Messages from Mykene: Othering and Smothering. Intersectional Orientalism and Sexism
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2021-02-26

Museum exhibitions show objects to visitors, but sometimes they display more than they realise, in terms of unexamined underlying assumptions. I was at first delighted by the Mykene exhibition (Karlsruhe), with a huge range of finds from all over the Mycenaean world.Then I became angered and concerned. The exhibition included photographs of earlier Mycenaean archaeologists, with several foreigners (German, British, American), and one Greek, but no women at all. Thus, the exhibition ‘othered’ Greeks and women in an example of intersectional orientalism and sexism, whereby Greeks can be archaeologists, but they’re still sometimes seen as the unworthy ‘oriental’ inheritors of their classical past. Women can be archaeologists but whatever their nationalities, they and their work will be considered less significant. This ‘othering’ message overemphasises the work of foreign archaeologists in Greece, underemphasises that of Greek archaeologists, and renders the contribution of female archaeologists invisible. The ‘smothering’ message is, and, this is important, related: othered topics are often smothered in terms of scholarly discussion.The history of Greek archaeologists is less valorised and less investigated.Othering women, in this case archaeologists and their work, links to the occlusion of gender issues.The exhibition included a panel headed ‘Women in Mycenaean Palaces’ type (rather than, say, ‘Gender in the Mycenaean World’).Such headings stifle debates on issues suggested by the very objects on show, while neatly maintaining men as the default category.The paper discusses examples of ‘smothering’ relating to the presentation of Mycenaean women and men, based on exhibition material.

LUCIA NIXON, WOLFSON COLLEGE, OXFORD