As an anthropologist and archaeologist, I have the honor of studying the dead. Teaching such courses as Introduction to Anthropology, the Anthropology of American History, and the Anthropology of Death enables me to share this privilege and passion with students.
The remote and recent human pasts are equally compelling. I have a nearly life-long fascination with Neanderthals but am also fond of australopithecines, and I’m endlessly amazed by evidence of ancient humans’ intellectual vivacity and social complexity. In different ways, the last 500 years are also complicated, often surprising, eye-opening and thought-provoking. I neither excavate nor conduct research with human remains but work to catch glimpses of past lives through artifacts, archival sources, and oral histories.
Studying legions of the dead gifts me with glimpsing “the amplitude of time” (in Walt Whitman’s phrase). My teaching is grounded in consciousness of time’s extraordinary scale and alacrity. I’m cognizant of students’ streaming through my classroom en route to their varied professional and personal futures. My goal is to give them what I can of lasting value as they move toward careers and communities in which they will not only spend much of their own lives but also affect the experiences of many others.
This class introduces students to major issues in the four traditional subfields of anthropology: biological anthropology, archaeology, socio-cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. Discussions in all subfields emphasize that anthropologists are students of human behavior and culture who use diverse methods to understand human activity around the world over millions of years. Biological anthropology considers the remote human past, hominin evolution, and modern human biological variation. Archaeology reads material culture for evidence of ways that past people thought and acted. Socio-cultural anthropology includes ethnographic investigation of living communities and their cultural perspectives, belief systems, kinship organizations, and social structures. Linguistic anthropology offers insights into relationships between language, culture, and society. The course also considers applied aspects of anthropology, ethical obligations of anthropologists, and means of analyzing our own cultural orientations.
Although we often learn about the past by reading scholarly publications, many other methods of historical inquiry exist. This course focuses on ways of knowing the past through direct experience with archaeology, architecture, archival sources, and oral history. Students use these tools to investigate issues within historic American communities that ethnographers often investigate among living groups: inequality, power, authority, race, gender, and belief. Students gain exposure to anthropological and historical methods, increase their understandings of past social dynamics, and practice thinking critically about how historical narratives are produced.
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Examples of recent project assignments: One, Two, and Three.
Why do some places, events, objects, symbols, and individuals become central to understandings of heritage, while others seem ignored or forgotten? How do people use material objects— including landscapes, monuments and artifacts – in negotiations of memory and history, identity and belonging, or debates about good and evil? This course examines cultural, social, political, and economic processes of shared remembrance through case studies from regional, national, and global contexts. We aim to expand understandings of ways that our own society as well as those distant from us in time and space have selectively incorporated their past into the present with an eye to the future. This exploration of collective, contested memory considers heritage tourism, dark tourism, memorialization as witnessing, ethics of remembrance, and relationships between memorialization and power.