Lafayette Campus News (www.lafayette.edu), February 19, 2008 — The course “Social Memory,” taught by Andrea Smith, associate professor of anthropology & sociology, explores the ways in which groups remember their collective history. The course, which was redesigned thanks to funding from the College’s Federal Learn and Serve America grant, will now place that study on a more local scale.
The goal of the course is to introduce students to the myriad of ways that the past enters into social life. The class will look at various forms of collective "remembering," the mechanisms by which certain pasts are elevated to prominence and other pasts are silenced. They will then study how social groups retain knowledge of their past through generations and the important role that the past holds in creating group identities.
Students in the course will also gain hands-on experience into some of the methodologies used by social memory scholars and will be exposed to important symbols, landmarks, and sites of memory across the country and in the Easton area.
“The students will be looking at the representations of the past in tourist sites in Monterey, Calif., monuments and national parks nationally and abroad, and the use of place-names to conjure up whole stories about the past among White Mountain Apache in Arizona,” says Smith. “They then will conduct research over much of the term on a question of their choice.”
“I’ve redesigned the course in part because I have found that some of the more exciting student projects have in the past involved local subject matter,” says Smith. “Moreover, encouraging local exploration works best for my discipline, which ideally involves hands-on ethnographic research with living people, rather than, say, solely archive-based research.”
Smith has also been working with students to develop an Easton-area oral history archive. As a part of this project, this semester some students will be interviewing elderly Eastonians, transcribing their oral testimonies, and storing them for later use by scholars.
Marvin Snipes ’07 and Rachel Scarpato ’08 (Yardley, Pa.), who is majoring in American studies and anthropology & sociology, have worked with Smith on the project in the past. Nora Posner ’09 (Charlottesville, Va.), who designed an interdisciplinary major Self in Society, will be continuing the project this semester.
All of the students in the “Social Memory” course will be reading the results of some of Smith’s previous research into Easton’s history, particularly about the lost Lebanese neighborhood. Smith hopes that reading this research will help the students “gain a new appreciation for a silenced local past.” She also feels that those students who work with elderly interviewees will “learn a tremendous amount – both about local history and also about how ethnographic and oral history research is conducted.”
The College received the Federal Learn and Serve America grant from the Corporation for National and Community Service program. The program provides support to schools, community groups, and institutions of higher education to facilitate service-learning projects.
