Antiquarianism in East Asian History

Undergraduate

This course introduces students to the history of antiquarianism—how people viewed, studied, and negotiated their own pasts through the medium of material culture—in East Asia. We explore how antiquarianism shaped social memory and collective identity in China, Japan, and Korea from the first millennium BCE to the early twentieth century by investigating how historical societies engaged in antiquarian practices such as collecting and displaying, copying and faking, and preserving and erasing. The first part of the course surveys the shared antiquarian traditions of East Asia, paying particular attention to the case study of the life and afterlives of ancient Chinese ritual bronzes across time and space. The second part of the course then draws on historical, art historical, and archaeological approaches to consider the themes of objectivity, authenticity, ownership, and the politics of the past in East Asia. HU T 4pm-5:55pm