ANTH 677 - Heritage, Knowledge, Recognition: A Public Anthropology Approach

3 Credit(s)

Description:
This course introduces students to the highly contingent and power-laden histories of knowledge construction around issues of heritage, culture, identity, and much that remains hidden and thus must be recognized in relevant global debates. Since students should feel empowered and find ways to learn from and support communities invested in the co-construction of knowledge about themselves and their identities, the course takes seriously the idea that we must first co-deconstruct prevalent notion of knowledge, representation, and rights vs. privileges around defining and gatekeeping with regard to heritage. Thus, we begin by historicizing and deconstruction the assumed, pervasive authority of institutions such as museums, libraries, theme parks, and even the academy in cementing modernist notions of truth, science, civilization, nation, heritage, patrimony, and preservation. The course considers exhibit design and the reformation of the museum as sites for decolonization and explores some of the ways in which contemporary educators, researchers, and activists from marginal groups across the globe use (indigenous) cultural resistance and intellectual critique to engage in on-going debates over the concepts mentioned above.

040530:1

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