The Politics of Practice Theory: Feminist Archaeology Meets Marx and Bourdieu

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Transformation of Historical Archaeology: Papers in Honor of Charles E Orser, Jr" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

            In his influential book Race and Practice in Archaeological Interpretation, Charles Orser provided arguably the clearest and most powerful explanation of the usefulness of Bourdieu’s practice theory for historical archaeologists.  Despite the use of practice theory for more than two decades now, most historical archaeologists who cite or rely on it fail to grasp the decidedly leftist political persuasion that informs Bourdieu’s body of work.  In this paper, I reflect on Bourdieu’s feminist analysis of Kabyle society in Algeria and his early ethnographic study of village life in France in light of his own sociopolitical and academic journeys.  I close by showing how theoretical ideas from Chuck Orser, Marx, and Bourdieu are brought to bear on feminist archaeology in my own study of French communities in Upper Louisiana.    

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2019   •
• The Transformation of Historical Archaeology: Papers in Honor of Charles E Orser, Jr

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 190