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- Convenors:
-
Zahira Aragüete-Toribio
(University of Geneva)
Magdalena Buchczyk (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Aimee Joyce (St Andrews University)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussants:
-
Zahira Aragüete-Toribio
(University of Geneva)
Aimee Joyce (St Andrews University)
Magdalena Buchczyk (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 22 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
Historical traces incite powerful forms of action and imagination in the present, enabling and hindering possible futures. In this panel, we explore how traces gain relevance as epistemic sources in exercises of political, cultural and historical transformation.
Long Abstract:
Historical traces incite powerful forms of action and imagination in the present, enabling and hindering possible futures. These often physical remnants, which persist in the landscape, the environment, the depths of material collections or the body have become vehicles through which to fathom complex histories in order to open up new horizons of possibility. Traces, as Napolitano (2015) has observed, can be seen as knots of history with an ambiguous auratic presence, located between memory and forgetting, repression and amplification, metonymy and dissociation. They conjure that which we can and that which we cannot know.
In this panel, we explore how traces gain relevance as epistemic sources in exercises of political, cultural and historical transformation. We reflect on how engagements with spatial, material and bodily traces provide meaning to these emergent forms whilst revealing knowledge production practices in the making. How do traces become meaningful in order to articulate new visions of the past, present and future? How are they foregrounded as clues or evidence? How are they silenced? How might traces be individually and collectively experienced and performed as part of novel ethical commitments? Moreover, could traces offer us, as potential methodological tools in anthropology, a way to forge new alliances and unlock new horizons of interdisciplinarity?
We invite speakers with a range of ethnographic material, including anthropologies of history, space, and religion as well as museum and material culture, to consider how distinct epistemologies of the trace engage with debates about radical change and different possible futures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
The paper analyses "public life" of the bones of the royal martyrs tsar Nikolay of Russia and his family unearthed in Ekaterinburg in 1991 and 2007 and focuses on different conceptions of temporalities articulated in the process of the search, examination and memorialization of the Romanovs.
Paper long abstract:
The paper is based on a fieldwork with a group of people who found the remains of the "royal martyrs" tsar Nikolas Romanov and his family near Ekaterinburg (Russia) in 1991 and 2007 and are still searching for the bones of the brother of the tsar in Perm'. The Romanovs were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate in 2000 as saint passion-bearers. Authenticity of the unearthed remains was proved with multiple scientific methods in respectable labs in Russia and abroad but has not been recognized by the Church so far. This situation of uncertainty is perceived by the people who found the remains and were involved in their examination and then building the semi-official places of memory as violation of essential moral principles which makes further developments of the whole nation impossible. The paper focuses on variabilities of the discourses of "repentance" (Rus.: pokayanie) and "resurrection" (Rus.: voskreshenie) central for memorialisation of the regicide, from museum exhibitions and conferences to holy icons and commemoration ceremonies which are performed every year on the day of massacre at official as well as dissident memorial sites in Ekaterinburg and other places. I argue that in historical imagination of the opponents in these ongoing debates and in the cultural forms this imagination takes the logics of historicism (linear history) and of topological history (Ch. Stewart) coexist and intertwine.
Paper short abstract:
How can engagements with the traces of past lives contribute to building ethical-reflexive futures.
Paper long abstract:
Museums of Natural history, world history (formerly and sometimes still known as ethnographic museums), anatomical and medical museums hold bodily remains from ancient but also more recent history. They are traces of past lives and bear witness to the livings relationship to the dead but also to remaining structural unequal power relations. Departing from an ongoing long-term collaboration with colleagues from the Natural History Museum Vienna (NHM Vienna) and the research project TRACES (Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts. From Intervention to Co-Production), this paper will analyze how the human story of these bodily traces, incites new ways of research methodologies based on interdisciplinary (artistic, ethnographic, historical,...) approaches, and can be opportunities for transmitting difficult pasts and heritages. How can the collective but also personal engagement with collections of human skeletal remains evoke changes in present institutional structures, foster future collaborations and to build new relationships? What are the ethical implications in engaging with these collections - some of the human remains were collected under violent and ethically questionable circumstances.
The paper will also focus on examples from a series of creative public engagements with the Viennese NHM's human remains collection. By doing so, it will discuss if and how the analyzed formats can contribute in building ethical-reflexive futures.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will analyse the importance of 'context' by looking at the historical traces concerning early Roma mobilisation in Europe, and offering new frameworks through which one can engage with concepts such as 'nationalism,'activism' and'temporality', beyond their oft-used presentist framework.
Paper long abstract:
The key argument of this paper is that looking at historical traces concerning early Roma activists' 'visions of the future' creates a new pathway through which one can understand the concepts of Roma 'nationalism', 'activism' and 'temporality', beyond their oft-used presentist framework. Moreover, such historical traces provide important sources for anthropologists' understanding of the experience of present-day fieldwork while, at the same time, their absences and silences are revelatory in the (hi)stories it left behind.
Based on long-term fieldwork among Roma in Finland and Romania, and combined with subsequent archival research on the Roma mobilisation in the two countries, this paper explores the ways in which historical traces are necessary pathways in understanding the process of shaping particular visions of the past, present and future of marginalised communities, from within. In particular, by analysing archival material concerning the discourse of early 20th-century Roma activism in the two countries, alongside its present-day manifestations, highlights the necessity to re-think historical traces as both constructive and constructed spaces, embedded within the larger framework of the national, political and social history that produced them. As such, far from being artefacts or repositories of ultimate truths, historical traces that left behind (letters, periodicals, manifestos) are not only shaped by their own context but enable different forms of imagining the 'future'. Finally, this paper will also highlight the necessity for opening up anthropological practice to an inter-disciplinary realm, wherein the lessons of archival research are crucial in the shaping of anthropological knowledge in the making.
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks to the visible presence of old books on the streets of Tirana as an index of Albanian modernity. It uses the market for old books in the city as a lens to bring the shifting structures of power that have been in place from the 1940s to the present into clearer focus.
Paper long abstract:
This paper approaches the old books on the streets of Tirana as an index of Albanian modernity. The narrow range of themes and Socialist realist aesthetics of the books themselves provide a lens into the structures of power that were in place during the communist regime (1944-1991). The life stories of contemporary sellers also shed light on the experience of transition: While some of the booksellers were persecuted and therefore came into the post-communist era with a structural disadvantage, others were relatively privileged but lost their respectable jobs in the country's restructuring. The constant turnover of books in the present raises further questions that connect to the phenomenon of Albanian migration and contemporary forms of inequality. Whether people who leave Tirana in search of a better life box up their books to sell in bulk or simply throw them out, the old books they leave behind will eventually be found for sale on the city's sidewalks. If the movement from the bookshelf to the street is a sign of out-migration, the trip from the garbage to the bookstall is diagnostic of a different kind of structural inequality. This is visible in the form of the men, women, and children in capitalist Tirana who sort through the city's dumpsters in search of anything with re-sale value. To get at the more indeterminate questions of who is buying the books and why, the paper concludes in conversation with a reader I met in search of what he called mrekullitë ("miracles").
Paper short abstract:
Intramuros, annihilated in the Battle of Manila and rebuilt only 40 years later, is now experiencing a period of renewed interest. Little remains to be touched or seen, yet it spurs the imagination. The stories which are told from these traces, however, often lead to forgetting the traumatic past.
Paper long abstract:
My paper is an exploration of the on-going process of reinterpreting and remaking the historical quarter of Intramuros in Manila. The city, annihilated almost entirely in the Battle of Manila and then rebuilt only 40 years later, is now experiencing a period of renewed interest among public and private institutions. With historical buildings being rethought and rebuilt, new museums being created, and new ideas arising for using the remaining heritage sites, the process of heritagization, and a possible gentrification, is under way.
The traces of the past have however been often forgotten and lost to new projects, such as plastering the original wall of the San Ignacio Church into a newly-built museum. Very little remains to be touched or seen, yet it spurs the imagination of those who narrate history. The stories which start from the material remnants of the past might take different routes.
Intramuros, even in today's form, brings back the traumatic memory of Spanish colonization, the killing of its inhabitants in the winter of 1945 and the annihilation of the city. Yet, as far as heritage efforts are concerned, there are very few initiatives willing to bring back these dark aspects of history. The focus seems to be more on forgetting it, and pushing the narrative more towards the bright vision of the Walled City: making it a tourist attraction and a hub for business. This enables eliciting a future bereft of the traumatic past or, one could say, a future bereft of a past at all.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation addresses the ruins of geothermal explorations in Andes Mountains as traces from an ethnographic perspective. Crossing different regimes of visibility and invisibility, traces have the power to activate diverse trajectories, to interrupt and destabilize geothermal energy futures.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation is about historical traces and ruins of geothermal explorations in Andes Mountains. From the beginning of the twentieth century, scientific explorations began to imagine the futures of geothermal energy in the Andes. Ascending to an altitude of 4,200 meters towards the geysers field "el Tatio" in the Atacama Desert, scientist imagined transforming geological phenomena into electrical energy. The imagination of these energy futures has been reactivated on many occasions. Under the context of climate change, it has emerged as a potentially sustainable alternative to fossil fuels. However, the exploration of its potential has failed, leaving not only drilling wells and machinery in the middle of the geyser field but also images, memories and conflicts with indigenous communities because of the steam column explosions. The traces of these explorations are composed by drilling wells infrastructures and steam columns explosions provoke by the geothermal perforations. The following work aims to address the ruins of these explorations as traces from an ethnographic perspective. The abandonment of infrastructures as drilling wells and machinery to translate geological phenomena into geothermal resources point out the failures of technologies, imaginaries and state policies. In the presentation, we want to discuss the temporality of these exploration's traces. Rather than just pointing out a nostalgic and closed historical past, the traces have the constant capacity to produce the temporalities of their failures. Crossing different regimes of visibility and invisibility, traces have the power to activate diverse trajectories, interrupting and destabilizing geothermal energy futures.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the annual re-enactment of the 1571 Battle of Lepanto in Nafpaktos, to argue that the celebration of 'Europe's' invasion in the Ottoman lands that Nafpaktos once occupied, both asserts the town's relationship to Europe and imbues it with ambivalence.
Paper long abstract:
The Battle of Lepanto took place in 1571, when the allied naval forces of the Holy League engaged the Ottoman fleet at the gulf of Corinth-Patras, near modern Nafpaktos, a Western Greek town of 20,000 people. The Catholic victory resonated across Europe, to capture the imagination of renaissance composers and poets, to inspire artwork by Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, and to leave an indelible mark on Miguel de Cervantes, whose left hand 'became useless at the Battle of Lepanto, to glorify the right one', as he is quoted to have said. Today, the Battle of Lepanto holds a prominent place in Islamophobic and alt-right formations and discourses across Europe and North America. While, however, such commemorators of the Battle rejoice in clearcut divisions between the West and barbaric rest, my Nafpaktian interlocutors were more ambiguously positioned vis-a-vis these binaries. In fact, rather than celebrating the Battle's contemporary political symbolism, Nafpaktos' claim to the Battle is premised on location, and the town's proximity to the site of the naval engagement. This paper examines the annual commemoration and re-enactment of the Battle of Lepanto in Nafpaktos, to argue that the celebration of 'Europe's' invasion in the Ottoman lands that Nafpaktos once occupied, both asserts the town's relationship to Europe and imbues it with ambivalence. I suggest that while these flamboyant and exuberant performances confirm the town's Europeanness, Nafpaktos nonetheless needs to transform into Lepanto in order to indulge it.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing from 18 months of ethnographic field research, this paper examines how Algerians reckon with the "things left behind" by settler colonialism. These material traces of the past remain at the center of contemporary urban life, including as a narrative trope of the 2019 "second revolution."
Paper long abstract:
Contemporary Oran, Algeria is a fractured, heterogeneous cityscape, marked by absence, ephemerality, pockets of un-reclaimed space, and things left behind or left to decay. Once the archetypical settler-colonial city of French Algeria, settler-colonial urbanism built a city oriented around European imaginative geographies. At independence in 1962, the vast majority of French Algerian settlers were "repatriated" to France, vacating their homes, businesses, and leaving behind anything they couldn't carry with them. These "abandoned goods" (biens vacants) became the "raw materials" of the newly independent Algeria. Nearly 60 years after independence, the material traces of settler-colonialism remain at the center of urban life. To what extent can these "abandoned goods" be understood as a shared inheritance? Or are they better understood as imperials ruins that serve as "the fragile and durable substance and signs, the visible and visceral senses in which the effects of empire are reactivated and remain" (Stoler 2013: 196)? Drawing from 18 months of ethnographic field research, this paper examines how Algerians reckon with the "things left behind" by settler colonialism, which continue to disrupt "the experience of the city as a whole, as a continuous, enduring identity in people's lives" (Munn 2013: 367). Through narratives I collected during fieldwork from 2018-2020, I argue that the juxtaposition of what the French "left behind" and what independent Algerians "have built" has become a powerful spatial metaphor for Algerians' grievances towards their government. These grievances hit the streets in 2019, when millions of Algerians mobilized in the "second revolution" (al-Hirak).