Graduate Fellow
121 Gordon Hall / 413.545.2647
alabra [at] anthro dot umass dot edu
Angela Labrador is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology and has worked as a Legal Studies Graduate Fellow since Fall 2005. In addition to her work as a student and instructor, she is also a member of the Department of Anthropology NAGPRA Repatriation Committee, and is assisting with the development of the new Center for Heritage and Society at UMass Amherst. In the Legal Studies Department she has taught Legal 391D Cultural Theft and Intellectual Property, Legal 450 Legal Research and Writing, and Legal 460 Legalization of American Indians. She has also assisted with Anth 325 Analysis of Material Culture, Anth 367 Archaeology Survey Methods and Practice, and has served as the lab director and public interpretation coordinator for the 2006 and 2008 Department of Anthropology Archaeological Field Schools in Deerfield, Massachusetts.
Angela’s fields of interest span disciplinary boundaries and anthropological subfields. These interests include the critical legal theory of cultural property, identity, and Indigenous sovereignty; anthropological ethics; repatriation under NAGPRA; archaeological laboratory skills; object-oriented relational database management of archaeological data; and archaeological landscapes, collective memory and cultural heritage in historic and contemporary communities.
Her dissertation research combines many of these fields and more specifically draws upon her ongoing interest in the differing and sometimes contradictory ways that communities memorialize a perceived past through archaeological landscapes with a particular emphasis upon the act of preservation. Over the past nine years, her research has explored a seeming paradox between an increase in acts of memorializing and an increase in a collective cultural “amnesia”; that “preserving” and “forgetting” are not simple binaries, but are dialectically related so that an act of preservation may in fact contribute to a state of amnesia, which in turn fuels more attempts at preservation. Her case study context will focus on this paradox as it plays out in economic development projects that focus upon heritage tourism development. How do researchers understand, assess, and communicate the inherent economic and social costs of heritage tourism development, and more importantly, how can researchers work with communities to find more healthy and sustainable models without selling their cultural souls or traumatizing their collective memories?
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