Gentility (a.k.a., "Victorian culture") was the preeminent model of propriety in mid-and late-19th-century [Historical archaeology, gentility, California, African-Americans] Although it is a relatively young endeavor, historical archaeology has developed a multiplicity of approaches from the anthropological and generalizing to the playful and particular (e.g., Orser 1996, Praetzellis, ed. 1998, respectively). Some feel that this diversity represents a loss of focus and an intellectual dead-end (Binford quoted in Thurman 1998); however, we see it as a healthy dichotomy that has created a productive tension within the field. This paper is a study in contextualization in which we seek to understand mundane Victorian artifacts by reference to the circumstances of their use. Specifically, we will examine how the meanings of the material culture icons of "gentility" (Bushman 1992) were created and recreated by various social groups in 19 thcentury California. In so doing, we focus on "the local and the diverse as against the grand narratives of cross-cultural anthropology" (Hodder 1999:153). Our approach is unashamedly historical and contextual. Rather than beginning with an interpretive framework that is taken to be cross-culturally applicable (e.g., Winer and Deetz 1990, Deetz 1996), we establish a series of local contexts and then seek to understand how individuals used material culture to pursue their own political, social, and ethnic agendas 2 in these particular places and times. In this way, we hope to avoid what Gosden (2000) calls the "static and monolithic view of colonialism" in which hegemonic domination is presented as unchallenged and material culture is to be understood through the lens provided by a single ideology.
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