Exploring Age in the Chinese Diaspora

Summary

While the archaeology of the Chinese diaspora has grown and expanded to incorporate numerous realms of study, most work has continued to focus on ethnicity as the key marker of Chinese identity, culture, and artifacts. More recently, archaeologists have explored the intersectionality of gender and ethnicity and class and ethnicity at Chinese sites. Age, however, is underexplored throughout archaeology in general, and completely unaddressed in archaeological research into the Chinese diaspora. Since numerous social and legal restraints contributed to a rapidly aging Chinese population from the 1850s to the 1920s, age should be considered as an important aspect of Chinese ethnicity and identity. This paper explores emic conceptions of the Chinese life cycle, addresses the way it was practiced, adapted, and changed in the United States, and the way age intersects with ethnicity, gender, and class. 

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018   •
• Seeing Ethnicity?: Parsing Hybridity, Creolization and Ethnogenesis in The Archaeological Record

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 176