The Archaeology of Institutional Life
Ph. D. April M. Beisaw (Editor), James G. Gibb (Editor)
Publication Date: March 22, 2009
Ph. D. April M. Beisaw (Editor), James G. Gibb (Editor)
Publication Date: March 22, 2009
Institutions pervade social
life. They express community goals and values by defining the limits of
socially acceptable behavior. Institutions are often vested with the
resources, authority, and power to enforce the orthodoxy of their time.
But institutions are also arenas in which both orthodoxies and authority
can be contested. Between power and opposition lies the individual
experience of the institutionalized. Whether in a boarding school,
hospital, prison, almshouse, commune, or asylum, their experiences can
reflect the positive impact of an institution or its greatest failings.
This interplay of orthodoxy, authority, opposition, and individual
experience are all expressed in the materiality of institutions and are
eminently subject to archaeological investigation.
A
few archaeological and historical publications, in widely scattered
venues, have examined individual institutional sites. Each work focused
on the development of a specific establishment within its narrowly
defined historical context; e.g., a fort and its role in a particular
war, a schoolhouse viewed in terms of the educational history of its
region, an asylum or prison seen as an expression of the prevailing
attitudes toward the mentally ill and sociopaths. In contrast, this
volume brings together twelve contributors whose research on a broad
range of social institutions taken in tandem now illuminates the
experience of these institutions. Rather than a culmination of research
on institutions, it is a landmark work that will instigate vigorous and
wide-ranging discussions on institutions in Western life, and the power
of material culture to both enforce and negate cultural norms.
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