Turning Privilege into "Common-Sense": Truth-Claims and Control of Cultural Heritage

Summary

Over the course of the last few decades Indigenous and descendant communities have increasingly made calls for control of their own heritage, both in terms of material objects and historical narratives. While these efforts have resulted in at least some measure of success, these communities continue to occasionally face challenges from researchers, scholars, and other agents who are in positions of power that allow them to control and define what heritage consist of. In my paper I interrogate the ways that those in positions of power use language and other mechanisms to normalize and universalize what are actually very culturally dependent views on the ownership, forms, and purposes of heritage. In effect, their position of privilege gets transformed into "common sense," and culturally contingent truth claims become reasonable and shared, while the views of others are denigrated as outside of the norm, irrational, and therefore subject to skepticism. I explore this topic by looking at ongoing debates over the issue of cultural continuity, especially as it applies to repatriations, as well as recent calls for the celebration of a "shared" heritage.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeology of Common Sense   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage