On Striving as Readers: A Response to Greer

Abstract

The capacity of northern European gentlemen scholars educated in the love of wisdom, human dignity, friendship and rationality to treat their fellow human beings with irreconcilable prejudice and hold to ghastly beliefs of racial superiority, which legitimated violence, exploitation and extermination elsewhere, is one of the great tragedies of humanism. That the images of the human cultivated in texts were at variance with the lived experience of those who were treated as other than human was rarely noted in the books they read. I appreciate Matthew Greer's efforts to bring these concerns to the fore. I am grateful for the opportunity to read Sylvia Wynter, among others, and to think about their work in counter-humanism. I stand with Greer who reminds us that, as archaeologists, we must do more than critique ideologies, fight for inclusion, and engage in dialogue as demanded by a radical pluralism (Shanks & Tilley 1992, 246). Equity, social justice, openness, and decolonization demand the sustained effort of us all, both in our capacity as archaeologists and as readers of texts.