Tackling Ethnicity from Anthropological, Archaeological, and Indigenous Perspectives: The Case of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians

Summary

Cultural anthropologists’ and archaeologists’ interest in theorizing identity has a long history. Anthropologists have generally focused on emic perspectives to gain insight into contemporary individual and group identity, while archaeologists have relied mainly on material culture to discern identity in the past, with relatively little attention paid to the views of contemporary peoples. When archaeological interpretations conflict with those of contemporary peoples, serious concerns arise. This is the case in Quebec where First Nations groups today claim to be the descendants of certain archaeological cultures that the archaeologists have attributed to someone else, and are thus denied what they consider as their cultural heritage. In this paper, we review ways in which identity has been theorized by cultural anthropologists and archaeologists in the in the last 30 years. We then consider the implications of identity and ethnicity theories in contemporary contexts (e.g., tribal and inter-tribal relations, land claims, heritage management) using the case study of the ethnic identity of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage