ANTH4101

Archives are not neutral. In order to decolonize them, scholars in anthropology and other disciplines must first understand the ways in which Western settler values have structured them. Who decides acquisition policy? How are items indexed, described, and related to one another? Who has access, and under what conditions? And who is structurally excluded? In this course we decolonize by recontextualizing both the archives as institutions and their contents. In other words, we use methods appropriate for contemporary anthropological archival research. We will consider preservation, curation, organizational bias in archives, analytic scale, voice, and how historical texts are material culture. Students engage in original archival research.