Find as Theme: re-uniting 'expert' and 'public' agendas in Egyptian collections paperby Stephen Quirke for conference Forming Material Egypt
Introduction: a standardised contrast - Research Precision versus Public Cloud
In archaeological collections, London museum practice opposes the needs of specialist researchers and general public, with academic departments for the first, education departments for the second.According to this received wisdom, specialist researchers require detailed information at minutely atomised level, whereas school groups and other visitors need more general,thematic summaries. For Egypt, as for other countries and regions, time and space, chronology and geography underpin this opposition:
A) TIME: in chronological terms, every researcher in Egyptian archaeology might be expected to know the conventional divisions of the "ancient"history into periods and dynasties, to have some knowledge of what these divisions signify, and how they have come into use (as explored in Redford,
Pharaonic King-Lists, Annals and Day-Books, 1986). Thirty (or thirty-one) dynasties form the single central motif of the Egyptological timescape. For example, a person identified as Egyptologist would be able to explain why Dynasty 7 is a historiographical phantom, would be aware of the lack of contemporary evidence for the divisions between Dynasties 4-5-6 or 9-10, and of the absence of consensus currently over the definition and usage of the terms Dynasties 16 and 23.
B) SPACE: a conventional geography may be less solidly established than that conventional history,but research monographs used for university courses provide information on the relative locations of sites, and the ecology of each region; even within the philological subject, standard reading-lists might include Karl Butzer, Early Hydraulic Civilisation as well as Hermann Kees, Ancient
Egypt: A Cultural Topography (1961 English translation of 1933 German edition). Forty-two (rather than the longer and better attested thirty-nine) nomes (in the original more neutrally sepat
"district") form a central motif of this more detailed Egyptological knowledge of the space of ancient
Egypt - though probably fewer Egyptologists could recite the series than know the fifty-one states of the USA.
From the mystique of the hieroglyphs and their decipherment, iconic if misrepresented in history of science, there is probably also a general assumption that an "Egyptologist" can read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Although this expertise may be required for a certain range of archaeological evidence, this persistent assumption is highly problematic in privileging script over all other media, and dividing one part of one slice of the past (Bronze Age to Early Iron Age, 3000BC-AD300) against and over earlier and later periods. Hieroglyphs elide Arabic language and script, which, bizarrely, outside
Egypt are considered unnecessary in both specialist study and public imagination of (ancient) Egypt.

For, against the chronological and geographical tools of precision, broadest public consumption supposedly allows room for only one Ancient Egypt,genericallythemed alongside other blocks of humans. For example, the English National Curriculum for primary schoolsgives an official compartmentalised line-up of Egypt, Assyria, Aztecs, or, within local history, the Romans, Anglo-
Saxons and Vikings. The Department for Education web-page guidance for teachers at Key-Stage 2 level http://www.education.gov.uk/schools/teachingandlearning/curriculum/primary/b00199012/history/ks2 li sts the overseas options in section 13 as "Ancient Egypt, Ancient Sumer, the Assyrian Empire, the
Indus Valley, the Maya, Benin, or the Aztecs".
Here I seek to contest the categories of expert and public, as terms that undermine our contemporary efforts at finding or seeking and understanding evidence for past peoples in Egypt. I cite twentieth-century examples outside Egyptian archaeology to discuss how intractable the problem particularly of the expert may be. For this problem in archaeology, I consider one old solution in the"return to sources" renewed in a critical Public Archaeology, one which might use display as transformative medium for advanced research. Finally I consider how we ourselves in our own social and institutional settings may have too much at stake in the expert-public division to allow radical change.
Cloud of Experts
For the modern history of Egypt, which includes the history of archaeology in the country, Timothy
Mitchell placed centre-stage the problem of claims of expertise, in his collection of papers published in 2002 as Rule of Experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity . Pivotally, in self-image and public image alike, 'researcher' means a scientist detached from daily concerns, as Max Weber sought to conjure against the chaos of First World War Europe (WissenschaftalsBeruf [Science as Vocation], 1919). If anything undermines the idea of detached scientist, it is the fierce protection of economic interests such as university pension rights or pledged honoraria. This economic conservatism structures the social conservatism of an academia which reproduces in itself and beyond its wallsthe persistentdistinctions of social class (so Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, 1988 [1984], p.207,
215). Academic self-consciousness tends to involve a pronounced self-satisfaction, as a group enjoying the privileges of a middle-range economic salary, reinforced by a high-end social status of intellectual, however ambivalent. We have tended to avoid or ignore the subversive notice of
Antonio Gramsci, that the intellectual is not a separate species, but the socially approved role for a sub-set, focussed on thinking and knowing, attributes shared by all humans (Crehan, Gramsci,
Culture and Anthropology, 2002, 128-161).

Despite evasive action and persistent academic self-assurance, the conventional 'expertpublic' opposition can be, and has often been turned on its head. Arguably the researchers are the simpler thinkers, as they disconnect themselves from a totality of complications of life. Rarely able to articulatetheir own long-term impact on society,focussed onimmediate detail,by training and competition averse to self-criticism, researchers may forget that they themselves generate the bland and banale Ancient Egypt abhorred in anti-lay rhetoric (the same relation applies in non-Germanreading English archaeology, in anti-Egyptological rhetoric). Conversely, public imagery involveswebs of politically ambivalent construction-work,requiring far greater sophistication than most expert research writing, as Stuart Hall, Culturaland Media Studies would analyse (classically S. Hall,
Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse , 1973).When consuming public media and ephemeral publications in general, those qualified as professional specialists enjoy the experience of critiquing their peers. For, if as individual researchers we may be poorly trained in advanced selfcritique, our academic tribe encourages in us finely-honed skills in criticising others.This social activity may not be a topic of research within Egyptian archaeology, but its significance can be recognised with the more self-critical archaeology championed by Shanks and Tilley. Following the category of the field of play, in Merleau-Ponty before Bourdieu, informal conversations to denigrate
"vulgarisation" might be ranked as one of the most important rituals in forming and sustaining academic self-consciousness.
Public clouds
Closer inspection demotes the status of specialist researcher, from the privileged superior thinker of tradition, to a single example of knowledge-container within a dizzyingly variable array of specific applications, and therefore with no automatic right to individual prestige. Equally radical change in status and identity can affect the notions of a "public", or in populist writing the "people" (as proposed for construction by Laclau, On Populist Reason, 2005). Instead of reducing all nonprofessionals to a single category, any encounter with an audience (museum visitors, or a class of students) reveals the same variable landscape of diffused knowledge, only imperfectly conveyed by terms such as 'lay expertise'. Leroi-Gourhan proposed a diagrammatic "operational chain" to articulate every aspect, every life in an artefact (Balfet, Observer l'action technique. Des chaînesopératoires, pour quoi faire ?
, Paris, 1991). We might try the same heuristic tool for acquiring greater awareness of the number of present lives with greater technical knowledge or personal experience of any item. The operational chain could then help us recognise our own acts of foregrounding and concealing in our general construction of relations with past peoples. With heightened self-consciousness, we might identify more clearly the potential and limits of traditional

subject specialist knowledge, within a web of knowledges and experiences, all inter-related through the artefact. The object then becomes a social point of reunion as a step towards the touchstone introduced below.
Experts in …
Notoriously, the expertise of the specialists can be difficult to pin down, behind the labels assigned by university qualifications. What are words like "archaeologist" or "Egyptologist" supposed to mean, to different people, in the worlds of media reception and governmental payments for consultants? How much knowledge, or how much talent, is sought, or articulated in the commissions for television programmes or news features or the vast budgets for new museums? And, if these are questions, why do they not become political, public questions? Why do modern "publics" in their many forms not require knowledge of the experts they fund? For these debates of definition in modern times, it can be useful to follow earlier generations, particularly in the sharp turns of
European critical theory. One of the most famous essays in critical theory of the interwar period is the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written in 1935-1936 by Walter Benjamin. I would like to take up one exploration of this essay byFredrik Schwartz, in his Blind Spots: critical theory and the history of art in twentieth-century Germany (2005). Against the age-old, passive contemplation of the aura of great art, Benjamin had sought to reject narrow subject specialists, and put in their place new "polytechnically trained" "experts" (in German Fachmann ). The audience, as one broad public, would now be, not obediently contemplative, but actively testing, and not blindly committed, but distracted, coming obliquelyto its object. In the terms of Benjamin, following
Schwartz, modernity might be imagined as a four-fold character: distraction
(mode of apperception) polytechnic expert (role)
|
(approach) critical
(task) testing
Within this account, Schwartz finds that both the "expert" and the quality of "distraction" lack definition.The second blurry category, distraction, would be a mode of receiving information without being absorbed by it. To express this mode, Benjamin took up the technical design field of New
Typographers, responding to the heady "Dynamik der Gross-Stadt [Dynamic of the Metropolis]", as
Moholy-Nagy named a feature of his 1925 Bauhaus book Painting, Photography, Film ; Schwartz

discusses the 1928 manifesto-brochure Einbahnstraße [One-Way Street] which Benjamin developed in with the multi-talented, polytechnical Sasha Stone. Is Stone the new expert, free from the narrow constraint of conventional university specialisation at?
Twentieth-century histories help us to see the limitations to the potential for change, in the replacement of university specialisation with polytechnic training. A year and a half after the Russian
Revolution, while Max Weber published in Munich on science professionals, in Moscow Lenin was arguing against the far left, who wanted an end to the highest salaries; Lenin defended the pragmatic line that "bourgeois experts" must be paid more during the training of a new society
(Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power, 1919). After the death of Lenin (1924), the old experts were incorporated for service in the new society as the "Soviet expert", in combination with the only massive example of affirmative action in the history of the Soviet Union, a short-lived late 1920s recruitment of hundreds of thousands from the working class into higher education - the vydvizhentsy (Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front. Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia,
1992).At the same time, a cultural revolution was launched against the old upper and middle class intelligentsia, leaving many victims and a lasting self-image of martyrdom, but, remarkably, failing in practice to dislodge them from either their social status or economic privileges. As a professional class in socialist society under and after Stalin, the old experts survived by adapting to power, while the Marxist cultural revolutionaries perished in the Great Purges. Professional experts shared the central government wish to see the country modernised, top-down, and could feel motivated to take part in modernisation. As a result, the prosloika "stratum" retained its privileges, and stood theoretically beside, in practice still firmly above, the working population in agriculture and industry
(Fitzpatrick 1992:15). At around this time, Antonio Gramsci was writing his warning that social and cultural "hegemony" would be harder to conquer than political power (Crehan 2002). The forces against substantive change are formidable.
In 1930, before Stalinism took hold, Sergei Tretyakovbrought the good news of the Soviet expert,in lectures,to Berlin. Some there were convinced, as perhaps Benjamin, while others such as
Siegfried Kracauerremained suspicious of the fashions of the left, and of the difference between old and new professional. As Schwartz argues, out of the debates between these contrasting receptions,
Benjamin createdhis Art Work essay.The Art Work essay focusses on film, as a new medium with a revolutionary potential. The developing industrial laboratories of the day required mechanical psychological tests of human perception and capacity for making use of products being developed.
Benjamin would transfer this practice of testing into the reception of cinema, to bring the testing out into the open, and give its revolutionary potential a chance to develop: "the critical eye of the tester can be taken over by the critical spectator, the filmic apparatus can encourage this probing sort of

appraisal" (Schwartz 2002:86). Yet, the tester is a figure of control, and aims at the status, not of worker-technician, but of middle-class professional, with academic qualification. Schwartz notes that, to understand this passage of history and theory, "we need to consider not a reified notion of the content but rather the status of the knowledge that could be considered 'expert'." Social class remains absolute dividing-line. Perhaps,precisely for this reason, content retains its revolutionary potential. In which specific ways might we move from the covert desire for prestige to a more transparent and more dedicated quest for knowledge? Returning to archaeology in Egypt, we can look for re-assurance of valued knowledge beyond the paper qualification bestowed by university and the intangible authority wielded in society by museum. Here, as touchstone, I am proposing the dangerous ground of the find-group.
Gem ma'at - finding truth in ancient Egypt?
In place of the opposition specialist-public, the distribution of knowledge can be seen as more diffuse, not only by vocational training (as discussed in the 2012 British Egyptian Society conference on the future of education), but also by the re-conception of a society of life-long learning, whichChris Smith promoted as Culture Secretary in late 1990s educationalpolitics (P. Ainley,
Learning Policy, Towards the Certified Society , London, 1999). The heterogeneous assemblage of knowledge-seekers is united by shared interest - in Egyptian archaeology, this is a shared interest in past peoples as part of our lived world. Since different views of the past compete for attention, both in the widest terms (Cheikh Anta Diop, Okasha El Daly) and on those minutiae of Sixteenth Dynasty chronology, most seekers probably also place high value on the evidence brought to support any argument.As a public constituted by this shared double interest we might collectively place at the door of evidence-keepers - universities, museums, libraries- the demand for the material evidence in the form best suited to our shared double interest. For discussion I would propose for this role the find-group, as, in the terms of Gianluca Miniaci, a microhistory within a frame of our wider horizons.
The find-group is risky material: it focusses on material object rather than people; the most visible find-group is the one with the most and the richest objects, so it focusses on a few rather than all people; in the other direction, an emphasis on objects can make each object seem to carry equal weight, with no regard to context (a risk realised in England in object-based policy-making, where statistics eclipsed the nuances of local life); objects might confine the quest within the walls of the very institutions we might seek to escape, with the book in the library and the archaeological find in the museum. Finally, the object is not a ready guide in itself to contemporary archaeology, which has shifted its focus from object evidence to the intangibles of broader statistics, survey and theory though the material turn in the social sciences might make ours again a moment of objects.

Taking all these risks actively on board, a space experiment may be offered.
Start from a find where an individual rests with no objects at all, or is a single item - for example, a burial of a man in a mat, with a single pottery bowl in his hands, in a cemetery near the village of
Badari in Middle Egypt, where the site identified by Ali Suefi of al-Lahun was excavated by men and boys from Qift farther south and from local villages, under supervision of foreigners directed by Guy
Brunton (the burial is recorded as no.5356 in his volume with Gertrude Caton-Thompson, Badarian
Civilization, tomb-register pl.6).The pot (now UC14514) and the location and style of the burial identify the time of this manin (some) 21 st -century terms as around 4500 BC.
In order to show the location in the landscape, the pot would need to be put back on the ground beside the outline of a body in foetal position, in a protected building (so that it is not destroyed by antiquities-market-suppliers or erosion or tourism), perhaps rounded like the burial space and the documented huts of the time, and itself made the corner of a vaster arc of land beyond, reaching out to which horizon?, marked by signs of that time, invoking the scope also of GIS and Theory in the disciplinary archaeology. Implicitly, the only site of preservation is the landscape of origin - this restaging/remembering can only happen at the place itself. This location raises the new risk that restaging becomes read as historical reconstruction.
The man from Badari lived at a time when we do not have evidence that society was divided into social strata. Periods of social division (3500 BC onwards) pose other problems.For people present, people past may only be visible in space. Repeating the experiment, the poorest burial of a rich age demands display in another protected building, this time rectangular and vast and nearly all empty, for archaeologists only rarely documented the remains of people without objects - so a vaster area than could be afforded in London would be needed to create the message of the society that this was, with a vast meditative space empty of objects to be filled with the presence of peoplepast and present, with in one corner a small space of finds of the poor, a smaller space of finds of the richer, a smallest space for the richest find-groups. Again this effect is only possible in the landscape of origin.
Further objections to the find-group become clearer after considering these two space experiments: the find-group is only proportionate with massive difficulty even in the landscape of origin - a vast garden is needed to convey the world missing from the evidence (thinking of the garden to the
Nubian Museum Aswan); the find-group is most often difficult to understand, particularly as archaeological deposits are most often disturbed, either "Partly" or Quite" (=Very) as Brunton summarised the Badari finds - the kitchen pots are rarely found on the kitchen table in the middle of use, they do not "say" KITCHEN, as they are found in unpredictable movement;

the find-group as singular installation can too easily become a monolithic, single message
(monoglossia) as in nation-building, not necessarily unwanted in itself, but unrealistically reductive as a massive simplification of the complexity of our lives; finally, the find-group is hard to achieve, following the political economy of distribution - though this dispersal of objects from one find is arguably one of the greatest research challenges for Egyptian archaeology worldwide, and perhaps the most powerful reason for pursuing re-groupings today.
Concluding reflections: shared interest divided by necessity?
Beyond expert-public oppositions, whether individual or structural, Ihave consideredhere a third option, that we share questions and needs, but remain divided by historical social processes such as institutionalisation. These processes set perhaps insuperable obstacles in the way of any change.
Professional archaeologists, and research organisations and funders require an opposition expertpublic; commercialised multimedia public spheresrequire the same. Effectively these institutions collude in division.Yet all life-long and occasional students of the past are organically united in the way knowledge is constructed. Knowledge-seekers at all levels expect evidence, which archaeology provides in graphic and in material form. In the public sphere of collections, documented find-groups become a touchstone for a new exchange between public reminders of the unanswered and research reminders of the complex. However, re-uniting find and theme requires a new social contract between knowledge-seekers. The institutional forms of the contemporary public sphere in both London and Cairo comprise televisual media and internet analogues and extensions into the recent social media; parliamentary forms of large-scale representation; state-funded or -subsidised universities; state-funded (direct or indirect) organisations for excavation and site maintenance.
None of these channels for 'experts' and 'publics' may feel any need or desire for structural transformations. Perhaps winds of change alwaysarrive from the outside.