General Information
Course Description
9598 - Place, Space and Memory in Ethnographic Context - This course will read some ethnography, emphasis on Native North Americans, against theorists (e.g., Benjamin (selected essays), Taussig (Mimesis and Alterity, Walter Benjamin's Grave), Williams (Country and City), Arendt (on Holocust Bruner on Masada), Deleuze and Guattari (Nomadology), Clifford (Routes, selections), Marc Auge (Non-Places).
Here are some of the anthropology pieces:
Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places
Steven Feld & Keith Basso, Senses of Place
Ted Chamberlin, If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories?
Robin Ridington and Dennis Hastings, Blessings for a Long Time
WJT Mitchell, Landscape and Power
Michael Jackson, Paths Toward a Clearing
Akhil Gupta, James Ferguson & Roger Rouse, Culture, Power, Place
Michael Hertzfeld, A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a
Cretan Town
Eric Hirsch & Michael O'Hanlon, The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives
on Space and Place
Anna Tsing, Realm of the Diamond Queen
T.J. Ferguson, This is our Land
Balkan village organized around a mountain (exact reference at home and I
forgot the deadline)
something on Australian dream-time, dream-song
Each student will choose a place and look into how it is constructed in local terms. We will read and discuss a combination of theory and ethnography, interspersed with student reports on their exemplars. There will be some reflection on the social construction of space, identity constituted through memory of place/space, the multiple construction of the same space by different groups, the resistance of location to globalizing forces, the intractability of the material.
