The Invention of History (P02564)

? Credit Points : 20 ? SCQF Level : 11 ? Acronym : SPS-P-P02564

The past is ‘everywhere a battlefield of rival attachments’ – an arena fraught with contestation and dispute. Picking up this cue this course examines the politics of history, memory, and the past. It begins by examining time, and way in which notions of time and history have been central both to the development of social anthropology as a discipline and to wider, racialised discourses about others in colonial contexts. Engaging with a growing body of anthropological work, and research done in related disciplines, which has emphasised the social construction of the past, it looks at how the past it is understood, experienced, remembered and represented in different ethnographic contexts in the present. Memory, history, and ‘oral traditions’ will be examined as different but related means of understanding, representing and politicising the past, alongside other, less discursive means of relating to the past, such as through performance, rituals, objects and landscape. Engaging with more recent arguments that have emphasised the limits to the ‘invention’ of history, the course will consider how the study of ‘the past’ inevitably involves not only notions of time and temporality, but also of space, place and landscape. The politics of the past is in no way limited to how we understand or represent it; it is also finely related to questions of what to do with its materiality – in the form of archaeological remains, heritage sites, monuments and memorials. With reference to a variety of empirical examples and broader theoretical trends, lectures will explore the politics of the past through the following topics: Time and denial of co-evilness; nationalism and identity; memory and forgetting; commemoration and memorials; heritage and museums; landscape and place.

Entry Requirements

none

Subject Areas

Home subject area

Social Anthropology, (School of Social and Political Studies, Schedule J)

Delivery Information

? Normal year taken : Postgraduate

? Delivery Period : Semester 2 (Blocks 3-4)

? Contact Teaching Time : 2 hour(s) per week for 10 weeks

Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes

Advanced knowledge and understanding of the way the past is imagined, constructed and contested through the processes of history, memory and commemoration, and the role that ideas and knowledge of the past play in the complex politics of identity and state-making, in colonial, postcolonial and nationalist contexts.

Advanced understanding of the role that place, space and landscape, in both ideational/discursive and material ways, can enable and limit the imagination/invention/construction of the past, and in turn how notions of the past inform, enable and limit the means by and through which landscape and heritage are understood, engaged with and managed, and the way in which these complex struggles over place and the past are both inscribed in and produce space/place landscape