Performing science, producing nation: Archaeology and the state in postcolonial India

This dissertation is an ethnography of scientific archaeology as practiced, performed, and articulated by the postcolonial state in India. It critically focuses on bureaucratic governmentality in the production of archaeology as an authoritative cultural and scientific discourse. The results are based on more than two years of multi-sited fieldwork between June 2003 and September 2005 in India, which included archival research, and ethnographic investigations of Archaeological Survey of India's (ASI) excavations of Harappan sites in western India. The dissertation concentrates on the micro-processes of statist archaeology in the construction of objective evidence at the particularistic location of the excavation site. It provides an ethnographic account of the everyday practices of ASI archaeology through which scientific methods collapse with administrative bureaucracy in the construction of knowledge at the excavation site. Located at the intersection of the sociology of science, anthropology of the state and theoretical archaeology, the research is driven by the analyses of five respective areas: (i) spatial formation of the archaeological field and technologies of governmentality through which the ASI transforms landscape into epistemic site; (ii) professional subjectivity of postcolonial bureaucratic hierarchy and the institutional structure of postcolonial ASI; (iii) scientific discovery of material culture and its transformation into empirical evidence; (iv) the conception of research problems and categorization of cultural deposits within the temporal and stratigraphic micro-context of the layer in the excavation trench; (v) representational practices of the archaeological excavation and how classification and typologies produced at the excavation site are transformed into authoritative knowledge. I argue that science and statist ideologies collapse in the practice of postcolonial archaeology and it is not merely the manipulation of data by ideological agendas that gives rise to nationalist archaeology. My research demonstrates that postcolonial scientific archaeology is itself an ideological practice; the boundaries between construction of scientific evidence and its ideological manipulation are non-existent and, in fact, present a post-facto perspective on the process of archaeological knowledge production.