Interpolating Stakeholders: The Industrial Complex of Resource Managment and Enterprise

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Landscapes in Dispute, Territorial Futures: Restitution and Reparation in the Face of Enclosure, Industrialization, and Extractivism", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Throughout the 20th century the predominant North American economies have developed bureaucratic regulatory systems for reducing and mitigating impacts to landscapes and the environment. These systems are meant to strike a balance between absolute economic development and absolute preservation. While many seemingly progressive policies developed were produced, a deeper examination of them will demonstrate how through these policies our understanding of resources has been apprehended by a dominant economic ideology. This paper will demonstrate how present economic systems constrain human relations with landscapes and resources in the interest of reproducing oppressive economic systems. It will in-turn demonstrate how global markets and extractive enterprises have historically limited the capacities of distinct groups to meaningfully exercise agency. These ideological frameworks produced by an industrial legacy will offer perspectives on how communities are forced to function with both environments and territories in ways which contradict their cultural needs and interests.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• Landscapes in Dispute, Territorial Futures: Restitution and Reparation in the Face of Enclosure, Industrialization, and Extractivism

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow