Archaeological autopsy : objectifying time and cultural governance

The increased interest in contemporary relations of culture and governance that has been prompted by the post-Foucauldian literature on governmentality has paid insufficient attention to the need to redefine the concept of culture, and to rethink its relation to the social, that such work requires. This paper contributes to such an endeavour by arguing the need to eschew the view that culture works by some general mechanism (of ideology or representation) in order to focus on the ways in which specific cultural knowledges are translated into distinctive technical and operational forms in the context of particular institutions and programmes of governance. In doing so, it draws on the perspectives of science studies and actor network theory and applies these to examine how the fabrication of the prehistoric past that resulted from the endeavours of the nineteenth-century historical sciences was translated into distinctive technical forms in the context of typological museum displays. These developments are related to the changing objectives of liberal government and the emergence of an archaeologized structure of the self.