Module 8: Material Culture and Ethnicity: Ethnic Markers
Reading: Deetz, pp. 187-211
Deetz, "Parting Ways": Did you like it? Do you feel that you learned something from it? Like what?
What is Deetz's approach to ethnicity in "Parting Ways":
- Primordial/ isolationist?
- Interaction/instrumentalist?
- Power/domination?
Primordial/ isolationist? How do you know? On p. 200, he looks for elements of African culture: "What degree of African culture survival can be detected and described when dealing with the material remains of African-Americans at an earlier time in the country's history?"
Does Deetz find what he believes to be elements of African culture? Yes:
- Room size: 12' sq vs. 16' sq
- Settlement pattern: clustered vs. dispersed houses
- Food remains: chopped vs. sawed bones, emphasis on cow's feet
- Burials: area paved with fieldstone vs. tombstones and fragments of pottery (especially English white earthenware) and shattered glassware.
Would this evidence fit another of the approaches to ethnicity? Power/domination?
- Room size might indicate poverty—the need to keep heating costs at a minimum
- Cow's feet might indicate poverty
- Settlement pattern might indicate clinging together as against a defense against discrimination
- "African" burial practices to promote sense of common identity, mutual aid in the face of white discrimination
In addition, a power/domination interpretation would account for additional archaeological observations: for example, the settlement of land that is "gravelly and singularly infertile" and a symbolically polluted place where victims of smallpox had been buried the previous century.
Which interpretation do you prefer? Which would you use in a public exhibit on Parting Ways? African culture, but not just as a passive "survival," a continuation of the past; African culture used as coping mechanism.