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7. Race, Practice, and Archaeology
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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Chapter 7 Race, Practice, and Archaeology The archaeological application of practice theory is only at the experimental stage. The novelty ofthis approach, especially as it pertains to the study of race-a topic that has yet to achieve prominence among archaeologists -mandates that this book must be viewed as an initial foray into a difficult and multifaceted realm of inquiry. Future archaeologists who opt to use practice theory to interpret past racialization-as well as other topics of concern to social archaeology-will undoubtedly deepen its application within the discipline. Archaeologists have the doubleedged advantage of understanding the multivalent capacities of material culture in past sociohistorical settings while also openly adopting and adapting the substantive insights of cultural anthropologists, sociologists , and geographers, among others. Empirical archaeological analyses of recent history that employ an intellectually diverse conceptual toolkit will substantially enrich our intellectual treasury of understanding and in so doing help us to comprehend the historical antecedents of the world around us. The many methodological advantages of modern-world archaeology, including perhaps most concretely the presence of often abundant textual resources, ensures that the recent past is an arena in which archaeologists can construct fully contextualized examinations. The relatively recent invention of modern-age theories of racialization makes perfect the match between the historical study of race and modern-world archaeology . The most recent centuries appear as a relatively short period when viewed from the perspective of the entirety of human history. Nonetheless, the myriad material and spatial dimensions of historical racialization during this age are infinitely complex and so their study is understandably far from exhausted. The archaeological examination of racialization is perfectly suited to multiscalar analysis, because the application of racial theories was never merely site-specific. For example, the many applications of race prejudice and oppression that were given expression at thousands of 248 Chapter 7 slave-operated plantations throughout the New World were never simply "about" that single place. The foundational racial theory that upheld the operation of individual slave plantations pervaded the entire plantation regime. Its manifestations-though context-specific, extensively mutable , and even idiosyncratic-stretched through time and across space. Countless slaveowners resident on plantations reproduced the structural realities of slave-based production, even though each one of them was free to create and enact individual personal strategies. At the same time, innumerable men and women held in perpetual bondage struggled with the regime's epochal structures and sought their own strategies of survival and self-determination. An important analytical strength of practice theory is that it recognizes the seminal significance of structures and actions, but it does not essentialize them. We cannot expect that the agriculturally rooted structure of early nineteenth-century rural America should be reproduced in early seventeenth-century America or even in early nineteenth-century Ireland, even though the basic structure of agriculturally based social inequality is roughly homologous through time and space. Owner/slave and landlord/tenant labor positions exist within the structures by definition , but the meanings of the positions and the ways in which individuals within the fields pursued and amassed diverse forms of capital are sociohistorically distinctive. The considerable diversity in sociohistorical formations mandates that the archaeological analysis of a social variable as mutable as race can be approached in various ways. The topic is amenable both to in-depth, sitespecific examination and to broader comparative study. Modern-world archaeologists intent on investigating past racialization can operationalize their research programs as site- and region-specific, and thus they may describe their research as "historic ethnography" if they wish (Schuyler 1988: 40-41). They can also undertake more overtly comparative projects of any scale, including the inter-site, race-based analyses suggested by Baker (1980: 35-36) or the internationally designed comparisons proposed by Deetz (1991: 8). The application of a highly contextualized practice theory will always ensure the practical difficulty of in-depth comparative analysis, but the insights gained will be profound and significant. The homologies between the structures of enforced Mrican American agriculture and pre-famine Irish farm tenancy are particularly instructive in this regard. Irish landlords were not slaveowners , but numerous early nineteenth-century commentators perceived the two elite groups as occupying roughly equal structural positions within their respective social hierarchies. Our purpose in examining early nineteenth-century rural Ireland is threefold: (1) to illustrate a way that practice theory can be applied to [44.222.212.138] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:45 GMT) Race, Practice, and Archaeology 249 archaeological interpretation to examine...