Abstract
Reviewed by: Emily Dale, Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Reno, USA
Douglas E. Ross’ An Archaeology of Asian Transnationalism boldly addresses Japanese and Chinese migration to Western Canada at the turn-of-the-20th Century. Ross’ research focuses on the late 1800s and early 1900s Ewen Cannery in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the nearby homes of its Chinese and Japanese workers. Specifically, Ross conducted archaeological investigations on both Lion Island, home to the cannery and the Chinese employees’ bunkhouse, and the neighboring Don Island, site of the Japanese workers’ village. Through various theoretical lenses and analysis of the archaeological assemblages, Ross explores the multiple local, regional, and national contexts that culminated in his two distinct archaeological collections. His approach relies heavily on transnational theory to examine the archaeological assemblages left behind by the residents of a Chinese bunkhouse located near to and on the same island as the cannery and the Japanese inhabitants of a small village on a neighboring island. Divided into seven chapters, Ross successfully guides the reader from the large scale to the small, beginning with Asian American studies in general and ending at his site.
In the first chapter, Ross provides a review of existing approaches to Asian American studies drawn mostly from archaeology and history. His stated goal is to pull out methods and theories from the larger body of knowledge on Japanese and Chinese migration to North America useful for his specific site. This is especially important in light of the fact that Ross’ research, as he notes in his Introduction, “is one of the first and most in-depth archaeological studies of overseas Japanese migration, and is the first detailed comparison of excavated archaeological assemblages from contemporary Chinese and Japanese sites” (p. 7). In so doing, his analysis engages problematic gaps in the literature and the lingering effects of assimilation and acculturation methods that dominated Asian American studies into the 1990s.
Chapter 2 tackles the theoretical underpinnings of Ross’ research. His main perspectives are migration, diaspora, and transnationalism, with lesser emphasis placed on approaches involving ethnicity, consumption, identity, and labor. Ross balances his myriad theoretical perspectives well, pulling them together at the end of the chapter by acknowledging that migrants’ identities, such as those of the Japanese and Chinese he seeks to understand, were variable, changing, and contextually situated. In drawing from so many theories, Ross hopes to de-essentialize the present archaeological and historical portraits of the Japanese and Chinese diaspora and the immigrants themselves. Surprisingly, Ross does not include an explicitly gendered theoretical perspective. Throughout An Archaeology of Transnationalism, Ross occasionally mentions the presence of Japanese women and children in his historical overview, as well as the all-male nature of the Chinese populations. Yet, aside from noting a lack of artifacts distinctly associated with women or children, there is no application of any gendered demographic information to the archaeological record. Conversely, there is little discussion of how other artifacts, besides alcohol-related artifacts, are explicitly associated with men. The largely masculine nature of Ross’ research populations could have offered an opportunity for discussing the construction of male identity.
Ross focuses on the history of Don and Lion Islands in Chapter 3. The author grounds his discussion in the larger themes of Chinese and Japanese migration to Canada and the context of salmon canning in British Columbia. He ends with an overview of the archaeology and includes discussions of unit placement and stratigraphy.
In Chapter 4, Ross explores the history and context of Asian American migration to British Columbia, with special attention paid to the material culture of the Japanese and Chinese homelands. Ross’ argument, and that of archaeologists interested in transnationalism in general, is that the material record of transnational immigrant and diasporic populations cannot be fully understood without knowledge of what traditions and culture they could possibly bring with them. In other words, one cannot assume that a group has assimilated, acculturated, or otherwise changed their behavior if they do not first know what was available to them in their homelands. Recognizing this, Ross investigates the histories and cultures of China and Japan in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as well as the two nations’ relationships with Western countries. Specifically, Ross discusses modernization movements in Japan and China, Japanese and Chinese gender and social structures, dining habits, foodways, and perceptions of alcohol, and the legal and economic systems in place in North America that simultaneously enabled and discouraged Asian immigration to Canada.
Chapters 5 and 6 cover the archaeology of the worker residences on Don and Lion Islands, respectively. Ross analyzes the Japanese community and the Chinese bunkhouse separately, a sensible decision given the disparate histories of the two populations, different timelines of occupation, and distinct residential patterns. He employs archaeological artifact categories of food and dining, domestic and work-related goods, and alcohol and recreation in order to draw conclusions about the behavior patterns and consumption habits at both the Chinese bunkhouse and Japanese village. Through this analysis, Ross contends that the Japanese community was more of a village environment with semi-permanent populations, while the Chinese bunkhouse was a shifting community rather than a household.
In the final chapter, Ross pulls together the threads he has weaved throughout the book. He compares and contrasts his archaeological collections on many levels. First, he compares the two collections from the cannery employees’ to one another, then to additional Japanese and Chinese diasporic sites throughout Canada and the United States, and, finally, to the data outlined earlier regarding the material culture available in Japan and China around the turn-of-the-century. What emerges is a picture of two transnational, diasporic communities that emphasizes the agency exerted by the Japanese and Chinese migrants themselves in deciding how to navigate the social, political, and economic landscapes of Canada.
Ross’ book demonstrates the benefits of a transnational approach to migration and diaspora archaeology in de-essentializing our understandings of past populations. His holistic approach, which considers the cultural, political, historical, and economic contexts in China, Japan, and North America, creates a complex view of Asian American migration that accounts for variation in assemblages by emphasizing the role of the migrants as active consumers and producers, rather than passive victims of assimilation and acculturation. Moreover, Ross’ research on Japanese migration in the early 1900s begins to fill in the dearth of archaeological knowledge concerning Japanese sites in North America in an explicitly theoretical vein. Finally, while the book itself forms a cohesive account that can be read as a whole, Ross also wrote a volume that allows for chapters to be read independently of the larger narrative, useful, perhaps, for a refresher on transnational theory or for a college seminar on Asian migration. Ross’ monograph on the Ewen Cannery is recommended for anyone interested in Chinese and Japanese immigration to North America, the history of the Canadian fishing industry, or transnational and diaspora theory in migration studies.