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My academic training is in cultural anthropology but, over the past couple decades, I have cultivated an interest in and appreciation for the work of public historians. Perhaps this is rooted in my teenage experience as an interpreter at Plimoth Plantation, but its more recent manifestation has come in the context of my research on public memory in urban India. During the late 1980s and 1990s, I conducted several research trips to India in connection with my dissertation research project (that resulted in a book, Womanhood in the Making: Domestic Ritual and Public Culture in Urban South India (1999)) and, over that time I observed dramatic changes in the urban landscape of Chennai (formerly Madras) the site of my work. With each visit, I noted increased levels of industrial growth and urbanization. I noted, as well, changes in the kinds of public memory sites that the city featured and the growth of an increasingly vocal “heritage” movement. Living history museums, cultural centers, and heritage houses augmented the existing array of historical statues and monuments, many of which had been constructed during the period of British colonial rule. This led me to ask about the relations between India’s economic liberalization, initiated in 1991, and the work of public history -- what are the socio-cultural and political agendas of contemporary public history projects in urban India? How do these undertakings compare with their Euroamerican counterparts?
My research culminated in a book, to be published in Fall 2008, entitled “The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai.” It examines the politics of public memory in contemporary south India, arguing that economic liberalization and the associated impact of mass culture has hastened the sense, among many urban Indians, that the material legacy of their history is under siege and that the distinctiveness of cultural identities rooted in nationalist and regionalist historic consciousness is diminishing. At the same time, economic liberalization has furnished a variety of resources for the conservation of historic sites, for the establishment of museums and cultural centers, and for a variety of projects meant to record, retrieve and archive cultural traditions. New fields of debate are being opened and ethnic, sectarian, and regional identities are at stake in the struggles around the past and its representation.
Public history projects are unique windows on the conflicts and challenges that urban Indians face as they enter the new millennium, for the work of representing the past is always a stage on which ethnic formations, sectarian loyalties, and class conflicts come to bear. I am interested both in what the work of public history reveals about India and in how the work of public history in India contributes (or not) to democratic participation in the context of India’s ethnic and cultural pluralism. These interests have shaped my teaching profile -- I have taught “Introduction to Public History,” “History, Memory, and Museums,” and at the graduate level, “Space, Culture and Power.” In “Introduction to Public History,” besides introducing the four fields of public history (museums, archives, oral history, historic preservation), I bring international case materials into the picture to encourage students to think comparatively about the genealogy and goals of public history. “History, Memory and Museums” is more explicitly comparative and interdisciplinary, drawing on a variety of sources from the fields of public history, anthropology, psychology, art history and cultural studies to examine the different ways that public (or cultural) memory is expressed and the different political projects with which it may be associated. “Space, Culture and Power” introduces graduate students to the interdisciplinary field of spatial studies and considers the implications that the cultural study of spatial practice and spatial forms holds for public historical scholarship and practice. |
