‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

Europe and the People without History

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Silencing the past: power and the production of history

ion, Metaphor and Mimesis Southwest is very conscious of its own corporate ‘way of life’. A list is given on its website under the heading ‘culture’ of the desired characteristics of a Southwest person (perseverant, egalitarian, passionate), and these qualities are abstracted into the more general injunctions to be low cost and have high customer service delivery, and the mission statement talks of warmth, friendliness, individual pride and company spirit. So there are clear abstractions here that create a unity and coherence to activities across domains. Throughout this book I have shown how entanglements involve material and conceptual components. In Chapter 2 I described a pebble on a beach that was brought into different assemblies with other things depending on how it was recognized, remembered and owned. In that chapter too I described how the equipmental totality of a thing depended on the different theories about and perspectives towards it. In Chapter 3 I used the quote from Gibson that ‘an affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer’ (1986: 129). In Chapter 4 I noted that the maintenance of walls in the Yorkshire Dales depended on expert ideas about organic foods and recent collective nostalgia for a rural way of life. In Chapter 5 I showed how a sail boat had different entanglements, and different affordances depending on the perspectives of sailing, entertaining and protecting the ecosystem of the bay. These ideas about the boat are themselves tied to wider ideas about what is leisure and how the environment should be protected. So entanglements and affordances and functions are always tied to abstractions (ideas, thoughts, words, feelings and senses). These abstractions are hierarchical and nested as noted above, and they often cross domains so that humans seek unities, coherence, metaphor within different realms of experience. Abstractions are general and can often be applied to more than one domain of activity. Their transferability Hodder_c06.indd 120 2/3/2012 12:14:59 PM

Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things

Preface to the first edition Preface to the second edition 1. The problem 2. The systems approach 3. Structuralist archaeology 4. Marxist archaeology, ideology and practice 5. Archaeology and history 6. An ethnohistoric example: reconsideration of ethnoarchaeology and middle range theory 7. Contextual archaeology 8. Post-processual archaeology 9. Conclusion: archaeology as archaeology Bibliography Index.

Reading the past : current approaches to interpretation in archaeology

What has frequently been termed “contact-period” archaeology has assumed a prominent role in North American archaeology in the last two decades This article examines the conceptual foundation of archaeological “culture contact” studies by sharpening the terminological and interpretive distinction between “contact” and “colonialism” The conflation of these two terms, and thereby realms of historical experience, has proven detrimental to archaeologists’ attempts to understand indigenous and colonial histories In light of this predicament, the article tackles three problems with treating colonialism as culture contact: (1) emphasizing short-term encounters rather than long-term entanglements, which ignores the process and heterogeneous forms of colonialism and the multifaceted ways that indigenous people experienced them; (2) downplaying the severity of interaction and the radically different levels of political power, which does little to reveal how Native people negotiated complex social terrain but does much to distance “contact” studies from what should be a related research focus in the archaeology of African enslavement and diaspora; and (3) privileging predefined cultural traits over creative or creolized cultural products, which loses sight of the ways that social agents lived their daily lives and that material culture can reveal, as much as hide, the subtleties of cultural change and continuity Lo que frecuentemente se denomina arqueologia del “periodo de contacto” ha adquirido en los ultimos 20 anos un papel prominente en la arqueologia norteamericana Este trabajo examina el legado conceptual de los estudios arqueologicos sobre el contacto cultural y aclara la importante distincion terminologica e interpretativa entre “contacto” y “colonialismo” La tendencia a confundir ambos conceptos, y por lo tanto el mundo de las experiencias historicas, ha perjudicado el intento arqueologico por comprender tanto la historia indigena como la colonial Bajo semejante predicamento, este articulo aborda tres problemas que se generan al equiparar colonialismo con contacto cultural: (1) poner enfasis en los encuentros de poca duracion—en vez de las relaciones prolongadas—lo que ignora las formas y los procesos heterogeneos del colonialismo, asi como las multiples dimensiones de las experiencias indigenas, (2) poner menor atencion a la intensidad de la interaccion y a los grados de poder politico tan diferentes, lo que no permite apreciar como la gente autoctona negocio en contextos sociales complejos, promoviendo ademas un distanciamiento entre los estudios de “contacto” y las investigaciones afines sobre la arqueologia de la esclavitud y diasporas africanas; y (3) privilegiar rasgos culturales predefinidos sobre formas culturales novedosas o criollas, lo que impide apreciar las formas en las que agentes sociales vivieron sus quehaceres cotidianos, olvidando a la vez que la cultura material puede revelar, asi como ocultar, las sutilezas del cambio cultural y de la continuidad

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Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America

I use this paper to intersect the trajectory of the agency concept in archaeology. On a theoretical front, I summarize briefly the state of ‘agency’ in archaeology and its deployment in theories of...

http://www.faculty.umb.edu/stephen_silliman/Articles/Agency,-Practical-Politics.pdf

Agency, Practical Politics and the Archaeology of Culture Contact

The archaeological study of Native Americans during colonial periods in North America has centered largely on assessing the nature of cultural change and continuity through material culture. Although a valuable approach, it has been hindered by focusing too much on the dichotomies of change and continuity, rather than on their interrelationship, by relying on uncritical cultural categories of artifacts and by not recognizing the role of practice and memory in identity and cultural persistence. Ongoing archaeological research on the Eastern Pequot reservation in Connecticut, which was created in 1683 and has been inhabited continuously since then by Eastern Pequot community members, permits a different view of the nature of change and continuity. Three reservation sites spanning the period between ca. 1740 and 1840 accentuate the scale and temporality of social memory and the relationships between practice and materiality. Although the reservation sites show change when compared to the "precontact baseline," they show remarkable continuity during the reservation period. The resulting interpretation provides not only more grounded and appropriately scaled renderings of past cultural practices but also critical engagements with analytical categories that carry significant political weight well outside of archaeological circles.

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Change and continuity, practice and memory: native american persistence in colonial new england

A fundamental issue for twenty-first century archaeologists is the need to better direct their efforts toward supporting rather than harming indigenous peoples. Collaborative indigenous archaeology has already begun to stress the importance of cooperative, community-based research; this book now offers an up-to-date assessment of how Native American and non-native archaeologists have jointly undertaken research that is not only politically aware and historically minded but fundamentally better as well. Eighteen contributors many with tribal ties?cover the current state of collaborative indigenous archaeology in North America to show where the discipline is headed. Continent-wide cases, from the Northeast to the Southwest, demonstrate the situated nature of local practice alongside the global significance of further decolonizing archaeology. And by probing issues of indigenous participation with an eye toward method, theory, and pedagogy, many show how the archaeological field school can be retailored to address politics, ethics, and critical practice alongside traditional teaching and research methods. These chapters reflect the strong link between politics and research, showing what can be achieved when indigenous values, perspectives, and knowledge are placed at the center of the research process. They not only draw on experiences at specific field schools but also examine advances in indigenous cultural resource management and in training Native American and non-native students. Theoretically informed and practically grounded, Collaborating at the Trowel's Edge is a virtual guide for rethinking field schools and is an essential volume for anyone involved in North American archaeologyprofessionals, students, tribal scholars, or avocationalists, s well as those working with indigenous peoples in other parts of the world. It both reflects the rapidly changing landscape of archaeology and charts new directions to ensure the ongoing vitality of the discipline.

Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge: Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology

Hybridity as an interpretive construct in the archaeology of colonialism has encountered many pitfalls, due largely to the way it has been set adrift from clear theoretical anchors and has been applied inconsistently to things, practices, processes, and even people. One of the telltale signs of its problematic nature is the ease with which archaeologists claim to identify the origin and existence of hybridity but the difficulty faced if asked when and how such hybridity actually ends, if it does. In that context, this paper offers a potential requiem for hybridity. If we need not go that far, archaeologists at least need to rein in the “Frankenstein” version of hybridity that permeates archaeology and occludes its variable and problematic origins, acknowledge the dangers of accentuating or even celebrating “purees,” and beware of the creation of cultural “mules” in analytical classifications and interpretations.

Stephen W. Silliman

Papers

Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America

Agency, Practical Politics and the Archaeology of Culture Contact

Change and continuity, practice and memory: native american persistence in colonial new england

Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge: Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology

A requiem for hybridity? The problem with Frankensteins, purées, and mules: