The social sciences have experienced a number of rapid and expansive theoretical developments over the course of the last hundred years. From fighting for their existence as an intellectual endeavor within academia and the university during the 19th century, to experiencing a series of popular and wide scale adoptions with such theoretical epistemologies as positivism and behaviorism, the social sciences are currently at an epistemological crossroads. In the aftermath of such powerful critiques as deconstructionism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and the Frankfurt School’s singular attack on positivism and the Vienna School, the social sciences are struggling to find their epistemological footing. This is particularly true within the field of anthropology, including its daughter discipline of archaeology, for not only has the theoretical foundations of the discipline been called into question, but the field’s subject matter – its source of data and existence – has also been brought to bear. In an effort to reestablish some form of theoretical footing, the social sciences have begun to open their epistemological doors to cultures and ways of knowing historically allowed to only represent data. In this process, indigenous peoples and their epistemology have played a key role.

Over the past two decades a significant amount of academic energy has been invested in professing the urgent need and essentialness for developing what some have called an indigenous archaeology. Books, essays, and academic conferences have discussed, defined, and designed a multiplicity of paths towards this goal. Very little effort has been expanded, however, in seriously examining the intellectual viability or the social and cultural desirability of this project. In a recent paper entitled Aboriginalism and the Problems of Indigenous Archaeology Robert McGhee attempts to examine this theoretical endeavor within the field of archaeology.

Using the term Aboriginalism in a broad sense, largely based on the model of Said’s (1978) Orientalismand referring to the concept that indigenous societies and cultures possess qualities that are fundamentally different from those of non-Aboriginal peoples, McGhee argues that such a project is misguided if not impossible. Furthermore, McGhee argues that although the movement has wide currency in European and North American academic and public thought, it bears little resemblance to any reality outside the world of scholars and the politicians who appropriate academic theories. Throughout the paper McGhee maintains that the idea of “indigenous archaeology” is very much an artifact of social science’s search for an epistemological footing, and that archaeologists’ acceptance or promotion of a distinct form of their discipline that is appropriate to the study of indigenous people’s history implicates the discipline in the production and maintenance of the dubious discourse on Aboriginalism. Finally, McGhee also links archaeologists to the potentially negative impact that this discourse may have on the contemporary and future well-being of indigenous peoples and their communities.

It is important to stress that McGhee is not questioning the many beneficial archaeological projects that encourage the participation and collaboration of indigenous people, or that promote the use of archaeological findings and interpretations in indigenous programs of education and cultural revival. Rather, he argues that difficulties arise when archaeologists accede to claims of indigenous exceptionalism and incorporate such assumptions into archaeological practice.

McGhee argues that the assumption of exceptionalism allows indigenous individuals and groups to assume rights over their history that are not assumed by, or available to, non-indigenous individuals and groups. These privileges go beyond those that are normally accorded to the governments of sovereign territories, and include proprietary rights over archaeological and other heritage materials, jurisdiction over how these materials are investigated, and claims to authority over the dissemination of information recovered by archaeological and historical research. It is here that McGhee’s argument fails, for indigenous individuals and groups are not asking for exceptionalism, but rather equality. That is, the way out of social science’s epistemological backwater is through an opening up of the epistemological and theoretical discourse. By including indigenous people’s epistemologies within the social science knowledgebase, we can begin to rebuild our epistemological foundation. It is in this vein that people have argued for an indigenous archaeology, not in terms of exceptionalism as McGhee contends.

As Jay F. Custer (2005: 3) correctly argues “Archaeologists have created a thought world which serves to support their own power and privilege, harms the interests of American Indian people and aids the ongoing cultural genocide focused on Native Americans.”

Whether seen as an instrument of colonialism or simply as a tool for sustaining academic life and reputation, much of contemporary archaeology serves to deprive indigenous peoples of their right to define their own place in the modern world.

Beyond the sharing of authority over the use of archaeological resources and the information derived from them, indigenous archaeology must also require what Ridington (1999:20) calls “sharing theoretical authority” by moving beyond the canons/cannons of formal academic discourse. Such projects strip archaeology of its so-called epistemological authority, and accord it at most equal weight relative to indigenous epistemologies. As McGhee’s article demonstrates, reaching such an epistemological dialectic is still a ways off. However, the project is essential if we are to move forward not only in terms of archaeology, but also science and it’s epistemology.

References

Custer, Jay F. 2005. Ethics and the Hyperreality of the Archaeological Thought World. North American Archaeologist 26(1):3-27.

McGhee, Robert. 2008. Aboriginalism and the Problems of Indigenous Archaeology. American Antiquity 73(4):579-597.

Ridington, Robin. 1999. Theorizing Coyote’s Cannon: Sharing Stories with Thomas King. In Theorizing the Americanist Tradition (Anthropological Horizons),edited by Lisa Philips Valentine and Regna Darnell, pp. 19-37. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

Tags: archaeology  anthropology  social sciences  theory  epistemology  discourse  aboriginalism