Concepts of community in the pursuit of an inclusive archaeology

Abstract

Community is a key concept that shapes how we approach our relationships with other individuals and groups. In this article, the author reviews how scholars and laypeople alike use the concept of 'community' in both theoretical and applied contexts. What do heritage professionals expect from the communities with whom they work? How do these communities define and constitute themselves? The answers to such questions have broad implications for the way that scholars interact and collaborate with stakeholders. Examples are presented from the author's archaeological projects at sites associated with communities in the African diaspora that illustrate the importance of an explicit and critical approach to the idea of 'community'. The discussion concludes with preliminary findings from an investigation of the meanings of community among black Chicagoans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Practicing Anthropology and the Politics of Engagement: 2010 Year in Review

“…Heritage projects involving archaeological research now routinely invoke the notion of “community” in concert with an implied, if not professed, commitment to engagement. Agbe‐Davies (2010b) argues that much of how community is considered by archaeologists turns on how scholars view their obligations, in both an ethical and intellectual sense; that is, she argues, archaeologists once saw their only obligation to be to scientific objectivity, but practicing archaeologists now consider their primary obligation to be to public constituencies. Agbe‐Davies explores the broad range of “communities” in African diasporan archaeologies, in which archaeologists have long partnered in various ways with literal descendant communities as well as the broader African American community that lays some claim to that diasporan heritage.…”

1 Introduction: Establishing a Bioarchaeology of Community

“…Given problems of identifying past communities in archaeology and that archaeologists have struggled with the idea of community (see for example Agbe‐Davies , ; Davis ; Janusek and Blom ; Yaeger and Canuto ), we advocate for investigating community through scholarly collaborations. The increasing emphasis on cooperation between subdisciplines is also common across modern archaeology.…”

Crafting, Community, and Collaboration: Reflections on the Ethnographic Sala Project at the Pukara Lithic Museum, Peru

“…Such uncritical approaches to “community” have been widely critiqued in the social sciences and, most germane to this discussion, within anthropological archaeology (e.g., Agbe‐Davies ; Marshall ) and heritage studies (e.g., Alivizatou ; Waterton and Smith ). Specifically, definitions that rely on a “combination of a limited set of characteristics: rural, geographically defined, traditional, working class, ethnic, face to face, and so forth” (Waterton and Smith :10) tend to homogenize the “community” in question, neglecting to leave spaces for internal conflict, power disparities, difference of opinion, and many of the other “messy” elements that are necessary to consider.…”

“…How, they asked, did this relate to what we observed in Pucará today? This craft‐centric community “coalesce[d] around shared interests, common causes or collective experiences” (Waterton and Smith :9; see also Agbe‐Davies :385; Marshall ). Pottery production and weaving provided a collective vocabulary and clear focus for the project archaeologists, local craftspeople, anthropology students from the UNAP, and other participants who might otherwise have struggled to find common ground.…”