Teaching

Current courses: Fall 2023

A&S 102: Cultural Anthropology 

What does it mean to be human? Socio‐cultural anthropologists offer a distinctive approach to this question. By immersing ourselves in the strangeness of everyday life, we suspend and question assumptions otherwise taken for granted about the social worlds we inhabit and encounter. Rather than generating a fixed set of ideas, cultural anthropology suggests a distinct way of looking, inhabiting, and interpreting the world. To live within an anthropological perspective is to wonder how cultural practices, beliefs, and norms as well as our ideas about ourselves and others came to be the way they are, to question their meanings and consequences, and to reveal their fabricated nature. This course, therefore, is not only an introduction to an academic discipline but an exposure to an anthropological sensibility—a way of being that will allow you to make better sense of yourself and the world in which you are immersed.

A&S 374: Museum Studies: History, Theory, and Debates

This course offers an introduction to the social and cultural history and theory of museums. Thinking about the idea of the “modern” museum as an instrument and technology of power, we will first consider how the practices and ideologies of colonialism, looting, and exploitation have shaped the construction of museums and their collections since the cabinets of curiosities of the Enlightenment. Second, we will explore specific collections and exhibits of natural history, anthropology, and art, to question whether museums can be transformed into spaces for restitution, repatriation, community building, and the unlearning of the imperial foundations of the knowledge. This course will also offer students the opportunity to develop an exhibit on campus, focusing on objectives such as: crafting a narrative around physical objects, writing exhibit text, developing virtual components, and installing and de-installing the exhibit.

This year, our class exhibit “Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism” drew inspiration from Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s book of the same title and aims to confront the profound legacy of violence deeply ingrained within museum collections. Building on her ideas, our physical exhibit features eight textual interventions (see samples below) designed to address the neutral language commonly found in museum labels. This language often overlooks the violent history of museum collections, particularly their imperial and colonial origins. Through our website, we aim to further emphasize this context and its lasting impact. We believe that for museums today, the most critical issue is understanding what was taken, from whom, under which conditions, and facilitating the return of objects when requested.

Other courses:

A&S 201: Culture and the Environment

http://sites.lafayette.edu/dss/2017/06/01/dh-in-the-classroom-dr-monica-salas-landa-on-archiving-nature-digitally/

A&S 230: Social Memory

A&S 258: The Anthropology of Violence

A&S 263: Latin American Ethnography 

https://news.lafayette.edu/2021/10/28/new-campus-art-installation-shines-light-on-humanitarian-crisis-at-u-s-mexico-border/

 

 

A&S 390-391: Independent Reading and Research (Ethnographic Methods)

A&S: 495-496: Thesis

 

 

Image Credit: Detail, Totonac Women in Papantla Plaza, Photo Lot 80-32. Isabel Kelly Photographs, 1948, National Anthropological archives, Smithsonian Institution