Rationale
The Network of an Anthropology of History and Heritage (NAoHH) encompasses research that examines how ‘history is cultural’ (Sahlins 1984). It addresses an anthropology of history, history making and historicities (Hirsch & Stewart 2005, Stewart & Palmié 2016, 2019) i.e., ways to understand and experience time and temporality in ethnographic and anthropological research. NAoHH complements other EASA Networks and will facilitate discussions that span anthropological subfields and foci (religion, migration, language, media, arts etc).
The network will address varieties of historicities including relationships to future and present and the role of memory and imagination. It emerges from the need to respond to the intensification of attention to the past in popular movements and political debates as well as in academia. It will encourage the development of anthropological perspectives in public debates around history-making, archives, and heritage.
Intentions
- Map intersections between history-making, memory, myth, heritage, archives, and actors as well as institutional spaces dedicated to the study of history
- Give attention to how experiences of space/time and the relationships between past, present, and future are socially produced and mobilised politically
- Provincialize European historicism in ethnography
- Challenge and decolonize the dominance of mainstream western models of history-making and narratives of time and temporality within and outside Europe
- Explore how history is given material and aesthetic forms including privileged artefacts of history such as documents, images, and monuments
- Study the political dimensions of heritage and intangible heritage in museums, legal courts, archives, material culture, infrastructures, activism, and new media
- Explore the ontologies and epistemologies of temporality and history-making practices including sedentarist historiographic biases
- Research affective dimensions of the experience and study of history, historicities, and anthropology
