Person:

Liebmann, Matthew

In recent years, archaeologists have used the term hybridity with increasing frequency to describe and interpret amalgamated forms of material culture. But do postcolonial notions of hybridity (sensu Bhabha 1994; Hall 1990; Young 1995) differ in any meaningful ways from models of cultural mixture traditionally employed by anthropologists such as syncretism, creolization, and acculturation? Or is this simply a matter of semantics, citation practices, and the adoption of yet another example of trendy anthropological jargon by archaeologists? In this chapter I consider the meanings associated with the concept of hybridity, exploring what this term offers for the archaeological interpretation of colonial encounters. In doing so, I compare and contrast hybridity with acculturation, syncretism, bricolage, creolization, and mestizaje in order to identify the subtly differing connotations of these concepts, as well as highlighting the contributions that postcolonial notions of hybridity offer for contemporary archaeology through a case study from the seventeenth-century Pueblos of the American Southwest.

Hybridity is a term used by anthropologists to characterize the amalgamation of influences from two (or more) different cultural groups. Hybridity has captivated archaeology in recent years, especially archaeologists investigating colonialism in Native American contexts. At the same time, a growing chorus of critics has begun to question anthropology’s devotion to hybridity and hybrid objects. These critics take issue with the term’s alleged Eurocentrism, implications of cultural purity, and evolutionary etymology. In this article I address these critiques and advocate a more circumscribed use of hybridity in archaeology. I caution against the abandonment of the term entirely, because the archaeological identification of hybridity provides insights into both present-day (etic) and past (emic) perspectives on cultural amalgamation. Hybridity reveals the biases of contemporary researchers regarding the societies we study, as well as highlighting the ways in which power structures centered and marginalized colonial subjects in the past. To illustrate these points I draw on case studies involving the Hopi Mickey Mouse kachina, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indigenous-colonial whips from the American Plains and southeast Australia, and seventeenth-century Pueblo ceramics from the American Southwest.