Knowledge is the relationship

scenes of Catamarcan gnoseology

Abstract

Why should archeology be quarantined? What would be the virus that archeology spreads without us noticing? It is, on the one hand, a discipline of knowledge, a science that, like all of them, establishes a distance between it and lay knowledge. At the same time, it is knowledge, accumulated over decades and centuries by peoples who, many times, were colonized by mechanisms that include, precisely, the subordination of their knowledge. Epistemic violence is not unrelated to the archaeological function, since defining what is stated as valid knowledge leads to the implicit or explicit denial of other knowledge. Furthermore, knowledge, that is, what archeology is and also what archeology is about, is tense in a struggle for what, not only archeology, but knowledge is. It is not only about this or that knowledge about this or that, but also about what we consider to be knowledge and, fundamentally, what it is not. In short, coloniality is structurally housed in the archaeological function as an epistemic struggle, a struggle for meta-knowledge. Thus, archeology is not just a hegemonic knowledge about peoples, cultures and histories, which are often subordinate. It also contributes decisively to demarcate the hegemonic understanding of knowledge. This text is not about archeology, but about what archeology is and what archeology is not: knowledge or, better yet, meta-knowledge.