Politics of Memory

Catalog description

How do groups and societies remember the past, and how and why do monuments and sites of historical memory become part of political processes and cultural struggles in the present? This class explores the role of cultural memory in diverse societies, examining how historical knowledge and other forms of relationship to the past are used to ask and answer questions about power and justice. Examples will include ethnographic accounts of people’s shared reflections on their pasts and the traces of the past in the landscape and even in people’s bodies.