Pluralism and Labor in Overseas Chinese Railroad Camps

Summary

How do issues of labor and pluralism show up in communities from non-Western backgrounds? How is archaeological interpretation transformed when pluralism is built into, and articulated in, the dominant intellectual traditions of the people being studied? And how can archaeological investigations take into account labor in its varied relations with sociality and emotionality?In this paper I describe how Overseas Chinese laborers along the first transcontinental railroad were drawn into capitalist labor relations without being defined by them. Using the comparative method, I draw out three broad, interrelated contrasts: relational personhood and possessive individualism; money and capital; and finally, filiality and wage labor.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Labor and Plurality: Excavating the Political Economy of Identity   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2014

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): SYM-58,06