ENTOMBED VOICES: THE CONSTRUCTION OF ESTABLISHED HISTORIES AND THE IMPLEMENTATION OF COUNTER-NARRATIVES WITHIN PUBLIC HISTORY
Date
2018-05
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
The American history that students and tourists are exposed to today is a
whitewashed and nationalistic history that has been normalized for centuries by a
dominant habitus that creates public monuments and historical structures. The
normative American historical narrative is one that focuses more on the struggles,
accomplishments, and histories of white heterosexual cis-gender males of European
descent instead of women, people of color, or non cis-gender people. The goal of this
thesis is to explore the realm of public history through the anthropological framework
of Pierre Bourdieu’s Practice Theory and seeks to understand the structures of power
involved in producing a dominant historical narrative.
By conducting both archival and ethnographic fieldwork in Savannah, Georgia
and Lewes, Delaware this thesis argues that through the erasure of a person of
people’s public history their access to current day resource, political, social, and
economic are limited. This thesis also suggests that one way to reverse this erasure of
history is through the installation of counter-narratives and alternative histories meant
to contest physical manifestations of the dominant historical narrative. Through the
implementation of contesting alternative histories a visitor will be forced to question
why some histories are valued more than others, and what kind of consequences
people with erased histories face today.
Description
Keywords
Anthropology, counter-narratives, public history,