Race, Sex, & the Ethics of Collection in the Harvard Peabody Museum (WGS 645)

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2022
Instructors: Caroline Light & Meredith Reiches
Convened at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, this course examines how historical relations of gender, sex, sexuality, and imperial/racialized power continue to be narrativized, hidden, and excavated in historical and contemporary anthropological projects. Using an interdisciplinary feminist lens, we will enter the urgent and complex web of conversations, within the Peabody and between the museum and its publics, about how to reckon with its past and how to move, with ethical alertness and rigor, into the future. Our shared questions include: What does it mean to collect human cultural and biological history? What are the roles of gender, sex, and race in shaping the politics of anthropological collection and study? How are human differences measured, and what do these systems of measurement say about the process of scientific knowledge production? Whose voices hold authority in adjudicating museum collections, and what forms of knowledge and authenticity govern their disposition and interpretation?