In Relational Engagements of the Indigenous Americas, Melissa R. Baltus and Sarah E. Baires critically examine the current understanding of relationality in the Americas, covering a diverse range of topics from Indigenous cosmologies to the life-world of the Inuit dog. The contributors to this wide-ranging edited collection interrogate and discuss the multiple natures of relational ontologies, touching on the ever-changing, fluid, and varied ways that people, both alive and dead, relate and related to their surrounding world. While the case studies presented in this collection all stem from the New World, the Indigenous histories and archaeological interpretations vary widely and the boundaries of relational theory challenge current preconceptions about earlier ways of life in the Indigenous Americas.
The future of humanity is urban, and knowledge of urbanism’s deep past is critical for us all to navigate that future. The time has come for archaeologists to rethink this global phenomenon by asking what urbanism is and, more to the point, was. Can we truly understand ancient urbanism by only asking after the human element, or are the properties and qualities of landscapes, materials, and atmospheres equally causal? The nine authors of New Materialisms Ancient Urbanisms seek less anthropocentric answers to questions about the historical relationships between urbanism and humanity in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. They analyze the movements and flows of materials, things, phenomena, and beings—human and otherwise—as these were assembled to produce the kinds of complex, dense, and stratified relationships that we today label urban. In so doing, the book emerges as a work of both theory and historical anthropology. It breaks new ground in the archaeology of urbanism, building on the latest ‘New Materialist’, ‘relational-ontological’, and ‘realist’ trends in social theory. This book challenges a new generation of students to think outside the box, and provides scholars of urbanism, archaeology, and anthropology with a fresh perspective on the development of urban society.
This volume provides fresh insight into northern human–animal relations and illustrates the breadth and practical utility of archaeological human–animal studies. It surveys recent archaeological research in northern North America and Eurasia that frames human–animal relations as not merely economically exploitative but often socially complex and deeply meaningful, and attuned to the intelligence and agency of nonhuman prey and domesticates. The case studies sample a wide swath of the circumpolar region, from Alaska, Nunavut, and Greenland to northern Fennoscandia and western Siberia, and span sites, finds, and scenarios ranging in age from the Mesolithic to the twenty-first century. Many taxa on which northern lives hinged figure in these analyses, including large marine mammals, polar bear, reindeer, marine fish, and birds, and are variously approached from relational, multispecies, semiotic, osteobiographical, and political economic perspectives. Animals themselves are represented by osteological remains, harvesting gear, and depictions of animal bodies that include zoomorphic figurines, petroglyphs, ornamentation, and intricate portrayals of human–animal harvesting encounters. Far from settling the problem of how archaeologists should approach northern human–animal relations, these chapters reveal the irreducible complexity of northern worlds and highlight the diversity of human and nonhuman animal lives. This book will be of particular interest to northern archaeologists and zooarchaeologists, and all those interested in the possibilities of a multispecies approach to the archaeological record.
Scholars and commentators have noted the frequent inefficacy of “development,” and criticized the power relations it entrenches. Aware of these problems, some North Americans choose to disengage from transnational work. But the reality is that we cannot avoid participating in global networks that affect people in many countries, and there are vast inequalities in access to resources that need to be addressed. Through philosophical insights, narrative accounts, and testimony from community members, we can discover a path between development and disengagement, through which relational morality and meaningful action can enrich intercultural collaboration and yield many fruits.
This book, in two volumes, breathes fresh air empirically, methodologically, and theoretically into understanding the rich ceremonial lives, the philosophical-religious knowledge, and the impressive material feats and labor organization that distinguish Hopewell Indians of central Ohio and neighboring regions during the first centuries CE. The first volume defines cross-culturally, for the first time, the “ritual drama” as a genre of social performance. It reconstructs and compares parts of 14 such dramas that Hopewellian and other Woodland-period peoples performed in their ceremonial centers to help the soul-like essences of their deceased make the journey to an afterlife. The second volume builds and critiques ten formal cross-cultural models of “personhood” and the “self” and infers the nature of Scioto Hopewell people’s ontology. Two facets of their ontology are found to have been instrumental in their creating the intercommunity alliances and cooperation and gathering the labor required to construct their huge, multicommunity ceremonial centers: a relational, collective concept of the self defined by the ethical quality of the relationships one has with other beings, and a concept of multiple soul-like essences that compose a human being and can be harnessed strategically to create familial-like ethical bonds of cooperation among individuals and communities. The archaeological reconstructions of Hopewellian ritual dramas and concepts of personhood and the self, and of Hopewell people’s strategic uses of these, are informed by three large surveys of historic Woodland and Plains Indians’ narratives, ideas, and rites about journeys to afterlives, the creatures who inhabit the cosmos, and the nature and functions of soul-like essences, coupled with rich contextual archaeological and bioarchaeological-taphonomic analyses. The bioarchaeological-taphonomic method of l’anthropologie de terrain, new to North American archaeology, is introduced and applied. In all, the research in this book vitalizes a vision of an anthropology committed to native logic and motivation and skeptical of the imposition of Western world views and categories onto native peoples.
In The Paradoxes of Indian American Complicity: On the Racial Sidelines, Kavitha Koshy offers a timely exploration of Indian immigrant racialization at the turn of the twenty-first century. This book is a call to action for an anti-racist, decolonial practice among differentially racialized peoples. The findings of the research uncover the paradoxes of claiming deracialized, neoliberal identities, while engaging in racial contestation, benefiting from selective immigration while occupying a racialized-human capital-labor "slot" in global capitalism, and experiencing "racialized otherness" through everyday racism, despite proximity to whiteness. Koshy develops a typology of Indian immigrant racialized subjectivity amid anti-Blackness, whiteness, caste-ness, Islamophobia, "forever foreignness," and neoliberal logic.
Policymakers, practitioners, and educators frequently group Latina/o immigrant adolescents within a single homogenous category, thus creating a problem in understanding their diverse experiences. To explore these diverse Latina/o adolescent experiences this dissertation cross-culturally compares patterns of ethnic identity and acculturation across a group of Indigenous (Yucatec Maya) immigrant Latino/a adolescents in the U.S. with Yucatec Maya adolescents residing in Mexico and with non-Indigenous immigrant Latina/o adolescents in the U.S. How do ethnic identity, acculturation levels, perceived discrimination, and sense of school belonging compare across Yucatec Maya adolescents in the U.S., non-Yucatec Maya Latina/o adolescents in the U.S., and Yucatec Maya adolescents still in Mexico? What roles do individual factors such as gender, language, generation level, and external factors such as family, cultural practices, ethnic community networks, and peer relationships take in the adolescents' lives in the U.S. and in Yucatan? The study draws on ethnic identity and acculturation frameworks as they relate to perceived discrimination (the study of how the person targeted by discrimination reacts and interprets these acts) and to the adolescents' feelings of belonging at school. The participants included 65 Latina/o non-Yucatec Maya heritage adolescents living in the Los Angeles, California area, 66 Mexican Maya heritage immigrant adolescents living in San Francisco, California or the Los Angeles, California area, and 70 Mexican Maya heritage adolescents living in Yucatan, Mexico. All 201 adolescents took a survey incorporating measures of ethnic identity, acculturation, perceived discrimination, and school belonging. Thirty-eight of the adolescents participated in semi-structured interviews that explored attitudes toward school, culture, discrimination, family, community, and peers influencing the adolescents. Quantitative findings expose the intra-group differences across Yucatec Maya and non-Yucatec Maya Latina/os adolescents and the discrimination faced by the growing population of Yucatec Maya adolescents within the Latino/a immigrant groups. Language, gender, and generation all play roles in the amount of peer and adult perceived discrimination experienced and the distress caused by perceived discrimination across Indigenous and non-Indigenous adolescents. The quantitative findings ultimately show that Indigenous adolescents have different psychological and cultural experiences when compared to non-Indigenous Latina/o adolescents. Being Yucatec Maya, first generation, male, and/or knowledgeable of Maya would put the adolescent at a higher risk of experiencing more perceived discrimination acts and distress. More perceived discrimination from adults also relates to adolescents in the U.S. (both Yucatec Maya and non-Yucatec Maya) resulting in lower levels of school belonging. The qualitative findings across the non-Yucatec Maya adolescents, Yucatec Maya adolescents in the U.S., and Yucatec Maya adolescents in Mexico reveal an in depth look at multiple perspectives surrounding cultural and ethnic identity, cultural practices, American culture, discrimination, school, family, and peers. Specifically for the Yucatec Maya adolescents, the interviews provided a lens into their sentiments about the Maya culture and preserving the culture for future generations. The interviews reflect the agency, reclamation of culture, and lived experiences that make up the Indigenous and non-Indigenous adolescents of this study. The study exposes the Yucatec Maya youth's resilient Indigenous identity that emerges regardless of the discrimination they face from non-Latina/o/non-Mexican groups as well as from their own Latina/o/Mexican communities. This understanding is needed to provide more comprehensive resources and services to these adolescents.
The author provides methods for the study of American Indian ethnographic texts and disputes some previous assumptions about the sources of the stories in Son of Old Man Hat.
This volume examines how pre-Columbian societies in the Americas envisioned their cosmos and iteratively modeled it through the creation of particular objects and places. It emphasizes that American societies did this to materialize overarching models and templates for the shape and scope of the cosmos, the working definition of cosmoscape. Noting a tendency to gloss over the ways in which ancestral Americans envisioned the cosmos as intertwined and animated, the authors examine how cosmoscapes are manifested archaeologically, in the forms of objects and physically altered landscapes. This book’s chapters, therefore, offer case studies of cosmoscapes that present themselves as forms of architecture, portable artifacts, and transformed aspects of the natural world. In doing so, it emphasizes that the creation of cosmoscapes offered a means of reconciling peoples experiences of the world with their understandings of them.
