Creating Insiders and Outsiders through Language

Summary

Anthropologists use discourse analyses to study how language is used within cultures and across cultural boundaries as a way to distinguish between the cultural “insiders” and “outsiders.” This study investigates how language creates insiders and outsiders in archaeology. Textbooks and primary literature are used in the professionalization of students from undergraduate through doctoral programs, helping to drive the transition from novice to professional status in archaeology. Scholars within the academy create theory and associated terminology within paradigms that is passed down to their students, a cultural subgroup, and is disseminated throughout the professional literature. Language differences among avocational, applied and theoretical archaeology are demonstrated through the analysis of how they discuss the data sets, such as artifacts, settlements and regional patterns, that are common to all these groups. Newsletters, site reports, journal articles, public talks and conference papers are used in this analysis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Collaborations and Competition between Professionals and Nonprofessionals in the Production of Archaeological Knowledge in the Americas

Keywords

Spatial Coverage