Summary
Cultural diversity is a major challenge both for research and coexistence. The deeper we know the difference, the better we understand reality.The images in this exhibition are gateways to discover diversity across time, space, knowledge? even across research strategies.These gateways take us to the sacred mountain of Ikh Bogd Uul (Mongolia), the agrarian landscapes of the Atacama Desert (Chile), the origins of architectural monumentality in the Latin American Southern Cone (Uruguay), the Iron Age societies of the Muni Estuary (Equatorial Guinea), the ethnic minorities of the Ethiopia-Sudan border, to Costa Rica, Perú, Jordan and Turkey. Our steps are guided towards archaeoastronomical studies that explore how ancient societies took advantage of astronomic events to build an understanding of the world, to organize the landscape and time. Or towards a comparative analysis of the participation processes and public engagement in the construction of cultural heritage (as the project TRAMA3 illustrates).All these images illustrate archaeological and ethnoarchaeological projects developed by the Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit), a research centre of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Although based in Santiago de Compostela, the aim of the Incipit is to better understand diversity as a key component of social reality; that has led us to get involved in research projects well beyond our immediate surroundings.These have nothing to do with the old fashioned colonialist Archaeology and Anthropology, aimed at increasing the Western-centric chauvinism of the European countries at the expenses of non-Western cultures: European imperialism fed Europe´s welfare. But today postcolonial research understands the world otherwise: framed as we are by an increasingly multicultural reality, our projects are part of an active dialogue with ?the other?. These images, these ?doors to diversity?, show above all the point of view of the different specialists involved (archaeologists, anthropologists) when facing foreign realities. We are well aware that having chosen a ?before the present? reference for the dates provided in the texts, or that locating the areas of study in uncommon views of the earth globe we are forcing you, the observer, to make an additional effort to understand the temporal and spatial location of what you will see here. This kind of disorientation is deliberate, as part of the jump into diversity that we are proposing here.
Keywords
Photography. Archaeology. Diversity. Exhibition.