A Compelling Intersectionality: Paleoethnobotany, Social Theory, and Feminist Commitments

Abstract

The term “intersectionality” was coined (Crenshaw 1991) and subsequently developed and used to characterize approaches that explored the interconnections between systems of oppression. In the context of paleoethnobotany, intersectionality raises the issue of how our own subsets of issues and perspectives intersect. Christine Hastorf and other researchers remind us that we do not just “apply” theory nor just “do” methods—there is a creative and interpenetrating relationship that can yield genuinely original insights. In particular, a feminist perspective should not just allow for, and positively enhance, the likelihood that our investigations will “complicate” our all-too-often essentialized grand narratives. Here I discuss what a more fully developed intersectional social/feminist paleoethnobotany can be from a recent generation of researchers who are looking over their field and its potentials. The overarching goals are to make a deeper and often more complex and nuanced sense of people and plants, a better sense of the on-the-ground human activities, and meaning-making that mobilize culture and precipitate the events to which archaeologists have some access. In the end, some might say that the presence of a seed (and its identification) in an archaeological context alone will “speak” to us, but when in dialogue with a revelatory theoretical framework, that seed will actually shout.