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
It’s a material world: the critical and on-going value of ethnoarchaeology in understanding variation, change and materiality
ABSTRACT Contemporary ethnoarchaeology has come a long way from material correlates and ‘fleshing out the past’. This paper re-introduces ethnoarchaeology and opens a debate on its role in archaeology today. We summarize the role ethnoarchaeology has in developing, testing and building archaeological interpretation, and argue for its continuing importance in the wider discipline. This critical role further produces rich ethnographic and material information to think about human-material relationships not necessarily as analogies, but as empirical accounts of how culturally different people engage with the material in complex and variable ways. The study of human-material interaction in daily life and in long-term studies can both challenge and support dominant and emergent theoretical models.
Gender Politics and Research: Male and Female Violence in Intimate Relationships
This article reviews a wide range of research reports on male and female violence in intimate relationships and highlights the political nature of domestic violence research. The authors review incidence and prevalence-based research that uses quantitative surveys and illustrate how quantitative, family-focussed researchers tend to ignore the political and social context of domestic violence and the complex issues of gender and power. The authors argue that understanding the complexities of domestic violence requires clear definitions of what constitutes domestic violence and multi-method approaches to research, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies.