Race and Practice in Archaeological Interpretation

4. Archaeological Interpretation and the Practice of Race

Chapter 4 Archaeological Interpretation and the Practice of Race The previous chapters demonstrate that archaeologists have long experience handling the concept of race, even though their understandings of this important social variable have changed over time. Many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archaeologists were inspired by the period's neophyte physical anthropologists, and so they tended to envision race as a biological objectivity with concrete, readily identifiable characteristics. Archaeologists, following the progressive intellectual leads of later anthropologists and sociologists, soon discovered that their conceptions of race were required to become increasingly sophisticated to have credibility and interpretive power within general social science. With the increased anthropologization ofarchaeology in the 1960s, however , many archaeologists interested in human variability turned away from race and began systematic examinations of past ethnicity. Historical archaeologists concomitantly developed their own interest in ethnicity and generally avoided race until the late 1980s and 1990s (see Orser 1998b, 2001d). Race is today developing as a topic of serious investigation by historical archaeologists (see, e.g., Franklin 2001; Orser 2001c), but it is still not a central focus of most long-term analysis. The unambiguous interpretation of past ethnicity using archaeological materials has remained frustratingly elusive. Even with the aid ofsupplemental textual sources ofinformation, most historical archaeologists' examinations of the relationships between ethnic affiliation and material culture have generally been less than entirely satisfactory. Many archaeologists at the beginning of the twenty-first century are diligently continuing their efforts to interpret ethnicity, and some are beginning to confront racialization as well. Today's social archaeologists acknowledge the copious data collected by physical anthropologists and readily recognize the fallacy of race as a biological reality. At the same time, they must admit that racialization has had in history-and continues to have in the present-a profound affect on human interaction. Archaeological Interpretation and the Practice of Race II 3 Social archaeologists cannot afford to sustain the illusion that a universally supported method of interpreting racialization in archaeology can be devised immediately. At the same time, archaeologists interested in social theory must grant that the task is worth attempting, and thus must allow that the first step in the process of understanding is to concede that archaeologists, and especially archaeologists with recourse to text-based, supportive sources of information, at least have the potential to unravel the material and social dimensions of historical racialization. The pivotal question, of course, is precisely how this act of disentanglement is to be accomplished. This chapter outlines a framework in which archaeologists may begin to make contributions to the investigation of modern-period racialization . To complete this task, we must explore a series of propositions and concepts that bear relation to the weaknesses proffered by the use of whole-cultural models, the avoidance of poverty as a topic of study, and the failure to employ a perspective that incorporates extra-site, network connections, which archaeologists often implement as a core-periphery model (see, e.g., Champion 1989; Chase-Dunn and Halll991). The development of an archaeology that can present useful interpretations about the historical nature of racialization must reach beyond these realms of investigation, because archaeologists must have an operative theoretical framework within which to conduct their analyses. Practice theory, an approach rapidly gaining adherents in the archaeological community, provides an elegant and powerful perspective for an archaeological effort to engage racialization. Race, Power, Culture, and Hierarchy The complex theoretical nature of racialization, coupled with its many historical faces, amply evinces the obstacles inherent in constructing an analytical framework that has archaeological relevance. One approach to confronting an archaeologically relevant notion of racialization is to begin by considering racism. This intellectual route, though it may initially appear slightly unusual, offers a conceptual base for an archaeological interpretation of race because of its overt concentration on the role of racialization in creating and maintaining systems of social stratification. In an important essay, sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (1997) presents a structural theory of racism that is rooted in the concept of the racialized social system. According to Bonilla-Silva, the most prominent theories of race and racism incorporate the idea that racism exists as part of a personal, internalized belief system. This cognitive feature incorporates a doctrine of superiority as a matter of definitional necessity. 114 Chapter 4 When racism is construed simply as a belief, it appears as an aberrant and irrational ideological construct. Individuals who express racist points of view appear...