Abstract
This introduction to the second edition of Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism assesses how far the field of historical archaeology has come in its study of capitalism and its effects since the publication of the first edition in 1999. Recent scholarship has revolutionized the ways in which archaeologists conceptualize capitalism and its effects, and the chapter highlights important new ideas useful to the future of historical archaeology. Although we set out several themes that have united historical scholarship that focuses on capitalism and its effects, the chapter also discusses the diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches, power relations, material culture, and subjects that the authors in this volume and other recent scholarship investigate. Less neat and united than earlier approaches to the study of capitalism, current approaches ensure that the “modern world” studied by historical archaeology is not reduced to the extension of European or North American paradigms globally; that capitalism can no longer be seen as a unified homogeneous system that operates in the same way across time and space; and that there is room to explore the borders, margins, orders, and disorders created and perpetuated by capitalist economies and resistance to them. In the second half of the chapter, Mark Leone describes and introduces updated rationales for the purpose of historical archaeology, the place of artifacts, and the place of social criticism, using the work of Slavoj Žižek.
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Notes
- 1.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, North American sociologists began to encourage the study of urban poverty among African American residents in cultural terms, focusing on past and present treatment and opportunities, in order to reject explanations of poverty based on biological notions of racial inferiority (DuBois 1996[1899]; Frazier 2001[1939]. In the early twentieth century, canonical sociology, including scholars working within the traditions of the Chicago School, adopted similar arguments that addressed culture as the site of human difference, instead of biology. The “culture of poverty” idea was proposed by Oscar Lewis (1959) and discussed the idea that in addition to lacking resources, the poor had also developed a poverty-perpetuating system of values, which held them back from material progress. Lewis’ ideas were later used in ways not anticipated by the author (including the Moynihan Report published in 1965) to place the blame for poverty on its victims (Bourgois 2003, p. 64). Surviving harsh critique in the mid- to late-twentieth century, the “culture of poverty” idea and “underclass” arguments of William Julius Wilson (2012) became popular ways in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to explain poverty and inequality as neoliberalism blossomed. The “culture of poverty” and “underclass” concepts both focused on cultural arguments, occluding the structural constraints placed on those living in poverty.
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Leone, M., Knauf, J. (2015). Introduction to Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism, Second Edition. In: Leone, M., Knauf, J. (eds) Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12760-6_1
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