Welcome!
This topic guide is meant to accompany History & Anthropology 101: An Introduction to History & Anthropology, taught by Dr. Ageeth Sluis.
The purpose of this guide is to familiarize you with The William F. Charters South Seas Collection (also known as the Charters Collection), found in Special Collections, Rare Books, and University Archives in the Butler University Library. When examining books from the Charters Collection, it is important to read and evaluate them through a cultural lens. Think about the author's point of view or perspective and remember that they often misunderstood what and who they encountered because they did not have sufficient cultural knowledge.
Also keep in mind that many Special Collections include archival silences, meaning that the perspectives of certain groups are absent or distorted.
What happens when people meet? How do humans make sense of the new or unknown? What happens when cultural practices, belief systems and visions of the world collide and how do these encounters continue to influence present social, political and economic relationships? Using as well as problematizing the notion of "encounters," especially as they relate to process of colonization and de-colonization, this course seeks introduce you to the disciplines of History, Anthropology and Classics and explore how they intersect. Through the lenses of anthropology, history and classics, we will think about knowledge production and consider what and how we know, what we don’t know and how knowing connects across specific moments in time and across cultural geographies.
Students will also be introduced to some of the methodological and theoretical tools, as well as practical tasks (e.g. evaluating primary sources, comparing critiques of secondary sources, “reading” images, analyzing artifacts, conceptualizing research projects, etc.) central to the intersecting disciplines of history, anthropology and classics.
Click on this image to go to the Charters South Seas Collection Guide in Butler's Digital Commons:
Or, you can use the viewer below to see the guide on the Internet Archive site:
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