GED 466

This course will examine what role the past plays in the present: Why study the past, and why preserve it? How has the materiality of the past been represented in different historical and cultural contexts and for what purposes? How do various indigenous, ethnic, and nationalist narratives of struggle give shape to and reconstruct a ‘true’ history? The course will employ archaeological, textual and ethnographic evidences drawn from a particular time-space bracket
in Bangladesh to explore how the past is interpreted and (re)presented to legitimize indigenous, ethnic, and nationalist conflicts and what their broader implications are.