What is Archaeological Ethnography?

Hamilakis, Yannis; Anagnostopoulos, Aris

doi:10.1179/175355309x457150

Cited by 129 publications

(77 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Referring to our own histories with things, we know/remember how it feels to be in a certain relation to things. Does this imply a more intersubjective and introspective researching and writing position than that of archaeological ethnography (Robin and Rothschild 2002, Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulus 2009, Meskell 2009, 2012? I think not, certainly considering the direction ethnography itself has taken in the last three decades or so.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Love & loss in the 1960s

Byrne

2013

International Journal of Heritage Studies

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Love & loss in the 1960s

Byrne

2013

International Journal of Heritage Studies

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“…One may object that over the course of institutional anthropology's lifetime, such comparisons have been at times fashionable, as with the direct historical approach or the analogism of ethnoarchaeology. However, after the critiques of Fabian and Wolf, the first method has fallen out of favor, and the second has been carefully qualified and redirected (Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos 2009). A major implication of their critiques was that all of anthropology had been involved in a project of constructing living prehistories, or mapping the premodern.…”

Section: Ancients and Modernsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity

Dawdy¹

2010

Current Anthropology

263

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The University of Chicago Press and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Current Anthropology. This essay identifies the potential of an emerging archaeological turn for anthropology-and for archaeology itself. I argue that despite the critiques of the past two decades, the temporality of modernity and a belief in its exceptionalism still structure much of anthropological thought, as exemplified in the division of archaeology and ethnography and in the subfield of historical archaeology and its dystopic treatment of modern urban ruins. But alternative temporalities and analytical possibilities are also emerging, ones attentive to the folding and recycling of cultural elements that Walter Benjamin described with such philosophical depth. On the ground, Benjamin's insights can be put to use by paying greater attention to the spatiotemporal dynamics of capitalism's creative destruction, to the social life of ruins, and to projects that challenge the linear divide between modernity and antiquity. Releasing anthropology from progressive time necessarily entails a reintegration of the subfields and a direct engagement with recent ruins. What! Ruins so soon! (Alexis de Tocqueville (2003 [1835])Alexis de Tocqueville was speaking of a ruined log cabin he stumbled on in his exploration of the woods of New York. He marveled at the restless American frontier and was enchanted by the oddness of new ruins. Until recently, such enchantment has been rare. More often, Western observers of recent ruins have found them banal, tragic, or noisome. Romantic views are usually reserved for the ruins of a more distant past. One of the unique attributes of Walter Benjamin was his ability to turn romanticism on its head. His aesthetic contemplation of the recent ruins of the shopping arcades of Paris and the artifacts they housed in dusty whatnot shops inspired him to rethink the temporality of capitalism and the dialectic of history, among other things (Benjamin 1999;Benjamin and Tiedemann 1999). The resurrection of Benjamin as a philosophical provocateur in the present intellectual moment is not unrelated to a growing aesthetic sensibility that shares Benjamin's and de Tocqueville's fascination with recent ruins. Nor does it seem unrelated to a growing cross-disciplinary interest in archaeology, a practice grounded in the study of ruins. Intensely personal encounters, both mediated and immediate, with large-scale recent ruins such as those of 9/11, the 2004 tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War, and the blooming global rust belt of postindustrial cities may also feed this preoccupation. In Benjamin's terms, ruins ar...

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“…Her Australian project gleaned insights from a breadth of random conversations and structured interviews, framing oral history less as a single component of the project than an ethnographic dimension of the entire research process, and, by placing such ethnographic method at the heart of the project's research, she argues that it provides more equity between community stakeholders and archaeologists. Certainly most archaeologists have such ethnographic encounters by chance in the course of fieldwork, but scholars increasingly work to create the potential for those encounters and relationships as a part of their research (Atalay 2006;Castaneda and Matthews 2008;Hammilakis andAnagnostopoulos 2009). Lynn Meskell (2005) champions just such an "improvisational" ethnography, yet she stresses that such contextually specific ethnographic insight must always be a conscious dimension of project methodology and not simply a serendipitous chat with a thoughtful community member.…”

Section: Talking About Thingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Rhetoric of Things: Historical Archaeology and Oral History

Mullins

2014

Hist Arch

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This paper examines precisely how objects assume meanings in archaeological interpretation and a dimension of everyday life and experience that exists on the fringes of self-consciousness. Archaeologists interpret the meanings of material things in ways that have often sought to erase the ambiguities of material symbolism in conventional linear narratives, but oral memories routinely struggle with the meaning of things and underscore their complex and ambiguous meanings. The paper examines how the contributors to this volume illuminate the implications of oral memories on broader material culture scholarship both within and beyond historical archaeology.

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What is Archaeological Ethnography?

Cited by 129 publications

References 32 publications

Love & loss in the 1960s

Love & loss in the 1960s

Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity

The Rhetoric of Things: Historical Archaeology and Oral History

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