{"id":359,"date":"2012-04-03T13:02:53","date_gmt":"2012-04-03T17:02:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.vassar.edu\/anth331\/?p=359"},"modified":"2012-04-18T15:20:50","modified_gmt":"2012-04-18T19:20:50","slug":"discussion-topic-archaeology-as-social-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/anth331\/discussion-topic-archaeology-as-social-justice\/","title":{"rendered":"Discussion Topic: Archaeology as Social Justice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The topic of my discussion was \u201cArchaeology as Social Justice.\u201d\u00a0 This week, we dealt with defining some more theoretical terms relevant to the idea of community and public archaeology.\u00a0 Some other goals of this week\u2019s discussion were to answer questions like <em>How can we address issues of class using archaeology?\u00a0 What is the difference between critical archaeology and post-processual archaeology?<\/em>\u00a0 For critical theory, we looked to Randall McGuire, a professor of Anthropology and archaeologist who received his PhD at the University of Arizona in 1982.\u00a0 Critical theory stems from consumerism: fed products that ultimately perpetuate class structure.\u00a0 In critical theory, class relations are reorganized by ideology.\u00a0 An example of this dominant ideology is meritocracy, which is the idea that people start on the same playing field and succeed by solely by working hard.\u00a0 Ultimately, the goal is to bring these ideologies to light so that people can recognize and understand them.<\/p>\n<p>Processual archaeology is essentially deductive positivist theory, which adopts a strict way of performing scientific study.\u00a0 The idea here is to create studies that are replicable with refutable or non-refutable hypotheses.\u00a0 Processual archaeology seeks to explain why societies are more complex than others.\u00a0 Post-processualism emerges against processual archaeology, coming out of post-structural thought.\u00a0 Post-processualism is kind of like an umbrella of techniques against processualism, including meaning, critique, and transformation.\u00a0 The critique aspect of post-processualism deals with the researcher knowing his or her biases and understanding context.\u00a0 Transformation of post-processualism deals with creating a new practice.<\/p>\n<p>We talked a little bit about feminist literature and research relating to archaeology, which largely deals with the intersecting of categories of experience with each other and the relationships among domination, power, and balance.\u00a0 Marxist archaeology puts class above other categories of experience.\u00a0 Indigenous archaeology intersects with some of the feminist perspective but asks the question, how do these result in colonization?\u00a0 Ultimately it is important to understand how we create and use knowledge.\u00a0 In order to transform archaeology, we must understand how we create knowledge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The topic of my discussion was \u201cArchaeology as Social Justice.\u201d\u00a0 This week, we dealt with defining some more theoretical terms relevant to the idea of community and public archaeology.\u00a0 Some other goals of this week\u2019s discussion were to answer questions &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/anth331\/discussion-topic-archaeology-as-social-justice\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26317,26312],"tags":[27662,27661,27660],"class_list":["post-359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archaeology-as-social-justicethe-archaeology-of-race-class-and-gender","category-discussion-topics","tag-critical-theory","tag-post-processual","tag-processual-archaeology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/anth331\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/anth331\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/anth331\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/anth331\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/anth331\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/anth331\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":463,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/anth331\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions\/463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/anth331\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/anth331\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/anth331\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}