Humanities

ABSTRACT In 2010, a rapidly growing body of public scholars continued to conduct engaged research that
involved various forms of collaboration, advocacy, and activism. Practicing anthropologists are among the most
powerful champions of engaged scholarship and are increasingly focused on tracing the concrete dimensions of
public engagement. Practicing anthropologists in 2010 made a concerted effort to critically assess precisely what
constitutes collaboration, engagement, activism, advocacy, and a host of similarly politicized but ambiguous terms.
This self-reflection has probed the philosophical, political, and methodological dimensions of engagement and painted
a rich and complex picture of practicing anthropology. In this article, I review those 2010 studies that are focused on
critically defining an engaged anthropology and expanding it to rigorously four-field public scholarship with conscious
and reflective politics. [practicing anthropology, public anthropology, 2010 trends, engaged]

A vast range of archaeological studies could be construed as studies of consumption, so it is perhaps surprising that relatively few archaeologists have defined their scholarly focus as consumption. This review examines how archaeology can produce a distinctive picture of consumption that remains largely unaddressed in the rich interdisciplinary consumer scholarship. Archaeological research provides concrete evidence of everyday materiality that is not available in most documentary records or ethnographic resources, thus offering an exceptionally
powerful mechanism to examine complicated consumption tactics. In a broad archaeological and anthropological context, consumption studies reflect the ways consumers negotiate, accept, and resist goods-dominant meanings within rich social, global, historical, and cultural contexts.

Perhaps the boldest challenge of Historical Archaeology and the Importance of Material Things was its ambitious definition of material culture that could confront a vast range of social questions, but historical archaeologists continue to circumspectly define archaeological data, focus on the prosaic details of everyday life, and avoid anomalous goods. This paper examines the implications of a historical archaeology that answers many of the collection’s challenges, taking aim on materiality in broad terms addressing the profound social significance of apparently mundane archaeological material culture and crafting a reflective picture of everyday life and materiality.

The 20th-century urban landscape was forged through a series of state-sanctioned displacements that routinely took African Americans as their primary target.  Many American universities profited directly from the removal of urban communities, and many campus landscapes were carved largely if not wholly from such communities.  Nevertheless, relatively few institutions have acknowledged that heritage, and many continue to expand into surrounding neighborhoods with the same rationalizations developed in Victorian slum discourses.  This paper examines archaeology’s potential role in confronting the concrete processes that created urban campuses, focusing on the near-Westside of Indianapolis, Indiana where urban renewal made way for the campus of Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI).  We examine how archaeology can contribute to a public acknowledgement of institutional complicity in urban displacements and probe how such profound and recent transformations are systematically effaced and ignored on many campuses that continue to reach into neighboring communities.

This paper examines Gilded Age affluence by focusing on apparently inconsequential decorative goods and assessing how such goods were part of shared transatlantic patterns that reached beyond the Gilded Age and the confines of urban America.  The paper focuses on figurines recovered from 19th-century sites in London and underscores how the American Gilded Age amplified many early 19th-century material patterns and ideological practices that were well-established in the United Kingdom and continued after the height of Gilded Age affluence.  This study examines the symbolism of such aesthetically eclectic goods and focuses on the socially grounded imagination that was invested in them borrowing from dominant ideologies and idiosyncratic personal experiences alike.

Race has long been rendered invisible in everyday materiality or remade to mask the relationship between material things and the color line.  This paper focuses on a public sculpture project in Indianapolis, Indiana that aspired to reinterpret a little-recognized 1890s statue of an Emancipated captive.  The case reveals how racist privileges and African-American heritage are at the heart of American experience even as the racial dimensions of seemingly mundane materiality are unseen or concealed, even in the case of a monumental public statue.  The Indianapolis experience reflects the ways many communities struggle to simultaneously remember, displace, and memorialize African-American heritage and race in cities where there appear to be no contemporary material traces of the color line.