Paul R. Mullins

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https://hdl.handle.net/1805/11714

Paul Mullins (1962-2023) was a historical archaeologist who studied the intersection of materiality and the color line, focusing on the relationship between racism, consumption, and urban displacement. He is the author of several books, including Race and Affluence: An Archaeology of African America and Consumer Culture (Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 1999); Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut (University Press of Florida, 2008); The Archaeology of Consumer Culture (University Press of Florida, 2011); and Revolting Things: An Archaeology of Shameful Histories and Repulsive Realities (University Press of Florida, 2021). He also published numerous scholarly articles in respected journals and maintained two blogs, “Invisible Indianapolis,” and “Archaeology and Material Culture.”

He devoted a great deal of time to painstakingly reconstructing the history of how a century-old, predominately African American community was displaced from the west side of Indianapolis by both the construction of I-65 and the expansion of IUPUI’s (now IUI) campus in the 1960s. In 2010, he and the late Glenn S. White, a former resident of the west side, edited a collection of oral histories with past and present west siders called, The Price of Progress: IUPUI, the Color Line & Urban Displacement. (The book was published by the Office of External Affairs at IUPUI). In addition to his work on race and displacement in Indianapolis, he also studied and published several articles on the legacy of the Continuation War in Finland, 1941-1944 (also known as the Second Soviet-Finnish War). Mullins received several awards during his career including the John L. Cotter Award, presented by the Society for Historical Archaeology for outstanding achievement by an individual at the start of their career; the Joseph Taylor Diversity Award, presented by IUPUI; the Dorothy Riker Hoosier Historical award, presented by the Indiana Historical Society; and in 2022, he was named a Chancellor’s Professor, the highest honor an IU professor can receive. He was also a docent at the University of Oulu in Finland and in Fall 2012, he spent a semester there as a Fulbright Fellow. His research was supported by several grants, many funded by IU and by Indiana Humanities. He also appeared in two films, Attucks: The School that Opened a City (2016) and Arab Indianapolis (2022).

During the 2016-2017 academic year, Mullins, along with his Anthropology Department colleague Susan Hyatt, were named the inaugural Charles R. Bantz Chancellor’s Community Fellows. Their project, “Invisible Indianapolis: Race, Heritage and Community Memory in the Circle City,” examined the history and material culture in a series of Indianapolis neighborhoods that had been effaced, ignored, or misrepresented in public discourse. The goal of the project was to use ethnographic interviews and archival research to illuminate how otherwise “invisible” neighborhoods provide powerful insights into challenging the histories of the class, cultural, religious, and racial inequalities that continue to shape our city.

Mullins received his BA from James Madison University, his MA from the University of Maryland, and his PhD from the University of Massachusetts. At the time of his death, he was working on a book about urban renewal and its impact on Indiana Avenue, once the heart of Indianapolis’ Black arts district. His work on the history and material culture of Indianapolis neighborhoods was an outstanding example of how IUPUI faculty are Translating Research Into Practice. In addition to his numerous academic lectures and conference papers, because he was such an engaging presenter and had such a sure command of Indianapolis history, he was often sought out as a speaker in a variety of non-academic settings.

After a year-long struggle with a malignant brain tumor, Mullins passed away in April 2023.

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    Racializing the Commonplace Landscape: An Archaeology of Urban Renewal Along the Color Line
    (2006) Mullins, Paul R.
    In the 1960’s Indianapolis, Indiana’s near-Westside was transformed by urban renewal projects that carved space for the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) campus out of a predominately African-American neighborhood. Within two decades that longstanding community was totally displaced, and today the former neighborhood covering 300 acres is completely effaced and the community is largely forgotten. This paper examines how archaeology on the University campus provides a mechanism to illuminate the processes that remade the near-Westside. Archaeological research conducted along with the displaced community and its descendants provides a powerful tool to rethink the otherwise prosaic campus landscape as a space shaped by racial and class privilege.
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    Excavating America's Metaphor: Race, Diaspora, and Vindictationist Archaeologies
    (2008) Mullins, Paul R.
    Over more than a century African diasporan scholars have defined identity in complex forms that aspire to resist racial essentialism yet stake consequential political claims to collective roots. Historical archaeology has painted a rich picture of the material details of African American life that also refutes black essentialism, but archaeologists have crafted many utterly fluid African diasporan identities that sometimes fail to examine the global connections, anti-racist citizen rights, and concrete cultural heritage long examined by diasporan scholars. An empirically and politically rigorous African diasporan archaeology would be significantly extended by diasporan scholarship’s vindicationist and reflective anti-racist perspectives. Such an archaeology could disrupt essentialist categories and outline concrete foundations for diasporan identity without lapsing into either particularism or hyper-constructivism.
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    Consuming Lines of Difference: The Politics of Wealth and Poverty along the Color Line
    (2011) Mullins, Paul R.; Labode, Modupe; Jones, Lewis C.; Essex, Michael E.; Kruse, Alex M.; Muncy, G. Brandon
    Commentators on African American life have often focused on poverty, evaded African American wealth, and ignored the ways genteel affluence and impoverishment were constructed along turn-of-the-century color lines. Documentary research and archaeology at the Madam CJ Walker home in Indianapolis, Indiana illuminates how the continuum of wealth and poverty was defined and negotiated by one of African America’s wealthiest early 20th century entrepreneurs. The project provides an opportunity to compare the ways in which wealth was defined and experienced along the color line in the early 20th century and how such notions of Black affluence shaped racialized definitions of poverty and materiality
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    Practicing Anthropology and the Politics of Engagement: 2010 Year in Review
    (2011) Mullins, Paul R.
    In 2010, a rapidly growing body of public scholars continued to conduct engaged research that involved various forms of collaboration, advocacy, and activism. Practicing anthropologists are among the most powerful champions of engaged scholarship and are increasingly focused on tracing the concrete dimensions of public engagement. Practicing anthropologists in 2010 made a concerted effort to critically assess precisely what constitutes collaboration, engagement, activism, advocacy, and a host of similarly politicized but ambiguous terms. This self-reflection has probed the philosophical, political, and methodological dimensions of engagement and painted a rich and complex picture of practicing anthropology. In this article, I review those 2010 studies that are focused on critically defining an engaged anthropology and expanding it to rigorously four-field public scholarship with conscious and reflective politics.
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    Achaeologies of Race and Urban Poverty: The Politics of Slumming, Engagement, and the Color Line
    (2011) Mullins, Paul R.; Jones, Lewis C.
    For more than a century, social reformers and scholars have examined urban impoverishment and inequalities along the color line and linked “slum life” to African America. An engaged archaeology provides a powerful mechanism to assess how urban renewal and tenement reform discourses were used to reproduce color and class inequalities. Such an archaeology should illuminate how comparable ideological distortions are wielded in the contemporary world to reproduce longstanding inequalities. A 20th century neighborhood in Indianapolis, Indiana is examined to probe how various contemporary constituencies borrow from, negotiate, and refute long-established urban impoverishment and racial discourses and stake claims to diverse present-day forms of community heritage.
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    The Archaeology of Consumption
    (2011) Mullins, Paul R.
    A vast range of archaeological studies could be construed as studies of consumption, so it is perhaps surprising that relatively few archaeologists have defined their scholarly focus as consumption. This review examines how archaeology can produce a distinctive picture of consumption that remains largely unaddressed in the rich interdisciplinary consumer scholarship. Archaeological research provides concrete evidence of everyday materiality that is not available in most documentary records or ethnographic resources, thus offering an exceptionally powerful mechanism to examine complicated consumption tactics. In a broad archaeological and anthropological context, consumption studies reflect the ways consumers negotiate, accept, and resist goods-dominant meanings within rich social, global, historical, and cultural contexts.
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    The Banality of Gilding: Innocuous Materiality and Transatlantic Consumption in the Gilded Age
    (2012) Mullins, Paul R.; Jeffries, Nigel
    This paper examines Gilded Age affluence by focusing on apparently inconsequential decorative goods and assessing how such goods were part of shared transatlantic patterns that reached beyond the Gilded Age and the confines of urban America. The paper focuses on figurines recovered from 19th-century sites in London and underscores how the American Gilded Age amplified many early 19th-century material patterns and ideological practices that were well-established in the United Kingdom and continued after the height of Gilded Age affluence. This study examines the symbolism of such aesthetically eclectic goods and focuses on the socially grounded imagination that was invested in them borrowing from dominant ideologies and idiosyncratic personal experiences alike.
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    The Importance of Innocuous Things: Prosaic Materiality, Everyday Life, and Historical Archaeology
    (2012) Mullins, Paul R.
    Perhaps the boldest challenge of Historical Archaeology and the Importance of Material Things was its ambitious definition of material culture that could confront a vast range of social questions, but historical archaeologists continue to circumspectly define archaeological data, focus on the prosaic details of everyday life, and avoid anomalous goods. This paper examines the implications of a historical archaeology that answers many of the Ferguson collection’s challenges, taking aim on materiality in broad terms addressing the profound social significance of apparently mundane archaeological material culture and crafting a reflective picture of everyday life and materiality.
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    The Rhetoric of Things: Historical Archaeology and Oral History
    (2013) Mullins, Paul R.
    This paper examines precisely how objects assume meanings in archaeological interpretation and a dimension of everyday life and experience that exists on the fringes of self-consciousness. Archaeologists interpret the meanings of material things in ways that have often sought to erase the ambiguities of material symbolism in conventional linear narratives, but oral memories routinely struggle with the meaning of things and underscore their complex and ambiguous meanings. The paper examines how the contributors to this volume illuminate the implications of oral memories on broader material culture scholarship both within and beyond historical archaeology.