Decolonization, Indigeneity, and the Cultural Politics of Race

Abstract

I am not an archaeologist, but I do know a bit about cultural politics and the ways in which ideas circulate between researchers and the cultures they inhabit. To me, one of the key challenges of decolonization to any field of research is in understanding how this relationship plays out: to develop a better grasp of the two-way traffic of meaning between disciplinary specialists and the wider public as we contend with the ways in which both constituencies express, modify, and contest the ongoing legacies of colonialism. If decolonization is to involve the pursuit of social justice in the present, then it becomes necessary to move beyond the confines of a particular field to trace the ways it is implicated in a wider set of relations over which it will have little or no scholarly jurisdiction. It is little wonder that this is said to be a difficult and unsettling process. It is. It is to Elliott and Warren’s credit that they have sufficient confidence to open up their field and render it vulnerable to its broader cultural contexts. In their reflexive examination of the historical formation of Mesolithic research, the authors address their field’s embeddedness in the structures of colonial knowledge production without telling a reductive and onedirectional story about causality. Colonial-era Mesolithic scholarship is understood to have both reflected and given shape to teleological, progressivist, and universal stories about Western modernity where racialized others came to stand in for the temporal others of the distant human past. As they trace Mesolithic archaeology’s enduring entanglement with colonial ideas and conceptual frameworks, Elliott and Warren retain an understanding of their field as both constituted and constituting. Decolonization is not, therefore, a one-off moment of epistemological cleansing whereby scientific facts are neatly extricated from non-scientific values, but instead a continuous process of reflection and critique. Decolonizing is not about apportioning blame but about establishing ethical research practices that engage the colonial legacy in the cause of social justice. Of central significance to this ethics is a reconfigured relationship to Indigenous peoples. Given the central and problematic role that ethnographic analogy has long played in their field, Elliott and Warren reconceive of Mesolithic knowledge production as a collaborative process more closely engaged with the interests of contemporary Indigenous communities. While once Indigenous peoples served as the objects of research that consolidated racist typologies of human development, their involvement as subjects provides a way of speaking back to monodirectional knowledge extraction and to the colonial history of Mesolithic research. Conceptually, indigeneity continues to open up a space for knowledge claims generated outside of the categorizing logics of Western science, for fostering ontologies or cosmologies that were subjugated and