UCSB Anthropology Brown Bag Lecture Series Presents:

The Arbitrary Divide: Exploring Ethnological and Archaeological Approaches to the Study of Empire in Southern Peru.

By Justin Jennings

One of the major agendas of postmodernism is the deconstruction of the evolutionary narrative of the past. In its place, some postmodernists have argued that the past can be broken up into definite periods of transition. This segmentation of the past has profoundly influenced the ethnological study of imperialism, colonialism, and post-colonialism. These studies, both implicitly and explicitly, have placed the origins of these phenomena in recent (by archaeological standards), western history. But the archaeological and historical evidence makes this rift nonsensical - the origins of empires are neither recent nor western. Both ethnology and archaeology stand to benefit from the closure of this artificial gap. In my upcoming dissertation fieldwork in the Cotahuasi valley of Southern Peru, I plan to use both historical and ethnological analogies to inform my interpretations of the archaeological remains of the Wari and Inka empires.



Thursday February 5, 1998, 12:30pm
HSSB 2001A, The Anthropology Conference Room

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