First of all, I would like to thank Manuel for the very generous introduction and also to the organizers of this conference for inviting me to talk here today. The subject of my talk is the relationship between archaeology and politics. What I'm going to do is to talk about some issues that I think are of general interest at the moment, the present political moment, not just in Spain but in Europe and all over the world. I want to talk about these topics that are very pertinent for the current political situation for archaeology, from my own experience conducting archaeological fieldwork in some of the most thorny issues of recent Spanish history, the Spanish Civil War and the French dictatorship. I'm sorry for the, probably the crappiest PowerPoint that you have ever seen, but I want to believe that my ideas and words are more interesting than the slides, so focus on the words. So, politics and archaeology have been dominated in the last couple of decades by discourses that emphasize identity, ethics, multivocality, consensus, negotiation. The thorny political, what could be described as the thorny political, which is characterized by radical disagreement according to most political philosophers, has been largely replaced by blind forms of politics that can be better described as policy in many cases or also by harmless politics or the political philosophers, and other philosophers as well, have called this politics. Even those fields of practice that are potentially more controversial and more political, such as the archaeology of the contemporary past and the archaeology of conflict or indigenous archaeology, they are not free from this depoliticization. In most cases, they have tried to skew the truly political, the most conflictful part of politics and have sought refuge in ethics, for instance, which is one of the key words in archaeology and heritage studies these days. So, there is a massive replacement of politics by ethics. But the current global situation dominated by reactionary populism and the spread of extremist positions all over the world, in the UK and the United States, but also in South America, in France, in Hungary, in Poland. These reactionary backlash shows that the political model of archaeology that has been dominant for the last 20 or 25 years is not useful anymore. We need another way of engaging with politics, and it's a way of engaging with politics that is probably less satisfying for archaeologists because it is very uncomfortable because it means that we have to embrace conflict. It doesn't mean that we have to accelerate conflict because conflict is a horrible thing, but we have to accept conflict, and it's not an easy thing to do in our daily work. So, as I was saying, this is not, of course, a defense of conflict, per se. What I would like to do is rather actually take the new level to make it dangerous thought that it is that conflict can be thick, circumvented, it can be bypassed, or overcome with goodwill on dialogue. I would say that this is sort of a Paulo Coelho kind of archaeology. You can believe that I really wanted something really, really hard to kind of really get it, and unfortunately, life is a little bit more difficult than that. So, I would accept conflict to be able to deal with it. In this talk, I would like to outline some of the problems that, in my opinion, played mainstream political perspectives in archaeology and heritage science as well. But before let me explain a little bit about the socio-political context of my work, why I have been developing this critique, or why I'm sort of critical to the way politics are embraced in archaeology, in mainstream archaeology. So, for over a decade, I've been doing archaeology at the Spanish Civil War on the Franconic Heritage Shed, and I have conducted my research as a form of public archaeology. I've been engaging with different publics very intensely since 2006-2007, and this kind of work, this kind of public work, has made me to realize how inadequate it is, at least for the situation in which I'm dealing with, the current model of public, I mean, public and community archaeology as institutional activities, or at least as it is usually defended in publications. In my opinion, the legal model of political archaeology that emerged in the UK, in the US, mainly in the early 1990s, and actually the political model of the humanities and the social sciences that has been prevalent since the 1970s, is really not useful, as I was saying, before being with the personal political situation. The political environment now is characterized by strong tensions and depolarization between left and right, as it was actually the situation is more similar in ways to the 1920s and 1930s than it is to the situation that we had in the 1980s or 1990s. So, since the situation has changed, and the situation is more similar to things that we thought had already been overcome in the 70s and 80s, we really need another model of engagement. In places like the UK and the US, people are writing to the situation now, to the situation of strong conflict, strong social and political conflict. But in Spain, this has been part of our everyday experience for decades. So, I would say that we have some experience with living and dealing with a fractured society. Spain is a fractured society for many reasons, for many historical reasons that I'm going to unpack here. But the normal immediate reasons for the extreme division of the Spanish society these days are the Civil War that ravaged the country between 1936 and 1939 and left half a million dead, and the dictatorship that ended in 1975. So, these were problems that were never... I mean, in Spain, it never came to terms with these events, with these phenomena, and we are paying the dues now. So, the space of highly divided society is something that you can see today. You can see these things in Barcelona with the problem with the fight between Spanish nationalists and Catalonia nationalists. And actually, the problem of the nationalities in Spain is a very old one that goes back to the 19th century, if not before, and it has never been dealt with properly, and apparently we will not be able to deal with this problem in a serious way in the near future. One way you can see the fact that this pan-society is deeply fractured is with the problem with the value of the foreign that is a trending topic these days. So, the value of the foreign is the place of Mussolini where Francisco Franco, the dictator of Spain for 40 years is buried, and this is still there. It's a huge Mussolini, it's colossal, it's the biggest monument in Spain, and people go there as sort of pilgrimage to pay homage to the dictator, and there is no any kind of discourse that tries to counteract the discourse of the dictatorship. So, when the government has tried to do something about that, so the debate has been asked about how to assume Franco, how to take him out of the volume and change the message of the volume of the foreign, there has been an odd try. And not just by people that are in the very far right, but also by people that would be considered, or that consider themselves water rights. So, the situation is quite tense at the moment in Spain, but it has been tense for the last 18 years when a campaign started, exhumation of the people that have been killed by the dictatorship, or by a right-wing militia during the Civil War, mostly between 1936 and the early 1950s. Around 150,000 people were killed in Spain between 1936 and 1948, more or less, and most of these people lie in a marked race all over the country, and in some cases in huge masquerades with thousands of corpses. And none of that has done anything about that, at least of all the states, until 2000, when a group of volunteers, Russian associations started to organize scientific exhumations of these people. And this brought about a fraction, because there were many people that really wanted this to happen, because they thought that during the democratic transition all these issues had already been solved basically by not doing anything at all value. And they thought, and they think still today, that it's better not to touch the past. They think that touching the past, whatever you do with the past, is going to be dangerous. Anything that changes, the accepted matter, is going to be dangerous. So, in this context, during the archeology of the Spanish Civil War or the dictatorship, no matter what it deals with, more or less, some of these issues, like battlefield archeology, or with masquerades and concentration camps, inevitably means that you're entering a political landfill. People have various strong feelings. Even if they don't know what you're going to do in a place, they think that what you're going to do is not good, basically. And so, during all these years, during the conflict in Spain, I have been regularly insulted and threatened. My credentials have been read and put into question. My ministers describe it as political bias, partisan, unsanitary, lack of objectivity, full of mistakes, et cetera, et cetera. And that's very interesting, because if I had to choose the most frequent insult that I have received for political prisoners while doing these kinds of research, the world would be ignorant. And that's very interesting, because it shows the exchange of occasion between politics and knowledge. And it demonstrates that we cannot relinquish epistemic authority, because it may count the price of living the expensive knowledge open to those reactionaries who claim to know better. So I think we have to rearm ourselves epistemologically to defend ourselves against these people. So for over 10 years I've done these kinds of controversial research in Spain. Actually, it's not very controversial. I have to say, yeah, I have to admit, I dig battlefields and trenches and some masquerades and concentration camps with archeological methodology. And it is extremely technical, and my reports are extremely boring. But because of the concentration camps, instead of people who are really angry, some people are very angry. So these 10 years have been really exhausting, and I'm actually stopping doing archeology in Spanish in the war, because I'm getting a little bit more. But it has been really an amazing thing, an excellent thought. It has been very illuminating, and it has allowed me to react upon the relationship between archeology and politics in, I think, in a new way or a different way, as I thought before I started doing civil war archeology. So, I'd like to focus, in the remainder of this talk, in YCS as five shortcomings of the current political power in archeology. They are all related to the imperialist Spanish civil war, but I'm not going to insist very much on Spanish civil war archeology, because what I would like to do is to demonstrate that these are issues that are affecting the way we relate with society in basically any context, from South America to Australia to this kind of even countries. So these issues I'd like to describe a little bit are multiculturality, multiculturalism, localism, choice, and different kinds of new materialisms. So let's start with multiculturality. Multiculturality has been one of the passwords in public and social archeology for the last 30 years. So it was seen in the original, in the early 1990s, when it started to become popular, as the solution to the authoritarian style of archeology that had to be eliminated in the field for many years or centuries. So it was a way of monetizing archeology and it was actually very well intentioned and it was necessary, it was necessary, even if we had to deconstruct the authoritarian archeology, the authoritarian position of archeologists. The problem is that perhaps some of the problems of opening multiculturality were not foreseen by the original proposal, proposes problems of these concepts. So multiculturality has been embraced in archeology as a way of combatting in general more ethical and social-engaged practice. There has been, of course, some awareness of the dangers of letting multiple voices speak and most people actually practice independently of what they say in theory, but in practice they actually discriminate between discourses. So it's not necessarily, that doesn't necessarily mean that all discourses are equal, of course. But this thing in most cases of multiculturality is discused to embrace forms of post-politics or sort of politics that try to bypass some of those unconsciously structural inequality and conflict. It's my impression that archeologists do not pay enough attention to the fact that some voices speak louder than others as you can see in this sample due to structural socio-political differences in which practitioners have really very little influence. So if you're working in Palestine or in Israel, even if you really want to overcome these structural differences and put Israelis and Palestinians to talk, the thing is that the structure of these structural inequalities and political violence is so huge that you're obviously going to fail. And this is beyond your capability to act. The problem master Egoton has noted is not the open dialogue of differences per se. Of course, a dialogue between different positions is praiseworthy. You have to engage in a dialogue with people that think differently. That's obvious. And it is decided the problem is to believe that such dialogue as an important Eotere Egoton could ever be adequately conducted in a classified society where what counts as an acceptable interest in the first place is determined by the rule of power. So there are situations where a symmetrical dialogue is simply impossible due to structural circumstances. To talk about reconciliation, or mutual understanding in the case of Palestine and the Israeli occupation is even cynical. As in any context where a situation of injustice is ongoing or a past injustice in the case of Spain has not been properly addressed. And I was reading now in the newspaper that the current socialist government in Spain has just published on the web page of the presidency where you can see a couple of veterans a very old veterans in the late 90s who fought in the civil war and you have one fight for Franco and then one fight for the Republic and the post basically says that the 80 years ago these people were killing each other and now after 40 years of democracy we have learned to talk to each other and to achieve reconciliation and so on. But that's of course proud thing is that some people were defending democracy and trying to destroy democracy and what this image is showcasing is a false quality or a quality that should not exist we should not say that democracy and dictatorship are the same thing. At least not in the party. The other problem with not difficulty is it's a theme narrative. So it's all about talking or writing and there are many examples that have tried to conflict by bringing different parts in conflict to talk together and dialogue about the past and construct new narratives and so on. I'm thinking here for example in a recent project in public archeology in Northern Ireland that intended to achieve a joint recovery of narratives. And then we doubt that recovering narratives will really fulfill the aspirations of a lot of the groups involved in the Northern Irish conflict. Narrative is important of course again I'm not going to deny the relevance of narrative of telling the past. But this is not the path of a process of social feeling that requires all the things and the problem is that sometimes we are using narrative in the area of all the more pressing things. These are things include a location of guilt and operations. So you can just ask victims to shake hands with perpetrators and say we have achieved reconciliation. And this is something that we have tried to do in Spain but not in Spain. It has been tried. It has been a proposal of places like Northern Ireland and also the Croatia or Bosnia. And the problem is that archaeology really opens up space for political agonism. Archaeologists really try to bring it to the full diametrically of post-fuse but rather try to pacify them through us with those shared pasts. Not in a colony that often ends in a sort of moral uprising as the one I was describing. That of all these conflicts at all costs. Which means in the end of all these politics so the problem is multiculturalism which sounds nice but it's not nice, it's like in theory it's great. I mean let's enjoy cultural diversity let's start with people that thinks differently. But the problem is that multiculturalism is the cultural logic of neoliberalism and it's quite obvious in other advertisement campaigns Multilegicalism unlike multiculturalism has been often criticized in archaeology because neoliberalism is quite obvious so everybody feels that has to criticize multiculturalism but then people keep embracing multiculturalism in a neoliberal way. So the problem is of course not only for those of minorities this has been an enormous achievement in society and in social sciences and the humanities for the last 30 years so the problem is not that we want to visibilize indigenous minorities African Americans, immigrants etc etc we have to do that but that's probably shit and Nancy Fraser have remarked the problem is that we are accepting the cultural wars, feminist gay anti-racist multiculturalism etc as the only until re-influencing cultural politics and multiculturalism tends to emphasize horizontal differences and to disregard vertical antagonism so like in this picture here there is no cultural difference because you have white people black people yellow people but they all belong to the same social class so there is no real conflict there but the problem is that vertical antagonism has been in focus in emancipatory politics from the French Revolution onwards it has been the cross politics since the late 18th century and it has been only recently on the early 1980s onwards that we have forgotten about the importance of these vertical differences and again more of these pan-signal war shows the limits that these multicultural approach because in those narratives where excavations or excavation related to civil war sites have been conducted the local communities are amazingly homogenous there is no real differences in terms of culture religion, ethnicity and so on they are pretty homogenous but then the vertical differences are important if you go especially to areas in south in Spain the difference between the people that have that are wealthy and people that don't have anything especially 70 or 80 years ago where I am insane and this explains basically that people were killing each other in the civil war so the point is that these internally fractured communities has kept the focus of much multicultural archaeology which is more interested in ethnic minorities or sexual differences and again I want to emphasize very much that the idea is not to go to them and don't play identity issues the idea is to put them together with issues that are related to economy, politics and class the other problem with multicultural is its tendency to see minorities and supporters as always empower the true development created even when they have went through extremely violence in this procession so many people think and not just in academia and definitely not in archaeology what you have to do is to rewrite the past in the positive light and that's something that has been very common in historical archaeology in particular and that's very dangerous and again the intention is very good we want to present the history of the marginalized communities in a more positive light and that's very praiseworthy but the point is that to present these communities as in a very positive way you may end up providing and leading support for oppression and inequality by neutralizing the past and this is not at least not my words but the words of Charles one of the most famous historical archaeology in the US so multiculturalist tends to understand as if I did in communities that have our own identity traditions, beliefs and worldviews that is they understand communities as sample cultures and that's okay when we are talking about communities that are more largely sample cultures if you are talking about the Paraguay for instance or any other small I mean indigenous group but it's not the same in Paris where they definitely have a community that has its own culture and communities that are defined by socio-economic and political marginalization in the case of homeless people there are several examples of how people have tried to rewrite the history of these marginalized communities in a more positive way in the case of the slums and the ghettos perhaps the most evident one so many historical archaeologists have tried to say that the places considered the slums in the 19th century for example were not that bad that people really were enjoying life and they have their own culture and traditions and it is true that they were a vibrant community in many ways but it is also true that these communities were falling in many ways because basically ghettos were making devices of segregation and marginalization and if you emphasize too much on the positive side if you perceive people living in a ghettos as simply as an art culture meaning trusting culture you may end up forgetting about these structural inequalities and these continuous everyday violence so I guess in the case of contemporary archaeology that is the archaeology that I know in the case of homeless archaeologists but you can see these multicultural projects working more clearly in the case of homeless archaeology so for example some of the people that have worked more on the archaeology of homeless in this such as Richard Keating and John Scottfield they say that talking about the homeless community they say it is another world with different rules and priorities and we thought of publics and then later the marginalization of homeless people has much to do with the attitudes of contemporary populations towards more white people and I quote while today's people are not intentionally enormous their relationship with several societies resembles that played out between farmers, pastoralists and hunters from the linear they transmit the game here the idea that homeless people live in another world and that their marginalization is largely due to their cultural openness and that's very dangerous because this represents how capitalist ideologies and economies work and is at odds with what I believe is a true political agenda true political agenda doesn't track about people who tries to change reality so I think that what we have to try to do as archaeologists or academics is try to criticize the structural conditions that make in this case homelessness or ghettos or the near global situation Palestine possibly in the first place rather than to alleviate these conditions to make the life of people better of course it would be nice to make the life of these people better we try to achieve these structural change but we cannot forget the importance of criticizing the structural conditions of reality localism is strongly related to the idea of multiculturalism it has been a strong celebration of the local for the last 20 years and again all these things are positive so I don't want to say that all these ideas are negative then we have to eradicate them the innocence they are good and they have been extremely necessary to make a more progressive more legal or more critical archaeology but they have the limits and the problem is that many of these ideas have been culted by the prevailing new liberal politics and they have been holed out of criminal content and this is very much the case with localism so then we have to make a motion to local communities that's against again very necessary an archaeology has advanced the world in that before I mean 30 years ago communities were considered like you know pictures background or just innocence in some cases and now we consider that local communities places where we work they are important we have to engage with them we have to listen to people we have to incorporate their stories and experiences to our archaeology narratives even if we are working but we have to do the experiences of contemporary communities in our narratives and as scholars and that's all I agree that that's very necessary and very nice and we have to keep doing that but the problem is that this has come at the price of criticizing and abandoning universalism and actually universalism sounds horrible because it sounds you know the foreign narratives of the 20th century that have produced so much pain so much death but then all the emancipatory movements have always been universal and it doesn't matter if it's anarchist if it's Marxist or if it's feminism they all have universal aspirations and if you really want to do something for a community that you see as marching allies do you want the improvement of this community not just to be restricted to that community you want that or communities in a similar situation enjoy from the same benefits and are able to change for better that they are not marching allies anymore so actually we are all what we should call the universal way one of the problems with localism is that it tends to produce an optimization of struggles so everybody has its small battlefield and it fights in a very limited way in a very limited place and that's something that can be very obviously seen in the case of Spain in Spain there are like maybe 500 different associations of historical memory and some of them are more successful than others and they try to centralize a little bit the efforts that are there many, many works with associations working without connection to each other most of the time and the point is that you have this very solid, this very homogenous narrative of the dictatorship that has been the only narrative that has existed in Spain for 40 years and then with the democracy we didn't have discurs that could replace these discurs of the dictatorship and when we started to create this discurs that was really critical with the dictatorship and the anti-Saharan war instead of having one master narrative that acted as an umbrella for of course many other narratives because we need many narratives but we also need a master narrative something that embraces all these other narratives where we had us only a thousand small narratives that had not been able to undermine the building of fascist ideology and the other problem is that we have lots of archaeologists working and producing small narratives everywhere working with our small communities talking about you know the small these small sites that they are working these small indigenous communities which they are working and the problem is that they are still producing small narratives which are extremely popular they are specialists there are people that like Trump that are producing a very powerful narrative that you have or a lot of very well-intentioned scholars producing a lot of micro narratives that we cannot want as people so this has started to change especially in the US but for a very long time because we were not concerned with the production leading to the space empty to all these very conservative people to produce small narratives and I mean there are also very good examples of that I am thinking as an example there is a very popular writer who is a former left wing terrorist that ended up being a sort of new Nazi and publishes books hundreds of books and they are extremely successful they said tens of thousands of copies and he has been able to draft a master narrative for the citizen-wanted dictatorship that many people that are not extremely right supporters are starting to buy and that is very dangerous and in the case of the United States you have people like Victor Hansen who is a classicist and who is an expert in the ancient world and he was an advisor to George Stalin's question and he was very influential and he was producing books comparing terrorists and more in war with war and the time of the Greeks and so also he was producing a narrative that legitimized the ocean restoration and we didn't have the equivalent on the other side and that is a problem and finally especially for most of us who work on the archaeology for the last 500 years that we are concerned with are the local they are global so of course we need to look at the global scale but you cannot forget the global scale because you won't understand an African village in Ghana if you don't understand the Atlantic slave trade of course and the colonial power it has been called of the 15th and 16th and 17th century and then there is the issue of choice which is the world that has been one of the most popular concepts in the social sciences for the last 30 years it's not so fashionable today because they are other keywords but it is still very popular especially it is very popular among archaeologists the popularity of choice in material culture studies started in the the 1980s with the work of John Wheeler and the people studying consumption at the UCL in the UK again it changed archaeology for the better it produced a new series of questions that were amazing and how it has to see the world present and past in a new way so again I am criticizing the study of choice consumer choice I think it's very interesting the problem is that choice and consumer choice in particular is seen as the political excellence by the anthropologists it's in consumption and the ability to choose what you are consuming but you can show your political agency your ability to resist and to create new worlds as David Reber has this kind of criticize being with the world's little guys it means that you must demonstrate that the people you are studying are successfully resisting some form of power mobilizing influence in person and then from above one has to demonstrate that they are full, not trans, not homogenized indeed that they are creatively appropriating or reinterpreting what is being shown at them in ways that its authors would never have anticipated and this is something that you get in a lot of archaeological studies in historical archaeology, Roman archaeology, Phoenician archaeology and so on so it doesn't matter what the little guys are in a select plantation or in a slum, they remain political agents because they can choose there are at least two problems with this perspective on the one hand it is debatable whether consumer choice can be considered political at all except perhaps consuming boycotts on the other it forgets that choosing always involves and that's very important but determining reality the options are given and when it chooses and all that so basically as Cizek has said we can go on making our small choices reinventing ourselves and condition that these choices do not disturb the social and ideological balance when these resonates we can suppose political choices are supporters that we are in archaeology, as I was saying indigenous communities, the important empire that consumes ease or that kind of poetry African communities involved in this trade that accept or reject this type of that type of glass deeds the options for choosing are always very limited and rarely establishes a system as worst and Maguire and Fargo real choice is the privilege of the powerful so against these association of politics with choice there is the notion of politics as beginning as our head, as the Greeks would call it and our head the work our head means different things in Greek that the one I find more interesting is the idea of beginning foraging according to Hannah Aron politics for the Greeks were not so much the freedoms, the freedom to choose are the freedom to establish a new beginning that identifies with the political and mad event that breaks away pretending conditions of the wheel and there are limited choices the political after all this perspective is not to purchase blue or red glass beads but not to end the displaced trade and there are cases of that there are cases of society that radically rejected the isolated trade and it is to these societies that we have to be looking at rather than whether these societies end the displaced trade were consuming red beads or blue beads that's irrelevant, completely irrelevant so in fact if I am interested in the political instead of celebrating choice they should try to locate those moments where a new beginning can be played moments of revolution in which the archaeological record also provides element if this can't evidence that there are cases of new beginnings in the archaeological record there are episodes of destruction of the principle and the creation of a new fair because it's very better social order my final point would be materialism I have to say that I love new materialism and many of my colleagues are new materialists in different ways so they embrace different strict new materialism and as the other things that I have criticized these are very valuable ideas they are definitely important that they are changing the discipline the point is that these ideas they have again troubling political implications there are different things in the case of new materialism I think that new materialism actually is a very powerful paradigm very powerful way of thinking that can have strong critical radical connotations but it cannot be the other way around and in my opinion in the opinion of other people it is more conservative version of new materialism that is succeeding and one of the things one of the things has to do with the celebration of things so much of the new materialist discourse celebrate things which is important because things have been forgotten by archaeologists and the social sciences and the humanities for too long and we have to recall things we have to take care of things and understand the relics of things and also the alternative things things are difficult to tame and that is very interesting but then things are also monstrous things are negative they can be very destructive they can cause a lot of pain and this sometimes is forgotten and that is dangerous and one of the things because these monstrous things they can be small parts for instance for AIDS virus but it can also be things that are produced by humans for which humans are in the last instance responsible such as in the machine gun right so I think that it is important to take into account this monstrosity of things, this more monstrosity of human things then there is the issue with dialectics which again it makes a lot of sense from a philosophical point of view one of the things that Symmetrical Archaeology for example says in the line of Archaeology and so on is that you cannot establish a divide between humans and humans from a perspective and that is ok the problem is that once you say that dialectics that are involved in the conflict between things and people are ruthless they are not they do not exist they simplify actual relations between humans and humans because you cannot separate them the problem is that dialectics are essentially an understanding conflict so if you want to take conflict into account you have to understand dialectics of course not the kind of dialectics not the kind of Cartesian dialectics of the 19th century dialectics but dialectics that embraces the new materials but then believes that there are distinct conflicts between people on things and normal things the main two problems in my opinion of new materials especially after the criteria in a lot of science and technology studies is the way they naturalize the world as it is so they basically describe the world and they don't try to change the world and they don't try to find they are not interested in irresponsibility really more so it's a very amoral thing which is not from the epistemological point of view but it's not that nice from the political point of view and finally there is the problem with flat ontology which again it works from an ontological point of view philosophically it's great it allows you to see the world in any way but the problem is it is very dangerous from a political and analytical point of view to say that humans and non-humans are the same thing of course ontologically that's right from a human philosophical point of view that's right the problem is that people can't really see these before because they were considered people things 200 years ago well the first the slide that was illustrating this was the ATM an ATM in my town who says that I can call him or her, I don't know the gender of the ATM let's say it's her you can call me Luis but I don't want to call her Luis I prefer to call him her 1-8-5-0-8-F because it's not a human being and it's quite ironic I agree that the same bank that is asking me to call Luis the ATM is considering me another or a call me not to say the workers of the bank so just to conclude I think that we need politics beyond identity politics I think that the politics of identity are very important they have been very important for 30 years they have changed not just archaeology they have changed society in a very good way but we need to go beyond that we need to go back to politics, to political economy we have to go back to class we have to go back to violence we have to combat the neutralization of politics in archaeology by multiculturalists on the left and by archaeological sciences on the right and again I love archaeological sciences I love archaeology if I had the money to pay for it but I'm not saying that archaeometry is not important it's absolutely important and it's again revolutionized in the field the problem is that archaeology is being used as multiculturalists to neutralize the potential of archaeology the potential to create radically new and challenging narratives of the past the true political archaeology is the one that makes a few people angry and many people uncomfortable and I think that's very important if everybody likes to work then you are doing something wrong I'm pretty sure of that well I don't know maybe if you are studying human evolution but maybe if you are studying human evolution creationists will not be happy with you and that's fine, you have to handle that and finally conflict cannot be you have to accept conflict and accepting conflict that doesn't mean to neutralize conflict but actually fight for a better world thank you


The question was about whether we are being overprotective or discriminatory, I reject that. We are a rule-based, rule-governed country, a constitutional democracy, and we respect our international obligations, including when it comes to registration of patents, irrespective of which sector they are, including in the pharmaceutical sector. We have our own pharmaceutical industry which is respected and recognised globally, making a notable contribution even when it comes to the registration of drugs or patents. So, in an environment or ecosystem where countries engage with each other, we have multilateral organisations, agreements, protocols and treaties which determine the decisions and also influence the decision-making processes. I am rather surprised that why a single case is being referred to, because as far as India is concerned, we have our Patents Act which has been amended twice after the TRIPS Agreement was concluded and the last amendment was in the year 2005. So, Indian Patents Laws are fully aligned with the TRIPS Agreement and the Patents Laws of all the other countries. Now, when we talk of this particular case, I would refer to the Section 3D of the Patents Act which has prescribed that there has to be a higher standard when it comes to invention for patents. Now, it was a process of adjudication where the registrar of patents or the examiner, the controllers, in very detailed orders gave the reasons for denial because we, our law, does not accept ever-greening. That is an incremental approach of an existing molecule or medicine unless and until there is enhanced efficacy. Now, this went through, later through an appellate process of Intellectual Property Appellate Board and I would like for the benefit of everyone to know that Intellectual Property Appellate Board is an authority which is entirely independent of government and which is chaired by a judge. So, it's the Indian judiciary is independent and very assertive. Then it went to a high court where a division bench upheld the original order as well as the order of the appellate authority. It finally came to the highest court of adjudication, that's the Supreme Court of India, which has examined the patents' law, the TRIPS Agreement and the reasons for the denial which are absolutely justified under the laws. I would also like to mention that Novartis as such has no reason to complain on this matter because it's not an executive decision or a government decision. The government of India would never be in a position to interfere with judicial processes. We respect the independence of our judiciary and there's no way that in a constitutional democracy the governments or administration can dictate to the judiciary. Lastly, Novartis is the third largest beneficiary of the registration of patents in India. We have the first three and I can share with you, Roche has 166 patents registered of pharmaceuticals. So, Nofi has 159, Novartis has 147. So, when we are talking of one where the Supreme Court of India and the judiciary through various appellate processes have said that it is not at all justified, it is not a patentable medicine because it is when we talk of the medicine as such which has been refused patent, it's a minor increment or addition is not enhanced efficacy of the medicine which has been scientifically proved.