This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land: A Paper on Conflicts and Conversations Between Communities and Experts
An apparent complication with the anthropological study and resource management of certain sites is the impact research has on the narrative it affects, and vice versa. While anthropologists may place value for scientific reasons, other groups may have more personal connections and consequently see values differently; not only that, but groups may have personal knowledge of places and be able to share that with researchers. For example, there are instances where anthropologists have studied cultural sites that pertain to the heritage of African Americans. The main problem that arises is that these are two separate groups; very few anthropologists or archaeologists are African American, so there is danger of researchers engendering inaccurate Eurocentric theories (LaRoche and Blakey, 1997). To combat this, however, site managers have valued the opinions of those with personal or cultural connections to places. The purpose of this paper is to discuss …show more content…
After becoming a popular movement, partially through the community-based newsletter Ground Truth, the excavation of the “African Burial Ground” attracted numerous opinions from academics and researchers. Those primarily tasked with the excavation were mostly white, which presented a problem. Some believed that African Americans should be the ones to manage an action so closely linked to their cultural past (LaRoche and Blakey, 1997). However, since there are not that many trained African American archaeologists, the excavation invited African American management
An apparent complication with the anthropological study and resource management of certain sites is the impact research has on the narrative it affects, and vice versa. While anthropologists may place value for scientific reasons, other groups may have more personal connections and consequently see values differently; not only that, but groups may have personal knowledge of places and be able to share that with researchers. For example, there are instances where anthropologists have studied cultural sites that pertain to the heritage of African Americans. The main problem that arises is that these are two separate groups; very few anthropologists or archaeologists are African American, so there is danger of researchers engendering inaccurate Eurocentric theories (LaRoche and Blakey, 1997). To combat this, however, site managers have valued the opinions of those with personal or cultural connections to places. The purpose of this paper is to discuss …show more content…
After becoming a popular movement, partially through the community-based newsletter Ground Truth, the excavation of the “African Burial Ground” attracted numerous opinions from academics and researchers. Those primarily tasked with the excavation were mostly white, which presented a problem. Some believed that African Americans should be the ones to manage an action so closely linked to their cultural past (LaRoche and Blakey, 1997). However, since there are not that many trained African American archaeologists, the excavation invited African American management