Professor Bray hosts SAR Seminar in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Professor Tamara Bray, together with Lori Khatchadourian of Cornell University, recently hosted a week-long Advanced Seminar at the School for Advanced Research (SAR) in beautiful Santa Fe, New Mexico in May 2022.

The title of the seminar, which included 10 participants, was The Matter of Imperial Politics: Archaeological Contributions to Understanding the Role of Things in the Productions of Power. In line with the "material turn" in Anthropology, seminar participants focused on the role objects play in constituting power across a gamut of ancient empires, from the Inca of Peru to Han China, highlighting the way in which things work as components of heterogeneous assemblages to both generate and stabilize relations of power.

The outcome of the Advanced Seminar will be an edited volume, tentatively titled Materiality, Metaphysics, and Imperial Politics.