The Archaeology of Common Sense
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)
Rather than colloquial wisdom, Clifford Geertz argued, common sense was culturally constructed, historically contingent, and in need of querying. As such, like myth or art or knowledge, common sense was a cultural system in need of anthropological attention. Though his concern was for the ethnographic present, investigators of ancient and historic remains have much to contribute to common sense's analysis. Their expansive time frames can reveal the processes that work so assiduously to turn history into human nature. In this session, contributors are asked to identify and interrogate contemporary commonsensical notion—about gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, time, etc.—that find their way into scientific studies and/or popular presentations of the past. This naturalization of the cultural is not without consequences, and contributors may also deliberate about the socio-political effects, whether intended or not, of reifying common sense. Finally, as a counter to universalizing and presentist narratives of the past, contributors are encouraged to offer evidence from their contextualized archaeological and bioarchaeological studies that highlight the varied ways to be human.
Other Keywords
bioarchaeology •
Mexico •
Migration •
Religion •
Theory •
Taphonomy •
Cultural Identity •
Repatriation •
Cultural Heritage •
Native Americans
Geographic Keywords
South America •
Mesoamerica •
North America - Southwest •
North America - NW Coast/Alaska
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-8 of 8)
- Documents (8)
- The Common Sense of Institutions and Modalities of Happiness (2015)
- The Edge of Humanity: Why Commonsensical Notions about Nature Impede our Understandings of Structural Violence in the Arizona Desert (2015)
- Love Never Dies? (2015)
- On the need for more "gut theory" in academic archaeology (2015)
- Quantifying Indianness: Commonsensical practice in U.S. bioarchaeology and skeletal biology (2015)
- Too Much Common Sense,Not Enough Critical Reflection (2015)
- Turning Privilege into "Common-Sense": Truth-Claims and Control of Cultural Heritage (2015)
- Women, Reproduction, and Fertility: How "Common-Sense" Assumptions of the Present Filter into the Mesoamerican Past (2015)