Hi folks,

Jolene Smith and I are trying to organize a session for Toronto on the
general theme of (re)defining "community" (see the description below). 
If you are interested in participating, please let us know at
[log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]  We'd like to
have a lineup by the end of this month so that we have plenty of time to
get everything submitted by June 15th.

Cheers,
Bob Chidester
________________________________________________________________________________________
Reconceptualizing “Community,” Past and Present: Current Approaches in
Historical and Public Archaeology

Symposium Proposal for the 2009 Society for Historical Archaeology
Annual Meeting, Toronto, ON

Organizers and Chairs:
Robert C. Chidester (University of Michigan)
Jolene L.U. Smith (University of Maryland)

Throughout the history of the discipline, anthropologists have struggled
to define culture.  In recent decades, the debate over culture has
broadened to include questions not only of what it is and what its
component parts are, but also where to find it and how to recognize it
when we do.  Due to the success of the postmodern critique, it is
generally taken for granted by most anthropologists today that culture
cannot be described in terms of “cultures” or ethnicities that are
discreetly bounded entities with their own internal (and timeless)
structures.

While the search for macro-scale “cultures” has all but ended, some
anthropologists (including many archaeologists) still use the term
“community” as if it represented a micro-scale, discreetly bounded,
geographically anchored cultural entity.  Whether discussing communities
in the past or the present, there has been a tendency to assume that we
can easily identify them.  Only recently have some scholars begun to
question this traditional approach to “community,” following the same
line of argumentation that lead to the deconstruction of the concept of
“culture.”  The reconceptualization of “community” is an urgent task,
particularly for archaeologists who not only study communities of the
past but who also collaborate with various communities in the present. 
The papers in this session will present new approaches to the concept of
“community” and reflections on experiences working within and in
partnership with these entities, and the difficulties inherent in
defining them, through both recent anthropological theory and grounded
case studies.


Robert C. Chidester, M.A.A.
Affiliate
Center for Heritage Resource Studies
Department of Anthropology
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
(410) 736-1214
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