Ethnography of “the Past”: Fieldwork Principles and Practices in the Study of Archaeologies and the Transcultural Meanings of Visible Histories
Archaeology is a term defined by the professionalized discipline with that name and its practices are strongly policed or regulated by the institutional apparatus of academia. Thus, although the core concept of archaeology is the study of the past, including the meanings of the material facts, we tend not to think of non-disciplinary ways of constructing these meaning and values as “archaeology.” However, as ethnography is introduced into the processes of doing archaeology, especially to investigate the sociocultural contexts of research projects and the disciplinary processes of knowledge production, the very concept of archaeology can be expanded. Ethnographies that study archaeology can open up its analytical design to include archaeologies of the past that are constructed and practiced not only by professionalized practitioners, but by nearby social agents (communities, stakeholders, workers, publics, etc.) that also actively construct historical meanings, messages, and morals from the archaeological materials that embody the visible past. The ethnographic study of archaeologies would therefore also be engaged with research on and in the ways in which these different archaeologies intersect, combine, conflict, conflate, contradict, and confuse unitary, singular and monolithic understandings of “the past.” But, archaeology itself is already such a field of hybridization, debates, and transculturation. Building on this notion of archaeology as a field comprised of these transcultural dynamics, this paper explores ethnographic methods that can be used to investigate the archaeologies of nearby communities and how they intercalate with the archaeologies of professional research projects. Specifically, notions of transculturation, ethnographic installation, expanded documentation, and transtextuality are presented as fieldwork principles especially suited for this sort of research. By way of substantiating and exemplifying these concepts, ethngraphic research conducted conducted over three years (1997-1999) in the Maya community of Pisté, Yucatán, México, is discussed.
