The Rhetoric of Things: Historical Archaeology and Oral History

This paper examines precisely how objects assume meanings in archaeological interpretation and a dimension of everyday life and experience that exists on the fringes of self-consciousness. Archaeologists interpret the meanings of material things in ways that have often sought to erase the ambiguities of material symbolism in conventional linear narratives, but oral memories routinely struggle with the meaning of things and underscore their complex and ambiguous meanings. The paper examines how the contributors to this volume illuminate the implications of oral memories on broader material culture scholarship both within and beyond historical archaeology

The Archaeology of Consumption

A vast range of archaeological studies could be construed as studies of consumption, so it is perhaps surprising that relatively few archaeologists have defined their scholarly focus as consumption. This review examines how archaeology can produce a distinctive picture of consumption that remains largely unaddressed in the rich interdisciplinary consumer scholarship. Archaeological research provides concrete evidence of everyday materiality that is not available in most documentary records or ethnographic resources, thus offering an exceptionally powerful mechanism to examine complicated consumption tactics. In a broad archaeological and anthropological context, consumption studies reflect the ways consumers negotiate, accept, and resist goods-dominant meanings within rich social, global, historical, and cultural contexts

Practicing Anthropology and the Politics of Engagement: 2010 Year in Review

In 2010, a rapidly growing body of public scholars continued to conduct engaged research that involved various forms of collaboration, advocacy, and activism. Practicing anthropologists are among the most powerful champions of engaged scholarship and are increasingly focused on tracing the concrete dimensions of public engagement. Practicing anthropologists in 2010 made a concerted effort to critically assess precisely what constitutes collaboration, engagement, activism, advocacy, and a host of similarly politicized but ambiguous terms. This self-reflection has probed the philosophical, political, and methodological dimensions of engagement and painted a rich and complex picture of practicing anthropology. In this article, I review those 2010 studies that are focused on critically defining an engaged anthropology and expanding it to rigorously four-field public scholarship with conscious and reflective politics

Imagining Conformity: Consumption and Homogeneity in the Postwar African American Suburbs

In the wake of World War II many urbanites left cities for a suburban life that has been persistently derided for its apparent social, material, and class homogeneity. This paper examines the African American experience of post–World War II suburbanization and the attractions of suburban life for African America. The paper examines two suburban projects in Indianapolis, Indiana, one a “sweat equity” housing community and the other a subdivision, both of which placed consumption at the heart of postwar citizenship. Rather than frame such consumption simply in terms of resistance to anti-Black racism, the two suburban experiences illuminate the African American imagination of visual and material “sameness” and demonstrate the challenges of archaeological studies of ethnicity and stylistic distinction

Racializing the Commonplace Landscape: An Archaeology of Urban Renewal Along the Color Line

In the 1960’s Indianapolis, Indiana’s near-Westside was transformed by urban renewal projects that carved space for the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) campus out of a predominately African-American neighborhood. Within two decades that longstanding community was totally displaced, and today the former neighborhood covering 300 acres is completely effaced and the community is largely forgotten. This paper examines how archaeology on the University campus provides a mechanism to illuminate the processes that remade the near-Westside. Archaeological research conducted along with the displaced community and its descendants provides a powerful tool to rethink the otherwise prosaic campus landscape as a space shaped by racial and class privilege

The Banality of Gilding: Innocuous Materiality and Transatlantic Consumption in the Gilded Age

This paper examines Gilded Age affluence by focusing on apparently inconsequential decorative goods and assessing how such goods were part of shared transatlantic patterns that reached beyond the Gilded Age and the confines of urban America. The paper focuses on figurines recovered from 19th-century sites in London and underscores how the American Gilded Age amplified many early 19th-century material patterns and ideological practices that were well-established in the United Kingdom and continued after the height of Gilded Age affluence. This study examines the symbolism of such aesthetically eclectic goods and focuses on the socially grounded imagination that was invested in them borrowing from dominant ideologies and idiosyncratic personal experiences alike