Topics in Anthropology (490-0-1)

Topic

Ethnographic Approaches to the Archive

Instructors

Megan Baker

Meeting Info

ANTHRO Sem Rm 104 - 1810 Hinmn: Thurs 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

Contemporary North America cannot be understood properly without examination of the logics and structures that maintain and uphold contemporary Indigenous dispossession and their historical constitution. Following Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot who highlighted the various stages of historical production in which power comes to shape knowledge, this course examines critical aspects of North American historical production and how such studies may be ethnographic ones. Rather than solely understanding archives as a place where one conducts research, this course considers how archives are produced, how archives shape the knowledge production that may come out of them, and how and why settler histories of Native peoples circulate as they do.

Class Materials (Required)

Denetdale, Jennifer Nez. 2007. Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. (9780816526604)

O'Brien, Jean M. 2010. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (9780816665785)

Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press. (978-0-8223-5655-4)

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2010. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (9780691146362)

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2025. Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy. University of Chicago Press. (9781914363221)

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1997. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. (9780807080535)