Cochasqui and other third world archaeological projects, is burdened with a historical narrative that not only transcends its borders but that perhaps even more importantly did not even begin within them. To this degree the development enterprise is so pervasive in its restructuring of the current global order of nations that archaeological sites carry this historical object of validation within the very possibilities of their discursive explanations. In this manner the story told by guides and imagined by visitors at Pompeii is as much about the site as it is about a troubled first world incapable of transcending its own historical limitations, an Italy traversed by unequal identification between its northern and southern regions, and about an ancient Roman empire that is as alive today in people’s imagination as we want it to be.
World History
