Laura Mary is a Belgian archaeologist, creator of the collective Paye ta trowel
which fights against discrimination and sexist and sexual violence inarchaeology. ---- Alternative Libertaire: Why did you create Paye ta trowel? ----Laura Mary: It started from a solitary observation when I was in the first yearof college. I realized that there were no initiatives that existed in theFrench-speaking archaeological community, and at the same time, as I wasidentified as "the feminist activist", when there were problems on the excavationsites , it was me that they came to see. I was trying to intervene on my scale,with a total lack of means and support from the hierarchy. In the second year ofmy thesis, I created Paye ta trowel because there was an accumulation of personalexperiences that made me realize that I was alone against a whole system. Ineeded to give all these people feminist keys to understanding the situations inwhich they found themselves.As this is a systemic issue that does not only concern archaeology, I contactedAnaïs Bourdet[1]to join in something bigger. At the time there were quite a fewPaye "something" and initiatives that highlighted sexism in different areas. Forit to make sense, I wanted to link my initiative to everything that was alreadybeing done to show that this is a problem found in all professions.Around the same time, Béline Pasquini and Ségolène Vandevelde had created theArchéo-ethics association and wanted to organize a symposium on ethics inarchaeology. They contacted the Paye ta trowel Facebook page to create somethingtogether, and we thought of an exhibition, "Archaeo-sexism". Today thisexhibition is present in Belgium, France, Quebec, Switzerland, but has also beenexhibited in London and Standford, and will soon be translated into Catalan. Theobjective is not for us to go there, but for the collectives on site to seizethis material and do what they want with it, supplementing it with their ownactions. In the end, through this exhibition, bridges are created and activeinternational solidarity is built.At first, Paye ta trowel was just a platform for collecting testimonies of sexismin archeology. Today, the objective is to raise public awareness ofdiscrimination and to promote the archeology of gender. In the big projects tocome, we have a manual on gender archeology which should be released in 2023 byFedora editions. We talk about sexism, of course, but also racism, LGBTIphobiaand classism. We hope that it will give visibility to what is already being done,and that it will encourage us to work on these questions still neglected byFrench-speaking archaeology. This manual is what I would have liked to have hadwhen I started my studies.Paye ta trowel revealed, as elsewhere, the major organizational issues in thefight against gender-based and sexual discrimination and violence (SGBV) inarchaeology. What conclusion can be drawn on this front ?Procedures for VSS are still almost non-existent. The victims are abandoned bythe institutions and by the people who are supposed to protect them. Nouniversity has yet put in place a truly effective structure to supervise victimsof SGBV, and the same in the professional environment of archeology. There areonly informal procedures or, worse, "mediations" of infinite violence for thevictims because not only do they take place in the presence of their aggressor,but they also induce that it is just a little relationship problem to solve.There is still a lot of work to do, we are in the early stages. But this is not apessimistic assessment. I knew when I started that it would be a fight that wouldtake my whole life. For the moment, we are setting up the tools, we are givingthe vocabulary, we are exposing the problems, and we are trying to train newrecruits.We've only been around for five years, and even if everything is still to be doneon the institutional side, Paye ta trowel is today a space where victims can meetand discuss. We succeeded, for all these people, in changing the focus from theindividual to the collective, in making them realize that they are not alone,that they can join a mass that has experienced similar things. And that if we aretogether, if we create solidarity, we can change things. The more of us who speakout, the more our struggles advance. On this scale, it is very positive to seethese changes in our professional environment.Archeology is a fairly feminized field, but not very unionized. Can Paye tatrowel and Archeo-ethics play the role of a balance of power?Yes, I am convinced of it. We are not trying to create an equivalence to unions,but to create solidarity between people who are discriminated against, and thento show the need to join unions that are already in place and already have abalance of power within the institutions. They have a lot more impact than us.And for the moment it works well, because we manage to bridge the gap betweenanti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal issues. The two for me have to cometogether, otherwise it doesn't make sense.Our objective is also to manage to change the vision of archaeologists on tradeunions. Unions are not the enemy, on the contrary! Our tools are also used toreclaim and think differently about the union struggle within your company. Thepublic of Paye ta trowel is really large and rather young, so it gives another,more positive image of the unions. We are hopeful that when these people becomemore professional, it will make more sense to join a union to protect theirinterests but also the interests of society as a whole. And that's also whatwe're trying to build, to recreate the link between personal stories and thecollective.And it works both ways: many union representatives come to our conferences andshow us their support. The fight against systemic oppression must also be wagedwithin the unions, and some are actively taking it up, sometimes via Paye tatrowel. It's progressing slowly, but surely!Interview by Audrey (UCL Saint-Denis)To validate[1]Author of the blog "Paye ta shnek", which collects testimonies from womenvictims of street harassment.https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Laura-Mary-Paye-ta-truelle-On-recueille-les-temoignages-de-sexisme-dans-l_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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