PROF. MARIA TERESA MILICIA
Welcome to Cultural Encounters!
We will explore the history of early professional fieldwork through the experiences of women ethnographers. We will look at their trajectories through the lens of mobility, gender and intersectionality, considering how class, marital status, nationality and other social positions shaped their opportunities to travel, conduct fieldwork and enter the emerging profession of anthropology.
In the second part of the course, we will focus particularly on the British anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood. Her remarkable professional and personal trajectory will allow us to connect individual mobility with the wider circulation of people, objects, photographs and knowledge within colonial anthropology.
We will then follow the afterlife of her ethnographic work in museum collections, focusing especially on photographs she took among the Kainai Nation in the 1920s and on their later return and reconnection with the people and communities represented in them.
Through this case, we will address some broader questions that are central to anthropology today: colonial collections and their legacies, the making of ethnographic knowledge, processes of museification, and contemporary practices of restitution and reconnection.
Welcome to Cultural Encounters!
We will explore the history of early professional fieldwork through the experiences of women ethnographers. We will look at their trajectories through the lens of mobility, gender and intersectionality, considering how class, marital status, nationality and other social positions shaped their opportunities to travel, conduct fieldwork and enter the emerging profession of anthropology.
In the second part of the course, we will focus particularly on the British anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood. Her remarkable professional and personal trajectory will allow us to connect individual mobility with the wider circulation of people, objects, photographs and knowledge within colonial anthropology.
We will then follow the afterlife of her ethnographic work in museum collections, focusing especially on photographs she took among the Kainai Nation in the 1920s and on their later return and reconnection with the people and communities represented in them.
Through this case, we will address some broader questions that are central to anthropology today: colonial collections and their legacies, the making of ethnographic knowledge, processes of museification, and contemporary practices of restitution and reconnection.
- Docente: Maria Teresa Milicia