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Conclusion - Alice Beck Kehoe
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Conclusion Alice Beck Kehoe religion—in the sense of belief,and in the sense of rituals—has been claimed to be the means of maintaining community and permitting individuals to carry on lives that seem coherent. Both durkheim (1947 [1912]), founding the French tradition of cultural analyses, and Malinowski (1954), teaching the British tradition, focused thus on religion, or shall i better say “religion”: a Western cultural category.Thus it behooves archaeologists socialized in the Western cultural tradition to search for evidence of religion in the archaeological record.Thus this book. An underlying theme in the book,set forth by editors sundstrom and deBoer , is the likelihood that religious concepts and symbols persist through many human generations, paralleling (but not in step with) ceramic and lithic technology and style traditions. to put it bluntly, because archaeologists recognize transmission over generations of ceramic and lithic artifact types and of house forms, an archaeologist may premise similar transmission of religious beliefs and seek evidence for such tradition. The essays in this volume illustrate how inchoate are such efforts. data sets that seem not to serve biological necessities such as subsistence or shelter are postulated to have been created for inhabitants’“religion”—it used to be a joke that if one couldn’t figure out a practical purpose for an artifact or feature, one should label it “ceremonial.”not many American archaeologists would say they are Marxists, yet most focus on material evidence of economics and seem to assume a superstructure of religion and ideology secondary to the pragmatics of everyday living. Methodologies to recognize, retrieve, and interpret economic data are well developed (technologies of subsistence practices, occupation features, zooarchaeology and paleobotany, demography, trade), in Conclusion 303 contrast to the varied avenues explored by the contributors to this book on religious traditions. The chapters here could be clustered as follows, to explore the varied approaches taken by participants in the project. Asserting the validity of oral histories of group movements and settlements (Bernardini, Hays-gilpin, Lekson) Premising millennia depth for concepts known ethnographically (Claassen, deBoer, Clark and Colman, McEwan, roe and roe, sundstrom) seeking principles and patterns in the data,to infer continuity with variation (Quilter) or significance of place (norder) using textual and ethnographic data to infer history (Hall) Arguing for independent-invention gradualism—a nineteenth-century axiom (Lyell 1830;trigger 2006:564) (Brown and Kelly) oral history as “tradition” has been a staple of anthropology from its nineteenth-century beginnings and indeed from the late eighteenth-century early romanticism efforts to preserve folk cultures, for example, by Walter scott and his friends in scotland. scots had been literate for several generations by then,thanks to the scottish Kirk’s requiring primary schools in each parish, but so long as aged women and men in their humble thatched dark houses spoke in dialect, their ballads and tales were taken to be age-old tradition .By the late nineteenth century,professional anthropologists were taking down national (“tribal”) histories from elder men.Whatever seemed unlikely could be labeled “myth.”Among the Pueblos, the detailed histories of migrations by residence groups labeled “clans”by anthropologists were often dismissed as myth, because the Pueblos were stereotyped to be small communal egalitarian primitive societies, rooted in their soil as if wildflowers. textbooks well into the mid-twentieth century contrasted such “primitive” societies with “dynamic” Western civilizations, the primitives’ myths contrasted with Western “true histories.” Come the roosevelt new deal’s indian Claims Commission, beginning in 1946, u.s. tribes struggled to document their claims to treaty-recognized territories.Florence Hawley Ellis was one of the archaeologists working with Pueblos to prove claims by excavation of occupation traces: she married oral traditions to archaeologists’ ceramic style traditions,as well as excavating structure features in the places described in the oral histories. Both Bernardini and Hays-gilpin carry on this project of reconciling Hopi “traditional”histories with archaeological data,seen also in the book by t. J. Ferguson and Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh (2006) that ranges farther afield to document Pueblo occupations in southern Arizona. [3.238.198.167] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:51 GMT) 304 Alice Beck Kehoe Bernardini and Hays-gilpin advance the study to a higher level by revealing that there is not one Hopi traditional history,but many,clan by clan,and Bernardini links oral-historical events to exercise of power in Hopi towns. We might call these studies historical thick description. stephen H. Lekson stands back from the particulars of Hopi histories to...