Building a National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom

Abstract

Many cultural anthropologists have studied networks and how people reinterpret and attach symbols to these networks, pulling symbols from a grab-bag of collectively significant events and personages. As an ethnographer working for a new National Park Service program, I find myself involved in creating "networks" and affecting construction of "meanings," rather than studying the process as an outside observer. In the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, created by Congress, my colleagues and I affect and effect relationships between groups previously unfamiliar with one another or previously not considered to fit under one umbrella. It would it be putting on blinders to analyze "transformations of popular concepts of the Underground Railroad" without considering the National Park Service and other cultural resource managers' role in public education, historic preservation, and use of memory in exhibits and publications.