By
Guillermo Díaz de Liaño del Valle (presenter)
Summary
This paper aims to discuss how Archaeology’s disciplinary culture shapes the way in which we display emotions, and how this emotional and behavioural disciplining effectively works as a gatekeeping mechanism at different stages of our professional careers.Following Stephanie Moser, disciplinary practices include everything that a person ‘needs’ to know and do in order to be an archaeologist, encompassing both the required skills and knowledge, but also a wide range of behaviours and beliefs that are deemed to be ‘professional’, despite not being actually necessary nor benign. We will argue that emotions and their sanctioned display play a key role in terms of who becomes a researcher and how scientific discourses are constructed, and therefore need to be monitored if Archaeology aims to become a truly reflexive discipline.We will illustrate our reasoning with two case studies from Spanish archaeology, in which we will analyse how negative emotions, and suffering in particular, are dismissed and/or glorified, becoming a key element in the disciplining of our emotions to fit within a toxic disciplinary culture.