More Than a Notion: Archaeology’s Issue with Using Social Theory to Comfortably Perceive the Lives of Marginalized Peoples

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Hood Archaeologies: Impacts of the School-to-Prison Pipeline on Archaeological Practice and Pedagogy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In archaeology, we like to theorize about those who lived at the margins of society, the systematically oppressed, the class struggle of those who existed at the bottom and the “creative” ways in which they “persisted,” “resisted,” and survived. However, despite this seemingly progressive effort to understand marginalized peoples in the past, the discipline continues to have a problem with “othering” the systematically oppressed by merely fitting the violence they experienced and the “choices” they made into trendy sociological theories. As a first-generation, mixed Xicana of Indigenous Mexican descent from the hood who escaped the school-to-prison pipeline, I found this mirage of understanding in archaeology especially deceiving; I realized that my peers and colleagues who liked to perceive the lives of people from disadvantaged backgrounds often forget that we still exist and become uncomfortable when we assert our existence and/or relay information about our lived experiences. This paper discusses my personal experience navigating higher education and career making in academic archaeology and the ways in which I have observed that the discipline continues to chronically theorize the lives of BIPOC from impoverished and marginalized backgrounds, despite claiming to want to understand the complexities of many of our ancestral pasts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Hood Archaeologies: Impacts of the School-to-Prison Pipeline on Archaeological Practice and Pedagogy   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39392.0