Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: The Intersection of Labor and Race in Intercultural Interaction

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One of the goals of historical social scientific research in the United States is to understand the complex interactions between immigrant and host communities and how they differ across space, time, ethnicity, and point-of-origin. Much of recent literature highlights how various forms of discrimination - based on perceived class, gender, or racial/ethnic distinctions - impact immigrants, and how they in turn grapple with these issues and adapt to United States society. How are different immigrant groups, from different origins, affected by the inequality and discrimination they encounter in the United States? How do they respond, in ways that secure their own social and economic needs? How has this changed over time? Archaeology is well equipped to help answer these questions. The archaeological record is not necessarily subject to the same kinds of biases as archival and oral historical sources. Thus, when combined with these sources, it provides a more complete picture of community responses to inequality and discrimination. Because the archeological record is often formed from the daily, practical, and habitual actions of human beings, archaeology is particularly well-equipped to push beyond investigations of conscious political action (such as activism and civil lawsuits) and understand how the dynamic relationships between immigrant and host communities influenced immigrants' daily lives. In addition to the research it will conduct this project will also employ and train undergraduate and graduate students in the methods of archaeological survey and excavation, and build connections with local community institutions, both as part of public outreach and as a foundation for future collaboration. The project's results will be made available through university-funded data depositories, public talks and site tours, and a thematic website dedicated to issues of Japanese American history, archaeology, and immigration.This project's Principal Investigators will, with the assistance of paid and volunteer researchers, examine how local labor hierarchies, direct and indirect racism, cultural traditions, and on-the-ground strategies deployed by first-generation Japanese American (Issei) sawmill workers are reflected in and mediated through the material evidence for daily activities. This research will be conducted at the sawmill town of Barneston, Washington (1898-1924). Barneston is an excellent location for such research; it employed a significant proportion of Issei workers and operated during a period of turbulent economic and social changes which may have affected Issei sawmill laborers. The researchers will use archaeological evidence, supplemented by written and oral histories, to reconstruct a variety of daily activities, including dining and food consumption, drinking, and gaming behavior. The goal is to determine the extent to which Issei at Barneston adopted anti-exclusion behaviors which were proposed by regional Issei leadership as a means of reducing anti-Japanese hysteria, and how such adoption varied throughout the community. In doing so, this project will add to archaeology's collective knowledge of the intersection of labor, race, and culture.