Joe Watkins - Discussion after presentation
FS- Female Speaker MS- Male Speaker.
FS-I love it when those of us end up doing the same thing out of our brains, maybe at the same time. Every year I give my students a project where they have to take a family object and find a character of their family. And I pass this along to you because it really fits what you're saying. And of course they all think it's a ridiculous project because this is not archaeology, and they took an archaeology class. And then they have lots of questions. Can a house be an artifact? I don't have any family, I'm adopted. There's other things that come in, but what it brings up is constantly this issue of who are you…. And what does it mean and what do you carry with you, but what is the value in this object? What I have been surprised at, and every year I'm more surprised is it does put students, and they will write me and say, they've never had an experience like this. Because it forced them into talking to their parents…… earlier. Usually you figure that out when you're forty or something that you better start getting the family stories, but it forces them at 20 or whatever to start the conversation. But because it's around an object, it's freer, and they don't have to get into family issues. I've had grandmother's pack up something priceless and send it through registered mail and people go home and get their object and bring it back. But what's amazing is that as they present in class, we all go around, just like this in a room, they bring their object and then they bring something to share. To somebody had beer bottles because they had a beer-making heritage and she brought the beer her brother had just made in the bathtub, and so we all were drinking beer as she was talking. That was an excellent presentation, of course she got an A. But they share, even cooking, it was the act of cooking, so they bring mom's favorite lasagna recipe and then we talk about the Italian family. Well, as we sit and listen and these are people that don't know each other for the most part. We end up literally as a group sometimes crying because the stories are so gorgeous. All brought about by this object which is generally, junk. It doesn't have a great deal of antique value, but what it does is it not only brings the student closer to their own family in a sense of where did that family come from, but it actually creates a community in the class, which was something I didn't anticipate. And that then changes the whole dynamics in the classroom itself. That we end up kind of feeling related to each other. So I'm glad you do that too.
Joe Watkins-
I'm glad to hear the story.
FS-
Especially for fall semester or quarter, what we've done sometimes, and this is not my idea, but our nutritional anthropologist teaches introductory class and gets at family and ethnicity like that by assigning them to go home to their Thanksgiving dinner and record everything they have in terms of the food and where it comes from and especially, food, cooking things, one of the most conservative culture elements, but especially stuffing, which I didn't realize, but it makes perfect sense, what do you stuff your turkey with. If you're in the south it's cornbread, if you're Italian it's sausage or whatever, but then in my class after getting her brilliant idea, I told them to take note of the artifacts that it was served in and how was the table, and who was there, and the Thanksgiving family gathering, as a one time assignment that isn't too hard for them to do. It also gets them working over a break, so that's another possibility too.
Joe Watkins-
And then you have, in my family, there is definitely a social order, grandparents, parents, kids… at another table, on washable floors, with plastic dishes.
Rick Wilk-
I've really just been pleasantly surprised because the kinds of exercises you're talking about are very similar to the exercises I use in teaching socio-cultural anthropology. I think what its saying is that there really are some general principles that we share, that when you're getting to better teaching, there really are ways that these assignments are teaching anthropology, not specifically a particular sub discipline. I use a lot of assignments that get students running around the campus looking at material culture, mapping buildings and looking at the relationship between status and furnishings. Or going to churches and looking at the use of space, and all of those can be used to teach archaeological principles as well as socio-cultural ones.
Joe Watkins-
Yeah, and that was one thing, the point I wanted to make earlier and didn't was that this doesn't apply just to archaeology and it isn't anything that should be or can be taught in just one course. Something that should be just across the curriculum.
Lynne-
Well, to bring us back to something that I said this morning about the thrust of the book, the "Teaching Archaeology in the 21st Century" being that lots of people are going into CRM and we're not training them for it, this is a critical issue in Cultural Resource Management today and so I think this is a real critical skill and I think you had about how to identify descendent communities and what the appropriate venue for consulting and communicating with them, is central. I always tell people who used to come and whine to me about dealing with cultural properties and how hard it was, tribes are easy, tribes have governments, they have a place to go, compared with trying to deal with Hispanic communities or other kinds of descendent communities, you can't even necessarily define them and there's no place to go. And what you said about the church made me laugh because the first thing I always told people was, in these little Hispanic communities in Northern New Mexico, go see the Priest and … with the church. They're the ones who know who the knowledgeable people are and all this kind of stuff. So this is a critical skill and these examples that you're giving for people who are training students who need to be able to go in ….
FS-
Well, some aspects of this conversation are making me a little uncomfortable because one of the things I try to get across in my class is the constructed ness of ethnicity and how it changes over time and how it is defined in contrast, often to other defined groups. And power structures, how ethnicity relates to trying to empower yourself or reacting to what people in power are doing to you and stuff like that. And I think that a sort of dynamic aspect of ethnicity is really important and so I think these exercises are really good and I think they can really draw students in, but it'd be nice if you could get some of that dynamic stuff into these assignments and not just take Scotts as something that, you know, they wear kilts…..but then the other thing that I have that maybe, Jerry, you could help me with a little bit, is that also when I teach that kind of ethnicity, I feel to a certain extent, I know that would make a lot of native communities really angry and sometimes it kind of varies on the edge of saying ethnicity is nothing but politics and I don't think that either, and so yeah, I want to get across this more dynamic view of ethnicity, but I also want to get across authenticity and these things….
Joe Watkins-
The way I handle that is more talking about ethnicity as definitely a dynamic thing. It's shared, it's a shared heritage, however, you have elected officials, you have traditional leaders, you have family leaders, each one of those operate within a tribal group. Once you can start getting people to stop and think and realize that the relationships…they all three are of the same tribe, and they all three serve different functions within the tribe, then they start looking at, again, the power relationships , they know which families are in power and can influence the elected government. They know which people can influence the tribal, the traditional government. And then they know who within their own family can influence the two others and themselves. And so ethnicity, I don't deal with it too much other than to talk to about how it is a construct that some people use to more easily define groups of people. Again, with Indians, they know they're ethnically different than everybody else and they define it all the way down to family and whether they're kinship to say… Parker and his first wife, his second wife, his third wife, or the white wife and they all know that there was different status depending on which wife they were from. They know that they're ethnic in relation to Indian, but they also see that they have separate, almost a sub-ethnic, within that group. I'm not sure that I can help you in that regard. I don't know if I answered it or ….
FS-
It helps.
FS-
Talking about the essentializing… with defining descendent communities. Because when you talk about race, which is something that I think about all the time, especially when I'm doing archaeology and trying to … African Americans, is that there is, when teaching race you want to de-construct or de-essentialize that social construct and explain to people that it's something that's imposed and there's also a power hierarchy associated with it, and the whole ugly history, but at the same time, when someone asks me, well, what are you? Well, I'm black. It's like you just got through telling me there's no such thing as race and this and that…. Well that's my political situatedness. That's how I position myself … I'm an anti-racist scholar, so I realize that race is a real thing and that racism is a real thing, that affects me, and so there's a strategic essentialism that's at work there and that's what I see descendent communities in terms of, like I'll be talking about the African burial ground, where the black community got involved, and yeah that was a self-identified black community and there were certainly identity politics around race that were at play there in getting, seizing control of those archaeological resources and that… so, it's hard to say well, let's just do away with race. Anthropology tried that already and the AAA came back and said well we need to get back into this whole racial discourse because clearly no one else in the United States has done away with race, so we put this in place and now we're stuck with it, so we'd better get back into the dialogue. It's a hard lesson to teach students because you try to teach it as a social construct and then here I am essentializing race by making a statement like, well, your mother is Korean so why do you consider yourself black?
Rosemary Joyce-
But the thing you're struggling with, isn't it really the stability that implicit in the idea that a descendent community identifies itself as a community by tracing connections back through time and if you think of it as history rather than as essential identity (or biology), yeah exactly, it is history, which happens to be highly structured in the US by race, highly structured in the US by some ethnic groups, but not others. Some ethnic groups are structuring in that same way. I think that's one way that I've found to be useful to try and explain exactly this problem and here descending to anecdote, I was a consultant for the American Heritage Dictionary on their most recent revised anthropology terms and they gave me this print-out and there's race on it, and it's got this substitute definition and I went nuts and I sent them the AAA definitions and I said this is not right. You've got to at least mark this as like a folk-belief and we had this long back and forth where they just couldn't get it until I stopped talking about essentializing, because then they said, oh are you saying there's no such thing as African Americans??? No, no, no, no, let's go back to, I'm saying these are historically produced categories and that's not saying they're not real, a historically produced category can be real by reference to specific genetic connections, family connections, material practices of sharing food and also all the memories of all of that. In fact I think it's a richer way.
Anne Pyburn-
I would agree absolutely, but I also think perhaps without being difficult, is making sure that we talk to students about the other side of ethnic pride. That archaeologists in many parts of the world where people are economically, politically, incredibly disadvantaged, to have suddenly discovered that pride in their heritage can be a great source of sustenance, both spiritual and economic in the present day. And I think it's dishonest of us to act like it couldn't really explain why there might be a problem with that down the road, just because "they" wouldn't understand. So I think it's a comment upon me as an archaeologist when I talk about these issues of ethnicity and race to talk both about the positives and the negatives and not in an advocate fashion….
Glen-
I have a question. When you introduce yourself to a Native American group you're going to talk to, you place yourself in relations to them over multiple generations. In the eventuality that I as a clearly, semi-clearly anyway, Anglo-archaeologist, if I was introducing myself to a group like that, would they regard me as totally wacko if I said, here is my family history…going back three or four generations and blah, blah, blah. Or would they just look at me like, what is he doing?
Joe-
I think most of the people that I've worked with would appreciate that, even though… They're trying to understand that you are not just an archaeologist.
Glen-
I would introduce myself typically, and I think most of us would. My name is Glen Doran and I'm and anthropologist. I'm from Florida State University. That defines me within a classic Upper-middle class, lower-middle class worker….
Joe Watkins-
…You tend to describe yourself by your job, and that is something that tribal people don't really care that much about. They know that you have some sort of a power, but they like to know who you are. I've found that most of the time, things get easier if they see you as a person first, and then down the line see where your profession comes in.
FS-
Well, that's what I was going to say, the personal, and even when we were in the square on the floor I kept wanting somebody to pick up an artifact and give it to the tourist and say someone like you might have used this to do such and such 500 years ago because your phrase, strategic essentialism, is wonderful and it's not just…. (it's not my phrase) well, I hadn't heard it before. Because we're not just doing ethnicity or sociological race or, descendent communities are lots of things. Diverse pasts, you're a woman. I kept waiting for somebody to say, is that where the women made those pot sherds? And that's Janet Spectre's whole thing too, tracing, this was everyday women's work right here where you're standing now X hundred years ago. I can go to the regular old white guy, redneck hunters and fishers where I work and say look, this is what they were catching in the past. You don't even catch this species today. Why not? Or you do, but you do this with it, or that with it. So, it's not just those kind of broad categories that we always have to think of, it's any, I hate to say the word targeted, but any segment of the population that might be our audience that we have to target depending on the project.
Lynne-
I wanted to go back to Glenn's question because one of the defining moments of my life involved a double barreled shotgun. When I was a state archaeologist a famous, elderly, not to be named archaeologist in New Mexico, who has a site that made the New York Times, many times, was excavating a site on state land without a permit. The state land archaeologists and I were trying to catch him, busting Frank Gibbon (?) was going to be the center of my life. We're laying in the bushes with a spotting scope waiting for him to show up with a class from the university, by the way, and I heard this sound behind me which was the sound of a double barreled shotgun being cocked. Turning around very carefully and looking up the barrels of this very large thing, there was a little tiny, skinny cowboy. Picture this guy, big handle bar mustache, all the color bleached out of him, he's about five foot five and he probably weighs 90 pounds. Giant hat and these steely blue eyes and this very large shotgun. Fortunately the guy I was with, JR Gomalick (?) was an old boy from New Mexico, comes from a cowboying family. He starts a conversation with this guy and I watch them go through the anthropological process of establishing kinship, only it wasn't genetic kinship, it was, the guy's name was EW Gunkle, I'll never forget that. EW and JR start this conversation, oh, you're the ranch manager for the guy who had the grazing lease and wanted to know what the heck we were doing out on his state trust land. Oh yeah, isn't this ranch now, didn't his brother used to run that ranch up in the black range? Oh yeah, you know my cousin cowboyed for him for about three years. Yeah, I did too, but it was back before I went to work for so and so. And pretty soon they had gone through their whole, all the ranches they'd ever worked for, who used to own that ranch, and established all the people they knew, and we were sitting in the ranch kitchen drinking beer. Never did catch up with Fred, I didn't get shot either. But watching people in a lot of traditional kinds of communities go through exactly what you were talking about with tribal people is what I was thinking about. So there really is that process for honkies too of establishing kinship, although sometimes it's not in the same way with you as clan and family, but there is that process that traditional communities have to place you somewhere. You have to fit into there. The military's the same way, they have to decide what rank you would be if you were military or they can't deal with you. I think this is a very common concept in a lot of communities, it's just how the fictive kinship works.
Anne-
Well, If you don't introduce yourself in those terms, than, if you think about it, you are essentializing yourself. The situation is, you are an Indian, and I am a scientist. So, if that's not the dichotomy you want to be operating, you can find another way to position yourself in relation to others…
MS-
One of the things, this is a little bit off the track but maybe not too far, one of the things that I thought about when you were going through your Janet Spectre's four things she learned as a student, Indians don't do archaeology… well they do. One of the things that professional archaeologists can offer is to be a resource. Where the sites are. I've seen lots of Indian people who want to go visit sites to be shown where they are. They don't want to be told necessarily what the archaeologist think about, they just want a chance to investigate it on their own. Often they'll ask to be left alone, knowing very well the archaeologists won't be able to quit talking if they will listen, but I think that's true for a lot of descendent communities who may not know where the ancestral properties are. We are a resource that can provide access to those properties. And then if we're asked to or if we want to, just get out of the way and people can get what they want out of it.
Joe Watkins-
Sure. I think now there has been a larger tendency for tribal people to use archaeologists. Again, Armand Menthorn (?) will tell you, they have archaeologists on staff and they recognize that archaeologists have something that they can offer to the tribal group. Protect the environment of the past and the environment of the present and they recognize the utility of archaeologists and archaeology. They're not blatantly opposed to archaeology, but one has to de-politicize it in order for them actually to make use of it the way that they can. And mostly it is on a personal basis. The archaeologist can help tribal people and often does.
MS-Some of the groups I worked with, they are doing research, but on their own terms. Not in sort of, standard archaeological terms. I had a chance to be a guest on a trip with a group of Siya (?) elders who went down to Pakimay (?) because they were explicitly investigating some aspect of their origin story that had to do with some groups going farther south and they spent a lot of time on it and they concluded that this is probably not where one of those groups went. I don't know how they concluded that, I wasn't part of that, but they were explicitly doing research, but on their own terms, but we were able to help facilitate that.
Joe W-
I think that's one thing that I didn't speak to, but I'm interested in looking at is, again, providing these fundamental archaeological skills to indigenous groups and letting them do their own archaeology. Because indigenous archaeology has got to be more than just indigenous people doing archaeology.
MS-
I wouldn't call what they were doing archaeology, it was research, but it wasn't archaeology.
Joe W-
Sure. Yeah, I understand that, but this is the indigenous use of archaeology I see that's going to evolve within 5 or 10 years and I'm not sure that I will recognize it, but we'll just see what it looks like. A lot of tribal groups do make use of archaeologists for the reason you're talking about, because they know where the sites are, or they know how to access sites. For me a lot of times it's just that they can use me as a resource to find out whether this one archaeologist up in Kansas is doing a good job or whether he's just working for the Pawnee or whether he's actually looking for the Kiowa presence in Kansas or Colorado. They do use us, obviously.