The Archaeology of Citizenship

Foreword

Foreword Contemporary archaeologists are acutely aware of the relevance of their work for the present, particularly those who study the recent past. Moreover , their practice and findings often challenge ideologies that naturalize relations of power and homogenize categories of belonging. A critical examination of citizenship is especially poignant for this book series, which aims to elucidate the American experience in all its complexity. It is too easy to assume what it means to be an American. Suffice it to say that nation-states employ numerous mechanisms to inculcate values in daily life both formally and informally. Yet the adoption of those values and attendant duties does not confer citizenship unilaterally, nor do all migrants wholly embrace them. The permeability of national boundaries has fluctuated to coincide with the economic need for cheap labor. With the birth of our nation in the eighteenth century, newcomers were welcomed so long as they were willing to swear allegiance, fulfill their patriotic duties, and adopt the practices of white Anglo-Protestants, with few exceptions. In their public lives, immigrants often acquiesced in exchange for a chance at economic mobility—the American dream. My maternal grandfather, Antoun Donato, was among the huddled masses welcomed at Ellis Island in the early 1920s. After obtaining naturalized citizenship in 1926, he returned home to his native Aleppo (Syria) to find a wife to accompany him back to America. He was among the last wave of Syrian immigrants to America before more stringent immigration policies were enacted. As with many migrants who attained citizenship after adulthood, he lived a dual life committed to being American yet maintaining many Old World practices as he redefined what it meant to be an American. He and thousands of European migrants could claim whiteness as they entered the country and sought its rewards. Despite his xii · Foreword outward signs of assimilation, he and my grandmother employed many foreign material objects in religious rituals, food preparation, adornment, and recreational activities. Iron skewers for grilling marinated lamb, copper kettles for brewing “Turkish” coffee, gold bracelets that jangled from my grandmother’s wrist signaling her presence, and crystal-clear glass water pipes for smoking aromatic tobacco were some of the most memorable visual, auditory, and olfactory symbols of my family’s Syrian-American identity. Yet, many of these vestiges of the old country disappeared in subsequent generations as the light of new institutions and public education taught my parents the civic knowledge deemed important for becoming American. In The Archaeology of Citizenship, Stacey Camp poses questions of central importance to understanding the American experience, namely “who is an American?” and how has America’s citizenry shifted over the course of the past three hundred years? Using a diachronic approach to the archaeological record, she demonstrates that citizenship is a process rather than a static, legal state of being. It consists of more than just a simple list of rights and duties; moreover, it has evolved and is always contested. Camp shows how historical archaeology—with its sensitivity to lines of evidence created by the subaltern—challenges accounts of citizenship that privilege and prioritize historical documents and legal case studies over experiences visible in archaeological data and oral histories. Using theoretically informed models that link citizenship to consumption , Camp convincingly argues that ordinary people can shape ideas about citizenry by using material culture as a medium of social action. Their consumption patterns—what they acquired, used, and discarded— expressed lived experiences through the adoption, reinterpretation, and/ or disregard of materials that find their way into the archaeological record . Individuals from marginalized groups were active agents who recognized that consumption of costly goods would not help them transcend isolation and discrimination. In an effort to develop cultural citizenship, their religious, political, and racial loyalties often took precedence over national identity. Camp provides a comprehensive overview of the ways in which immigrants to America have been extended and denied citizenship and the ways in which archaeology can be used to monitor that process. She interrogates how the Mt. Lowe Resort and Railway, an early-twentiethcentury tourist destination in southern California, conveyed to visitors Foreword · xiii important elements of a national meta-narrative regarding the appropriation of wilderness, the destruction of indigeneity, technological prowess, and manifest destiny. In the course of absorbing these messages, tourists witnessed toiling Mexican immigrants who were lured across the border and forced to endure company-sponsored “Americanization” campaigns. As her research illustrates, such...