Betwixt and Between: Ethnoarchaeology, Women, Susan Kent
The gilded Marshalltown traditionally went to the guy dressed in faded khakis, eyes squinting in a weather-beaten face, pipe in hand, trowel in the belt (Flannery 1982:267). He dug square holes to get data. Frequently, there were a few young women in his crew, women who mostly worked steadily, eyes lowered as the guy in charge ogled down their halter-tops. Summer over, some of these women worked in the lab. Photographs of field crews named young men, but less often, women (e.g., Jennings 1994:145). Linguists distinguish between unmarked, or basic, categories and marked words, with qualifiers affixed to the basic morpheme. For example, ‘man’ is the unmarked, and ‘woman’ (derived from ‘wif-man,’ that is, wife-man) is the marked word. Similarly, ‘archaeology’ functions as the basic term and ‘ethnoarchaeology’ is the marked category. It follows that a woman doing ethnoarchaeology is special, outside the basic cognitive frame ‘archaeology.’ No woman pursuing ethnoarchaeology has been recognized in standard histories of the profession. This essay will center on Susan Kent, a person who was an indefatigable fieldworker, had an enviable list of significant articles and edited volumes at her early death at 50, served the profession in national organization offices, sparked many discussions with her cogent analyses and stimulating observations, and nurtured a number of younger scholars. Her operational method of doing ethnoarchaeology focused the subfield (David and Kramer 2001:11). To no avail when it came to appointment to larger research-supporting anthropology programs to which she applied, her accomplishments seemingly could not balance what hiring committees saw as a short, plump woman whose lectures at interviews failed to dispel the negative impression. Kent’s career illuminates how fundamental to Western societies is the unmarked ‘man’ standing for ‘human being.’ Our professional community had difficulty fitting the anomalous ‘woman’ ‘ethnoarchaeologist’ into its model of the discipline, exhibiting the androcentrism that can obfuscate substantial, illuminating contributions. The hallmark of Kent’s archaeological practice was her deep, empathetic engagement with non-Western communities. Her model of ethnoarchaeology contrasts with that of the New Archaeology ‘processual’ archaeologists avowedly pursuing ‘lawlike’ generalizations (O’Brien et al. 2005:101–103). Empathy with the people with whom she sat as a participant observer drove her to active concern with her communities’ complicated political issues, particularly about health. ethnoarchaeology, Vol. 5 No. 2, October, 2013, 112–118
Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism
Ellen Badone and Sharon Roseman, eds., Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2004, 199 pages.Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism brings together a collection of papers that engage both a very traditional subject of anthropology, pilgrimage, and one that only much more recently was deemed worthy of the intellectual scrutiny of our discipline, tourism. In doing so, editors Ellen Badone and Sharon Roseman engage discussions of the fluid and mobile realities of the experience of pilgrims-pilgrimage and tourists-tourism. As such, ideas of identity, place, sacredness-secular and ethnography become central to the volume. Chapters in the book travel to Spain, east England, New Guinea, New Mexico, Japan, Toronto and California. They take the reader on journeys to religious and secular pilgrimage-tourist destinations. One travels, depending on the chapter, and sometimes simultaneously, in the shoes of a spiritual-religious pilgrim, an ethnographer, a "trekkie," a touristtraveller, or a colonial missionary. The editors offer a well-written and engaging introduction to the thematic focus of the book, laying out how current anthropological thinking about pilgrimage has travelled itself under the guidance of Turner and Turner (1978), Morinis (1984), Bade and Sallnow (1991), and Coleman and Elsner (1995). Balancing this theoretical discussion of pilgrimage is one on tourism and tourists which highlights mainly the work of MacCannell (1976), Graburn (1977, 1989), and Bruner (1991). The final chapter, written by Badone, offers a useful theoretical perspective which attempts to situate those "travellers" discussed in the book "in an interstitial border zone, a metaphorical space "betwixt and between" cultures where social actors have the potential to reformulate meanings and negotiate identities" (p. 181).If taken as a whole, the book accomplishes its purpose of examining the intersection of the journeys of pilgrimage and tourism. Individual chapters read in isolation, at times, could be seen to be out of place within the larger theme of the book, or at least a bit of a stretch to link the themes together (see for example Holmes-Rodman, Fife, Coleman and Porter). I do not offer this comment as a criticism, however, of the inclusion of any of these papers. Editors have the right to presume that a reader may well do them the courtesy of reading the entire book to see the multidimensional ways which a collection of papers do in fact speak to each other and larger umbrella themes.Holmes-Rodman, in a very compellingly written piece about her physical, professional and metaphorical journey to Chimayo, New Mexico, moves the reader back and forth between the contradictions and complexities of the roles of ethnographer, pilgrim and traveller. Fife's piece on the creation of "sacred" space and the pilgrimage made by missionaries to foster such space in, but not necessarily enroute to, New Guinea in the late 19th century, offers a critique of the presumed nature of a pilgrimage site, and physical mobility understood to be integral to any pilgrimage. He links the vision of these missionaries to the tourists of the same era who travelled to places such as the English Lake District and Niagara Falls. The latter emphasized the physical effort expended to see and understand a site. Missionaries in New Guinea expended parallel physical efforts to turn their mission compounds into "sacred sites" of pilgrimage. His argument for understanding such spaces as sites of pilgrimage, I feel, is one of the more distinctive and insightful contributions to the entire volume.Spain is a popular destination of the travellers documented here. Three papers (Roseman, Frey, and Tate) are all geographically located there. The detailed ethnographic work done by Frey strives to capture the "aftermath" of the experience of those who travel the Camino de Santiago. …
Continuity and Change in Cypriot Pottery Production
Long-term research permits the evaluation of time-ordered trends in technological change. In this study, the author revisits a field site in Cyprus after twelve years. Old and new practitioners of ceramic craft are observed and details of form, techniques of manufacture and links to the engulfing culture were recorded. The results bear on questions of resilience and change in ceramic production within a rapidly changing political economy.