This book examines how mainstream scholarship constructs the past. By creating another people's cultural history, scholars appropriate it. This collection looks at how 'post-colonial' scholars are redefining the nature of scholarship.

Social Construction of the Past examines how mainstream scholarship constructs the past and, in creating a people's cultural history, appropriates it and turns it into a form of domination by one group over another. Acknowledgements of the intellectual and scholarly contribution of subjugated peoples such as women, minorities, and workers has led to a critical review of the established bodies of knowledge. Social Construction of the Past looks at the way 'postcolonial' scholars redefine the nature of scholarship, and themselves, in order to develop a more egalitarian discourse. It probes the nature of the relationship of labour, race and gender to power and class. The chapters cover a broad range of topics, from the role of intellectuals in restructuring a non-apartheid South Africa, to Haitian working-class women using sexuality to resist domination. Social Construction of the Past is essential reading for academics and students from a whole range of different social and intellectual backgrounds, including anthropology, archaeology, history, comparative literature, political science and sociology.

'It cannot fail to prove of great use to students and others in coming to terms with the post-modern turn in archaeology throughout the globe.' - John Carmen