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2 Public Archaeology, Activism, and Racism Rethinking the Heritage “Product” CAROL MCDAVID INTRODUCTION Most academic presentations about public archaeology and heritage tend to fall into two main categories. The most prevalent examine how to practice public archaeology: case studies, strategy papers, and the like. These descriptive narratives are useful, in that they give other archaeologists a vocabulary of ideas and approaches from which to draw (see, for example, Jameson 1997; Smardz Frost 2000).The other category, much smaller, may include case studies but also attempts to reflect upon, critique, and theorize the processes involved in public archaeology and heritage work. A growing number of conference sessions and publications (Carman 2000; Derry and Malloy 2003; Little, ed. 2002; Marshall 2002; Merriman 2004; Shackel and Chambers 2004) have included these critiques, and they have also appeared in the pages of the journal Public Archaeology, the Journal of Social Archaeology, and a few other journals. Some of this work does attempt, as Jim gibb proposed recently, to understand the “role of the archaeologist as a definer of community,a mediator in the creation of identity, an anthropological activist who is more participant than observer , [and] a creator rather than documenter of culture” (gibb 2005:140). In both categories, however, the underlying goals—of both the work itself and the writing about it—are usually aimed at promoting public archaeology as a way to serve archaeology’s needs (for notable exceptions, see Jeppson et al. 2003; Scham and yahya 2003). The main objective has been to promote stewardship, and, by extension, to increase public support for preserving archaeological sites. This volume, however, and other publications (Castaneda and Matthews 2008; Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2008; Little and Public Archaeology, Activism, and Racism • 37 Shackel 2007; Mortensen and Hollowell 2009) have begun to explore a rather different idea: that our work as archaeologists, public archaeologists, and heritage managers has only partly to do with “saving the past for the present” (or some other phrasing of the stewardship idea). In this view, archaeology’s “product ” is not only our data, reports, and so on, but also the process and results of doing this work as part of an engaged social activism. In my own area of archaeological interest,African diaspora archaeology,the research itself has a great deal to do with the roots of racism and with the ways that racism has oppressed and continues to oppress specific social groups. So the particular social action issue I will focus on here is how archaeologists can use the public archaeology of African diaspora sites to acknowledge racism, to confront it, and to challenge it. By examining, critically and reflexively, what it is that our work does, we may be able to ally ourselves with others (in other disciplines as well as outside the academy) who yearn to eradicate this disease from contemporary society. It is a taken-for-granted in social scholarship that “race” is a cultural construction that plays itself out differently in different geographical, historical, and cultural contexts.Likewise,as people who live in racialized cultures know, racism, in particular, white racism, is also very real. One primary way that it presents itself is through white privilege, that is, the countless ways in which whites in Western society are automatically given (without having earned it) power and status (Jensen 2002a, 2002b; McIntosh 1988). I have written about white privilege in some detail elsewhere (McDavid 2007), so I will not elaborate here except to say that my public archaeology work, within the field of African diaspora archaeology, is part of a larger activism agenda which recognizes and attempts to challenge the ways that white privilege and racism emerge within everyday archaeological practice (even when the manifestations are not specifically archaeological). This chapter will offer several examples of how this happens. I should make it clear that these reflections necessarily spring from my own subject position as a white,female,middle-class archaeologist who works with descendants and other groups who identify themselves with other ethnicities and classes.My archaeological colleagues and antiracism allies who identify themselves in other ways obviously deal with these issues differently. PUBLIC ARCHAEOLOgy CONTExTS First, I will describe two of the disciplinary contexts in which my work takes place.The first is the Levi Jordan Plantation Project, located in South Texas in Brazoria. The archaeological research itself, which has focused on the part of the plantation occupied by captive and enslaved Africans and African Ameri- [3.147.104.248] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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