Diasporic Tensions of Historical Framing and Material Process in Mauritian Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper examines the tension between historical framing and material process in the context of colonial labor migrations, using archaeology of domestic and settlement landscapes in nineteenth-century Mauritius as a case study. Historical archaeology has the benefit of being able to trace the movement of people through multiple literary, oral, and material sources. Historical archaeologies of diaspora have tended to tack between quantitative studies of imported and locally made goods and qualitative studies that draw analogy to specific diasporic homelands, despite the diverse geographic origins of immigrants. While nineteenth-century Mauritius is historically framed by French and British colonialism, encompassing agro-capitalism and exclusionary landownership, we must not forget that the majority of the colony’s population were enslaved and indentured laborers in diaspora. I argue that the island landscape and its material record were shaped more by diasporic people than settler colonizers, and that we have the luxury of taking the presence of such populations as fact rather than complicating the methodology of “identifying” diaspora. Doing so allows us to ask key questions about non-Western material identity practices and social boundary making that we might otherwise miss when relying on historical colonial framings.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36968.0