Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America
Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America
复制标题
文化接触还是殖民主义？
DOI：
--
复制
发表时间：
2005
影响因子：
2.8
通讯作者：
Stephen W. Silliman
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Stephen W. Silliman
在过去的二十年里，经常被称为“接触时期”的考古学在北美考古学中扮演了重要角色。本文通过对“接触”与“殖民主义”之间的术语和解释上的区别，考察了考古学“文化接触”研究的概念基础。这两个术语的混淆，以及历史经验的领域，已经证明不利于考古学家试图了解土著和殖民历史。针对这一困境，本文认为将殖民主义视为文化接触存在三个问题：（1）强调短期接触而不是长期纠缠，忽视了殖民主义的过程和多样形式以及土著人民经历殖民主义的多方面方式;（2）淡化互动的严重性和政治权力的根本不同层次，这并没有揭示土著人如何应对复杂的社会地形，但很大程度上使“接触”研究远离非洲奴役和散居考古学的相关研究重点;（3）将预定义的文化特征置于创造性或克理奥尔化的文化产品之上，忽视了社会主体的日常生活方式，忽视了物质文化可以揭示，也可以隐藏，文化变化和连续性的微妙之处。
What has frequently been termed “contact-period“ archaeology has assumed a prominent role in North American archaeology in the last two decades. This article examines the conceptual foundation of archaeological “culture contact” studies by sharpening the terminological and interpretive distinction between “contact” and “colonialism.” The conflation of these two terms, and thereby realms of historical experience, has proven detrimental to archaeologists’ attempts to understand indigenous and colonial histories. In light of this predicament, the article tackles three problems with treating colonialism as culture contact: (1) emphasizing short-term encounters rather than long-term entanglements, which ignores the process and heterogeneous forms of colonialism and the multifaceted ways that indigenous people experienced them; (2) down-playing the severity of interaction and the radically different levels of political power, which does little to reveal how Native people negotiated complex social terrain but does much to distance “contact” studies from what should be a related research focus in the archaeology of African enslavement and diaspora; and (3) privileging predefined cultural traits over creative or creolized cultural products, which loses sight of the ways that social agents lived their daily lives and that material culture can reveal, as much as hide, the subtleties of cultural change and continuity.