Topic for Winter 2025: The Ghosts of Our Past
PREREQUISITES: Junior standing or at least two courses in anthropology or consent of instructor In this course, we will think about various contemporary practices that summon the past, or its ghosts, into the present. Some of the topics will include making and consulting archives, creating World Heritage sites, building and destroying monuments, exhuming the dead from mass graves, establishing truth and reconciliation commissions, and even feeling nostalgic. Drawing on a range of case studies from the United States and abroad, we will explore the ways that memory practices interface with key anthropological concepts, such as temporality, space, identity, nationalism, and globalization.