Anthropology and the Making of Chumash Tradition

Anthropologists employ concepts of cultural persistence, indigenous resistance, and primitivist imagery which mystify their own roles in the construction of Chumash identity and tradition. We attempt to demystify the scholars' remembering, forgetting, and imagining of the Chumash past that has helped to construct an influential Chumash Traditionalism since the 1960s, and we discuss how scholarly advances in understanding the fluidity of cultural identities now contest Chumash Traditionalism. We examine the variety of roles played by anthropologists in this process of identity negotiation, especially in traditional‐cultural‐property evaluation and contract archaeology. The origin of the current sacredness of Point Conception, California, provides an issue to frame this examination. We find that anthropological practice and Chumash identity and tradition are so deeply entangled that there is little hope that anthropologists can avoid participating in the self‐determination of Chumash people. We conclude that this creates a great need to historicize anthropology's role in shaping and constraining identity and tradition until further progress can be made in resolving the ethical dilemmas of the anthropological study of cultural creativity.