Antiquarianism and the Politics of the P

This course introduces students to the history of antiquarianism in East Asia and explores how people in the past negotiated their own pasts through the medium of material culture. We will examine how historical societies engaged with antiquities—through collecting and displaying, copying and faking, preserving and erasing—and how antiquarian traditions shaped social memory and collective identity in China, Japan, and Korea from the first millennium BCE to the early twentieth century. We will pay particular attention to the life and afterlife of ancient Chinese ritual bronzes through the centuries as a case study to consider how the politics of the past translated across both time and geographic space in East Asia.