Social Lives of Places and Things

Syncrude Plant, Fort McMurray, Alberta..... and the Trinity Test, 1945, New Mexico

Message from KD: Hi Everyone, and thanks for coming and being a fantastic class for our guest speakers, Marc Lafleur and Nelson Ferguson! I'm grateful to them both for coming, and to Nelson for running class today.

Have a good Reading Week, and I'm looking forward to seeing you on Feb 21st. - KD

Readings for after Reading Week will all be posted shortly on the main course page

As you know, this course uses anthropological / archaeological approaches to understand the social lives of things and places.

We've already explored some different ways to think about material culture/things. (E.g., studying the trajectories of an object's development, the ways it mediates between people, its afterlife as it is recirculated, recycled or put into landfills.)

We now start to think more about places, i.e. the "archaeology of the contemporary past" -- looking at sites and technology from our own culture's recent history. We'll talk about the theory of this after Reading Week.... but today, we're plunging into two fantastic large-scale case studies:

* the material culture / sites of the oil industry, particularly in Canada / Fort McMurray

* and the material culture / sites of the nuclear age... specifically, as seen through "atomic tourism"

- both require large-scale, expensive infrastructure which is interesting in its own right, as 'sites'

- both deal with using technology to harness energy found in the natural world (oil, the atom) for elaborate human purposes

- both oil production and nuclear weapons sites have become major tourist draws in recent years

- both are things that everyone alive today should probably know more about, because they may significantly affect our global future

Special Note: The readings for today were posted rather late by KD -- apologies -- but we hope you had a chance to get to them. If you didn't, please do make sure you read them for next class, as we'll be returning to these subjects after Reading Week.

Oil:

A brief history of the early days of the oil industry in Canada: www.petroleumhistory.ca/history/cdnbeginnings.html

And a few key events in Canada's oil history: www.petroleumhistory.ca/history/wells.html#springs

And the Alberta oil chronology: http://www.petroleumhistory.ca/history/chronologies.html

The End of Cheap Oil: http://www.globaloilwatch.com/reports/Cheap%20Oil.pdf

Material Culture and Archaeology of The Nuclear Age and Atomic Tourism

ATOMIC TOURISM:

Joseph Masco, "5:29:45 am", from Museum Cultures, about tourism at the Trinity site. PDF here (1060 Kb)

The Cold War and the Nuclear Age

n.b. If you know little about the Cold War, I encourage you to review at least the opening paragraph of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War

Also: Please review the timeline of the Doomsday Clock (which gives a very brief history of the riskiest moments in the nuclear age): www.thebulletin.org/minutes-to-midnight/timeline.html

A Brief History of the Nuclear Age: www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/printStoryId.aspx?StoryId=4968