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Lecture/Presentation/Talk

Lunch Club Series | Unsettling the Grid: Engaging Substantive and Relational Epistemologies on a Collaborative Archaeological Project in Mi’kma’ki

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Lunch Club provides affiliates of the Stanford Archaeology Center with a community-oriented forum for engagement with current issues in archaeology. On January 15, 2024 we will host Dr. Michelle A.  Lelièvre from William and Mary and Cynthia Martin.

Abstract:

Anthropologists conducting collaborative fieldwork with members of Indigenous, descendent, and other local communities often do so with emancipatory objectives to “decolonize” the discipline. These efforts have focused on methodology. But collaborative field projects also offer opportunities for developing anthropological theory through ethnographic analyses of how members of these teams encounter alterity. We use our excavation of a ~3600-year-old archaeological site in Nova Scotia, Canada, as a site for observing ethnographically how our L’nu (Mi’kmaw) and European-descended crew members made empirical observations using the substantive epistemology of archaeological knowledge production and, simultaneously, the relational ontology of L’nu knowledge production. At our field site, the differences between these two epistemologies were illustrated when an entity most archaeologists would categorize as a low-priority object was understood in the relational epistemology as a high-priority subject. Analyzing such moments of knowledge construction provides opportunities for making the systemic changes required for decolonizing Anthropology.

 

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