Archaeology of Identity and Dissonance: Contexts for a Brave New World
Diane F. George and Bernice Kurchin
Abstract
In situations of displacement, disruption, and difference, humans adapt by actively creating, re-creating, and adjusting their identities using the material world. This book employs the discipline of historical archaeology to study this process as it occurs in new and challenging environments. The case studies furnish varied instances of people wresting control from others who wish to define them and of adaptive transformation by people who find themselves in new and strange worlds. The authors consider multiple aspects of identity, such as race, class, gender, and ethnicity, and look for ways ... More
In situations of displacement, disruption, and difference, humans adapt by actively creating, re-creating, and adjusting their identities using the material world. This book employs the discipline of historical archaeology to study this process as it occurs in new and challenging environments. The case studies furnish varied instances of people wresting control from others who wish to define them and of adaptive transformation by people who find themselves in new and strange worlds. The authors consider multiple aspects of identity, such as race, class, gender, and ethnicity, and look for ways to understand its fluid and intersecting nature. The book seeks to make the study of the past relevant to our globalized, postcolonized, and capitalized world. Questions of identity formation are critical in understanding the world today, in which boundaries are simultaneously breaking down and being built up, and humans are constantly adapting to the ever-changing milieu. This book tackles these questions not only in multiple dimensions of earthly space but also in a panorama of historical time. Moving from the ancient past to the unknowable future and through numerous temporal stops in between, the reader travels from New York to the Great Lakes, Britain to North Africa, and the North Atlantic to the West Indies.
Keywords:
Historical archaeology,
Identity formation,
Adaptive transformation,
Displacement
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780813056197 |
| Published to Florida Scholarship Online: September 2019 |
DOI:10.5744/florida/9780813056197.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Diane F. George , editor
Fordham University
Bernice Kurchin, author
Hunter College
More
Less
