Course Description

This course combines typical Honors College seminar discussions with the opportunity to explore real-world examples through a series of field trips and field studies during scheduled class time, on a weekend day trip in the Sandia Mountains, and over a 3 day/2 night camping trip in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains above Santa Fe.

Place is a fundamental concept in the study of culture. It is the landscape on which culture unfolds; it encompasses the physical and natural structures that shape and direct behavior; and it is the specific spaces—built, inhabited, remembered, and imagined—that people use to define themselves. Placemaking is the act of using landscape to define oneself and one’s culture. This course is an anthropological and archaeological-grounded study of how place has been, and continues to be, visualized, experienced, and understood by peoples from prehistory to the present.

This course has two arcs. First, students will study the interdisciplinary scholarship of place to gain an understanding of how people have used, defined, and experienced place and how scholars have studied and documented it. This includes examination of: the acts of claiming and marking place; the phenomenology of place; the relation between place and memory; migrations and migrant’s perceptions of place; and the experience of wilderness places. 

Second, students will head into the field to experience and visualize first-hand various landscapes and culture. This will entail field studies and field trips across campus, in Albuquerque, and across New Mexico both during class time and on select weekends—including a weekend day trip in the Sandia Mountains adjacent to Albuquerque in mid-April and a 3 day/2 night camping field trip in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains above Santa Fe during the first weekend of May.

Students must also be physically able to hike and camp in the outdoors and must provide some of their own hiking and camping equipment. A course fee of $85.00 will be required to cover some field trip expenses, including travel to some sites and some food and camping gear while in the field.  Because of the weekend time commitment for the field trips, we will not meet in the classroom every assigned class time. 

Texts

Required readings made up of research articles will be available for free download in PDF format, link shared the first week of classes. Because we will be spending a significant amount of time outdoors you must bring printed copies of readings to seminar meetings.

Requirements

Seminar requirements include participation in discussions, field trip worksheets, and a creative research project entailing cultural mapping collected during several field trips. There will be campus and city tours during regularly scheduled class time and on some weekends, including a 3 day/2 night camping trip in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains above Santa Fe. Students are expected to provide some of their own camping gear and arrange their own transportation to some field trips.

About the Instructor(s): Troy Lovata

Troy Lovata, Ph.D. is a Professor in the UNM Honors College and Research Faculty in UNM’s Southwest Hispanic Research Institute, where he has taught courses on landscape, culture, and place for more than a fifteen years. Trained as an Anthropologist and Archaeologist, Troy is especially interested in how people from prehistory through the present conceive of and mark their environment and the paths people etch on the land.