An Archaeology of Asian Transnationalism

1. Theorizing the Asian Migrant Experience

8 1 Theorizing the Asian Migrant Experience As a first step in developing a model of diasporic consumerism and identification , this chapter introduces and critically examines existing approaches to overseas Asian migration and industrial labor, drawn from the historical and archaeological literature. The goals are to identify valuable observations and insights that can be incorporated into the model and to draw in important critiques and concerns inspired by previous research that should be addressed before moving forward. Archaeology of Chinese Migrants Archaeological research on Chinese migrants and their descendants in western North America and elsewhere spans the past four decades, although it did not really emerge as a distinct field of study until the 1980s and 1990s. Nevertheless, the volume of published and unpublished literature on the subject is large and diverse. The following discussion, therefore , will focus primarily on works of direct relevance to the current study, with particular reference to rural and industrial sites as opposed to the more abundant literature on urban Chinatowns and Chinese material culture . A comprehensive bibliography has recently been published (Schulz and Allen 2008), along with critical overviews of the field as practiced in the United States and Australasia (Ritchie 2003; Voss and Allen 2008; Lawrence and Davies 2011). As noted in these overviews, there has been a recent upswing in the volume and diversity of archaeological studies of Chinese migrants, but the degree to which they have attracted the attention of the broader discipline is highly variable. Within the last 10 to 15 years scholarship has increasingly acknowledged that Chinese ethnicity 9 Theorizing the Asian Migrant Experience is fluid and negotiated in particular contexts, and that material culture plays an active role in creating identities and relationships. Furthermore, Chinese migrant communities are internally diverse and maintain complex and ongoing relationships and cultural exchanges with the homeland and with other Chinese and non-Chinese individuals and communities in the host society. There is also increasing recognition of the ongoing need for collaborative research with other academic disciplines and with local descendant communities. Among the first archaeological projects on Chinese sites in North America were surface collections and test excavations at former railroad construction camps in Texas and California in the mid to late 1960s. None of these pioneering projects was properly written up, and one of the first detailed reports to appear in print was Briggs’s master’s thesis based on mapping and surface collection of two 1882 railroad construction camps near Langtry, Texas, conducted in 1969 (Briggs 1974; see also Chace 1976: 511). Since then, archaeologists have completed a number of studies on similar sites across western North America and elsewhere, including resource management projects and university-based research, with a heavy emphasis on the former. Many of these studies are primarily descriptive, but where they are articulated, common interpretive themes include ethnic and functional pattern recognition based on artifact types and proportions (Briggs 1974; Landreth et al. 1985; Berryman 1995; Wrobleski 1996; Rogers 1997), maintenance of traditional culture and social identities versus acculturation or adaptation to local Euro-American culture and society (LaLande 1982; Hardesty and Hattori 1983; Stapp and Longenecker 1984; Ritchie 1986; Ritter 1986; Piper 1988; Solury 2004; Greenwood and Slawson 2008; Lee 2008; Van Bueren 2008), subsistence and economics (Stapp and Longenecker 1984; Ritter 1986; Stapp 1990; Braje and Erlandson 2007; Braje et al. 2007; Lee 2008), and identification of ethnically distinct architecture and landscapes (Fee 1993; Ritchie 1993; Sisson 1993; Valentine 1999). Two of the most theoretically sophisticated early studies were based on archaeological and archival data on the lives of nineteenth-century Chinese miners in Oregon and New Zealand (LaLande 1982; Ritchie 1986). Both studies emphasize persistence of traditional culture, combined with a limited degree of voluntary and involuntary acculturation. Such acculturation was dominated by functionally equivalent substitutions for unavailable items adopted out of practical necessity; their uses, nevertheless, An Archaeology of Asian Transnationalism 10 fell within the bounds of Chinese culture. However, both authors acknowledge acculturation to, or experimentation with, particular local customs and material goods, including foods and beverages, ceramics, personal hygiene products, and Western clothing. Overall, authors LaLande and Ritchie interpret their data as evidence for cultural conservatism accompanied by limited experimentation with and practical adaptation to local circumstances. According to Ritchie, Chinese immigrants “selectively acculturated”: “Even when they adopted the extrinsic trappings of the Anglo-European majority in New Zealand, they maintained their ‘Chinese-ness’ where it mattered most...