Call for Papers, for the next American Anthropological Association
meeting, Washington, D.C., November 30 to December 4, 2005
Session Organizers: Jennifer Babiarz and Matthew Palus
Chair: Mark P. Leone
The attached abstract describes a session we're co-organizing for
the AAA meeting in D.C. this November. The purpose of the session
is to bring together recent efforts at developing responsible and
ethical archaeologies of African America or the African Diaspora,
paying particular attention to the way that researchers consider
and contact descendent communities and other stakeholders in the
research. Participants so far include Jamie Brandon, Cheryl
LaRoche, Mark Leone, Carol McDavid, and Paul Shackel. We're
working to make plenty of opportunity for the participants to
discuss the papers and the themes of the session.
The deadline for submission and meeting registration is April 1. We
are posting in an attempt to elicit 3-4 additional papers to round
out the session. If you are interested in participating, please
contact Matt Palus at [log in to unmask], or Jenn Babiarz at
[log in to unmask], with questions or paper titles/abstracts.
Thank you,
Matthew Palus
Department of Anthropology
Columbia University
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Dialogues in Context: Perspectives on Applied Work in African
Diaspora Archaeology
Abstract:
The ways in which historical archaeologists have approached
communities of African Americans now define ethical approaches to
communities in general, and are central to the practice of public
archaeology. Decades of research in African-American communities
with traditional connections to local heritage, for instance that
of plantation slavery, have contributed to a received view on how
the archaeology of African Americans or the African Diaspora should
be conducted. This methodology can be assembled from criticisms
deployed during the 1980s and 1990s of archaeologies that were
either premised in a simplistic notion of race or ignored race
altogether, or failed to consider the significance of this heritage
for contemporary political contexts. In these situations the ethical
obligation is to identify and consult with stakeholders, cultivate
positive local ownership of these heritages, and methodically
transfer authority over the research from the scholar to the
community while not denying the interests of archaeologists that
are involved. In a real sense, the archaeology of descendent
communities has become the moral center of a contemporary
historical archaeology fraught with nervousness about race. We
begin with the possibility that this now-commonsense and widely
accepted approach to descendent communities—itself strangely
impenetrable to criticism and revision—is not the sole ethical
possibility.
The participants in this session have each undertaken research in
which interaction with communities of descendents played a key
role. However, the variety of approaches is striking and speaks to
the distance that exists between the model defining ethical
standards, and the designs of individual researchers and groups of
researchers. Our intention is not to measure the assembled cases
against this standard, but rather to consider applied and
critical/theoretical perspectives, and reflect on the multiple ways
that dialogue in context has made archaeological projects mutable to
changing political and academic needs.
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