The poster has a tan background, with black lettering for the title, reading “Race, Sex, and the Ethics of Collection in the Peabody Museum” in all capital letters, and black lettering for the course description, reading “Dr. Caroline Light Harvard professor and Dr. Meredith Reiches, UMass Boston professor. Wednesdays 5:00-8:00pm, Spring 2022” in a thin font. Beneath the description on the poster is a sepia tinted image of a pale woman in a large white, wide brimmed hat in a ditch. She is wearing a long white coat and is on her knees, straight faced resting both hands on large rocks coming from the ground. Across her body hangs what appears to be a small instrument in the shape of a looking glass or horn. Pictured in the far left of the image is a large pickaxe, placed on the ground with the handle in the air. To the left of the image is the description in white text against a black background in the shape of a box reading “Duchess of Mecklenburg excavating Magdalenska gora” in quotations. Beneath the title in the description box reads “Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 40-77-40/14326.1.5.4.1.” In the lower right hand corner of the poster there is a small black box reading “Pending all Covid restrictions, this course will take place at the Harvard Peabody Museum.” in white letters. In the lower left hand corner of the poster are the MIT logo with white and black letters, and the GCWS logo with white and purple lettering.
Wednesdays, 5:00-8:00PM
Spring 2022, Meets at Harvard Peabody Museum.
We are monitoring the status of each campus, and at this point, it is our understanding that courses will operate in-person again. If that changes, we will update our plans.
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?
Faculty
Dr. Caroline Light is pictured in her faculty headshot looking at the camera with fair skin, black rimmed square glasses, and shoulder length brown hair. She is wearing a gray blazer and black blouse with white buttons. She is leaning against a brick wall.
Dr. Meredith Reiches is pictured in her faculty headshot against a gray background with fair skin, smiling with short brown hair and one silver stud earring visible. She is wearing a black blazer, purple sweater, and a silver and purple necklace.
Caroline Light is Director of Undergraduate Studies and Senior Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her scholarship focuses on the racialization and heteronormativity of lethal self-defense in the United States. Her practice engages her in racial and gender justice work at the University and beyond.
Meredith Reiches is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She studies the way race and sex are mutually constitutive in the construction of evolutionary narratives of human origins. The sleight-of-hand in these accounts, she argues, naturalizes historical and contemporary social hierarchies.