Anthropological Histories: the Politics and Poetics of the Past

Abstract

This seminar engages with the work of a wide range of scholars – anthropologists, historians and philosophers – who have collectively grappled with what history and how it is cultural constituted. With the rejection of the ‘ethnographic present’, anthropologists have realized the necessity of looking at social processes and events historically. In so doing, the contemporary conditions of non-western societies are understood to fit within long-term developments and cross-cultural entanglements. The untangling of these histories has begun to break down various binaries Western/Non-Western History/Non-Historical divide, with all their implied inequities, that have long informed understandings of difference. Focusing on theories of history, we will also read ethnographies on how history is made, told, contested and translated in a variety of medium in the Caribbean (Haiti & Jamaica), Central and South Asia (India & Tibet), Europe (Romania), Oceania (Banaba & Hawai’i), South East Asia (Sumba) and West Africa (Guinea). Taught at the National Museum of Natural History, we will use Smithsonian collections to think critically about how history is, and is not, materialized in different things (documents, places, objects, and still and moving images) and methodologically how these stories can be engaged with. This seminar is held on Friday mornings and is open to upper-level undergraduates with permission of the instructor.