Entanglement and tinkering
The concept of `entanglement' in contact encounters emphasizes the power and agency of individuals, particularly Indigenous leaders, to confront colonial and capitalist hegemonic forces. Consequently, entanglement presents a necessary comparison of scale, a link between the situated actions of...
| Published in: | Journal of Social Archaeology |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
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SAGE Publications
2009
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1469605308099371 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1469605308099371 |
| Summary: | The concept of `entanglement' in contact encounters emphasizes the power and agency of individuals, particularly Indigenous leaders, to confront colonial and capitalist hegemonic forces. Consequently, entanglement presents a necessary comparison of scale, a link between the situated actions of individuals and the broader patterns of history. While the former is theoretically complex, the latter is often contrasted as a static and stagnant essentialization. Naïvely invoked, long-term structured history simply replaces normative `culture' as a backdrop for individual agency with `identity', a modern-sounding recreation of a simplified model of history. That historical trends can cross generations is clear, but their source is likely to include the non-discursive aesthetics in the structure of agency-structure models. Rather than static, such capacities are inertial, changing only with the substantial consensus of many individuals. Northern Tsimshian post-contact archaeology has evidence of both strategic action and aesthetic shifts, presenting a model of structural history that includes evidence of entanglement at many scales, including in the most tenacious aspects of identity. These data suggest that there is a significant role for archaeology in unravelling the complex, and at times contradictory, historical frameworks found in contact scenarios. |
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