Using Haida archaeology as a model, we offer more agency-based interpretations of Beothuk life. Technological and economic approaches have dominated archaeology of the Beothuk and their ancestors while Haida self-governance, in combination with rich records of historic Haida practices, has fostered more socio-politically, religious-, and/or cognitive-oriented approaches to archaeological thought, practice, and heritage stewardship. We review regional archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic literatures to demonstrate that archaeological epistemology is heavily influenced by the islands’ divergent histories, in particular, with regards to the power that indigenous people have asserted in the research process. Anthropological knowledge and archaeological research of the Beothuk has since evolved in the absence of an indigenous voice. Whereas the modern indigenous Haida play an active socio-political role on the Pacific Coast, the last known Newfoundland Beothuk died in 1829 ad. We utilize Canadian case studies from the Atlantic island of Newfoundland and the Pacific island archipelago of Haida Gwaii. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008.This paper examines the dynamics of archaeological knowledge production in the presence and absence of living descendants of indigenous peoples. “Spencer, Herbert.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. “Social Evolution.” In 21st Century Anthropology: A Reference Handbook, Vol. “Historical-Particularism-as exemplified by Franz Boas (1858-1942).” University of Idaho. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference, 2010.įrey, Rodney. “Theoretical Anthropology.” In 21st Century Anthropology: A Reference Handbook, Vol. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference, 2013.įrancisconi, Michael J. “Historical Particularism.” In Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia, Vol. Learn more about the anthropologistsĭarnell, Regna. One important part of doing that was to learn the language of the study group. Historical particularists were also responsible for showing the need for long-term, intensive fieldwork in order to produce accurate descriptions of cultures. Historical particularists showed that this labeling is based on insufficient evidence and claimed that societies cannot be ranked by the value judgment of researchers. The nineteenth-century evolutionists explained cultural similarities and differences by classifying societies into superior and inferior categories.
One of the achievements of the historical particularists was that they succeeded in excluding racism from anthropology. Historical particularism was a dominant trend in anthropology during the first half of the twentieth century. He named this cultural aspect superorganic and claimed that a society cannot be explained without considering this impersonal force. He believed a society evolves according to its own internal laws that do not directly originate from its individuals. On the other hand, Alfred Kroeber did not see individuals as the fundamental elements of a society. He gathered information from individual informants and considered such data valuable enough for cultural analysis. For example, Frantz Boas saw each individual as the basic component of a society. At the same time, the anthropologists in this theoretical school had different views on the importance of individuals in a society. The Historical particularists valued fieldwork and history as critical methods of cultural analysis. Based on these raw data, they described particular cultures instead of trying to establish general theories that apply to all societies. To that end, he and his students collected a vast amount of first-hand cultural data by conducting ethnographic fieldwork. Boas believed that there were universal laws that could be derived from the comparative study of cultures however, he thought that the ethnographic database was not yet robust enough for us to identify those laws.
Historical particularists criticized the theory of the nineteenth-century social evolution as non-scientific and proclaimed themselves to be free from preconceived ideas.
Its core premise was that culture was a “set of ideas or symbols held in common by a group of people who see themselves as a social group” (Darnell 2013: 399). This approach claims that each society has its own unique historical development and must be understood based on its own specific cultural and environmental context, especially its historical process. Franz Boas, Father of American Anthropologyįranz Boas and his students developed historical particularism early in the twentieth century.