Paper Abstracts
Diana Loren
Fetishizing Hybridity in the Museum
Hybrid colonial objects are potent. Hybrid material culture -objects that include both Native American and European elements- results from the adoption and fusing of elements of style, manufacture, material, and meaning from distinct intellectual and cultural legacies, which were hybrids themselves. While hybridized material culture was used alongside more familiar, perhaps non-hybrid objects, archaeologists encounter hybrid colonial objects differently. They are at once knowable and unknowable in the intermingling of familiar and unfamiliar. They materialize cultural entanglements and are fetishized as an artifact that authenticates a lived experience of colonialism, allowing validation that the concepts of hybridity we argue were real and tangible in the past. In this paper, I turn a critical mirror on collections of colonial material from eastern North America at the Peabody Museum to discuss not only how were hybrid artifacts from the colonial world documented, catalogued, and preserved, but also to interrogate the collection and interpretations of these objects. How were collections of hybrid objects motivated by the yearning to document colonial "rarities?" How can archaeologists articulate the role of hybridized objects in historical contexts and assemblages while attending to concerns of fetish?
Matt Liebmann In the Eye of the Beholder: Hybridity, Purity, and Classification in 17th Century New Mexico
Considering the spate of recent critiques of hybridity (see Palmié 2013), is there still utility in this concept? Or should hybridity (and hybridization) be abandoned to the scrap heap of anthropological jargon along with the litany of other terms that have been used to characterize cultural "mixture" over the past century? I argue that while hybridity is not without problems, archaeologists should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. In fact, hybridity can be useful not only to improve our understandings of the archaeology of colonialism, but also to improve our understandings of archaeologists' own contemporary biases and expectations. My case study draws on the archaeology of Pueblo-Spanish relations in 17th century New Mexico to illustrate the utility of -and problems with- the concept of hybridity in practice.
Peter van Dommelen
Objects of Hybridity: Approaching Material Culture in Colonial Contexts
Hybridity, mestizaje, creolization, métissage, syncretism and the Middle Ground are all terms that have been put forward in the past decade to capture processes of mutual cultural and social influences that occur in contact and colonial situations. As hybridity, or one of its alternates like hybrid and hybridization, would seem to have gained most currency, the concept has increasingly been tied to the appearance of individual objects; detecting hybrid objects has practically become an end in itself. While all these terms have no doubt contributed to a greater awareness of the complexities and multi-faceted nature of colonial contexts, I will nevertheless argue that their explanatory contribution has been rather more equivocal as a result of a descriptive, if not superficial focus on the outward appearance of objects.
In this paper, I will argue that most, if not all, insights about the complexity and the socially constructed nature of material culture and the accordingly contextual grounding of meaning that had been gained since the late 1980s, appear to have fallen by the wayside of academic popularity and buzzwords, as hybrid objects are all too often and all too readily taken as straightforward evidence of cultural hybridity. In an attempt to counter this trend, I propose to go back to square one and to begin by questioning what hybrid objects can tell us about contact and colonial situations before moving on to examine how material culture and meanings may be constructed in such contexts. My discussion will largely be centred on first millennium BC Sardinia, where the tzigantes of Monte Prama offer a starting-point that is as intriguing as it is inspiring.
Stephen Silliman
A Requiem for Hybridity?
"Hybridity" as an interpretive construct in the archaeology has encountered many pitfalls, due largely to the way it has been set adrift from clear theoretical anchors and has been applied inconsistently and sometimes carelessly to things, practices, processes, and even people. One of the tell-tale signs of its problematic nature is the ease with which archaeologists claim that they can identify hybridity (its origins and its existence) but the difficulty faced if asked when and how such hybridity actually ends, if it does. In that context, the goal of this paper is to offer a potential requiem for hybridity. If we need not go that far, archaeologists at least need to restore "hybridity" to its proper interpretive context in the realm of practice (rather than in objects or people), to be clear about whether hybridity is our retroactive analytical narrative or a forward-looking act of social agents, to acknowledge that hybridity works fleetingly as performance in the "in-between" to fracture dichotomies, and to be ready to answer the question - "what is not hybrid?"- so that the concept does not end up applying to everything and thus nothing. I consider these issues as they have manifested in North American archaeology, especially in 17th- through
19th-Century New England.
Alicia Jiménez
Images of partial presence in Roman Spain
How can hybridization be understood in new terms when even attempting to conceptualize hybridism seems to require accepting the existence of once pure, distinct cultures? Both the ‘pure’ and the ‘hybrid’ can be seen in this view as the result of social processes of classification. However, hybrid practices may be also interpreted as examples of “cultural translation” (Benjamin 1923) linked to processes of repetition and imitation or partial representations of the Other in colonial situations. From this perspective what is crucial is to understand the meaning of the ‘quote’ made by players and its role in building up material discourses of difference and similitude. This paper will discuss some artifacts from the Roman province of Hispania (late 3rd c. BCE- 2nd c. CE) with the aim of putting into practice theories that suggest that hybridity has to do mainly with the sort of cultural positioning that makes meaning possible, bringing to the fore the active role of people in colonial encounters.
Maxine Oland
Hybridity on the Colonial Maya Frontier?
This paper considers whether hybridity is a useful concept in understanding Maya ritual practice along the 16th-17th century frontier of the Spanish colony. Maya ritual took many forms across the frontier: the adoption of Christian burial practices in church floors and cemeteries; the continued use of traditional Maya ritual objects, such as effigy incense burners; and the use of non-ritual Spanish objects in Maya ritual contexts. Thinking of these as hybrid practices can complicate our understanding of Maya ritual within the story of the Spanish conquest, introducing negotiation and ambivalence into the dichotomies of domination and resistance, change and continuity. Yet a focus on colonial hybridity continues to shape the history of the Maya according to Western narrative constructs, foregrounding the changes wrought by colonization as a defining moment, while minimizing the long history of Indigenous Maya culture change. This talk is centered on the 15th-17th century Maya community at Progresso Lagoon, in northern Belize, where I have constructed a narrative of colonial interaction based on long-term local history. Hybridity seems to be a much less useful concept when new ritual practices are situated within the long history of Maya ritual changes, and the economic and political contexts in which they occurred.
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