Dear Bob,


I am very interested in your session, and would love to be a part of it.
My dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of Virginia's enslaved
cooks. I want to present a paper in Toronto that compares the
archaeological material from two kitchen sites, and the unique social
roles of enslaved cooks, in both the enslaved and free plantation
"communities".

Please let me know if you are interested.

Thanks,

kelley


> 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
> [log in to unmask]
>


Kelley Deetz M.A.

Doctoral Candidate
PhD Program in African Diaspora Studies
UC Berkeley