Where is home? How do you know where you're from? Our points of origin (cultural, linguistic, geographic) often shape our life trajectories by telling us who we are and where we belong. The embodied ways we move through the world and our experiential relationships to particular places (in both the built and natural environments) also influence our sense of shared history and community. At the same time, the asymmetrical acceleration of travel and communication technologies has produced a globalized world that invites us to redefine the scale and scope of our neighborhoods. With the potential to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, how do we maintain a sense of place? Anthropologists ask how and why certain places come to hold strong and lasting meaning to people. Together, we will study localization and placemaking practices through close ethnographic readings and with site visits to marked places, non-places, and contested spaces throughout the St. Louis area. This course explores the creativity and politics of place to ask, anew, what it means to be human in the early 21st century.
Course Attributes: BU BA; AS SSC; FA HUM; AR HUM; FA CPSC; EN S
