Camouflaging Consumption and Colonial Mimicry: The Materiality of an Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Nipmuc Household
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Camouflaging Consumption and Colonial Mimicry: The Materiality of an Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Nipmuc Household Guido Pezzarossi
Published online: 4 January 2014 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract This article serves as an interpretation of Nipmuc history in colonial contexts by focusing on the engagement and survival of the “capitalist colonial” world by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Nipmuc inhabitants of the Sarah Boston Farmstead Site in Grafton, Massachusetts. Ceramic analyses are drawn upon to argue that active consumer strategies and/or choices may potentially undermine the material and discursive markers of difference linked to notions of domesticity, class and race. The apparent homogenized or “insignificant” character of the Sarah Boston Farmstead ceramic assemblage is argued to in fact be quite significant, as its banality speaks to a degree of knowledgeable “mimicry”—tactical or not—that may have deflected (but not negated) inequality through the undermining of markers and discourses of difference. Keywords Colonialism . New England . Postcolonial theory . Consumption
Introduction Historically, archaeologies of consumption have primarily focused on straight-forward socioeconomic models of consumption that link consumption almost deterministically to economic power (Klein 1991). More recent work in historical archaeology (Cook et al. 1996; Mullins 1999, 2004, 2012) has sought to bring new perspectives, such as those elaborated by Daniel Miller, to bear on archaeologies of mass consumption. While productive, these approaches have been challenged by Marxist-inspired critiques of archaeologies of consumption that have espoused a “disdain of mass materialism” as a reifying agent of capitalist exploitation (Leone 1999; Mullins 2004, p. 195, Wurst and McGuire 1999). These critiques have brought to light important elements to consider as archaeologists reframe consumption as a potentially “active” process that plays a critical role in the way populations “construct a culture that is authentic and profound” G. Pezzarossi (*) Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94309, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Int J Histor Archaeol (2014) 18:146–174
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(de Certeau 1984; Miller 1987, 1990, p. 77). In tandem, these approaches to consumption have opened up historical archaeology and archaeologies of the recent past to new ways of interpreting the “tangible evidence of everyday materialism” of the early modern era that came to be primarily constituted by mass produced commodities (Cook et al. 1996; Mullins 1999, 2004, p. 195). In particular, recent archaeological work has sought to redress the lacuna of explorations of subaltern engagement in the practice and products of consumption (e.g. Camp 2011; Mullins 1999, 2004; Wilkie 2000 among others). Nevertheless the consumer strategies and practices of Indigenous populations in the colonial period have been minimally explored (but see Pezzarossi 2008; Silliman and Witt 2010; Witt 2007). I argue that this lack o
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