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In my paper, I will focus on processes through which personal histories are transformed into self-expanding social systems. I will discuss a case of an amateur painter, a witness to life in a shtetl in prewar Poland, and a narrative of a former village councillor in postwar, socialist Poland.

Paper long abstract

In my presentation, I will focus on some processes through which personal histories are transformed into self-expanding social systems. I will discuss two such cases.

The first concerns the amateur painter Mayer Kirshenblatt, a witness to Jewish life in a prewar shtetl in Poland. In his later years, he was encouraged by his daughter, the anthropologist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, to paint scenes from his memory. He also produced a memoir based on interviews conducted by Barbara. Together, these sources reveal his recollections of the intensive, informal economy of the shtetl, developed under conditions of material scarcity. At the same time, Kirshenblatt’s narrative demonstrates a form of cognitive oversensitivity, through which he articulates rich para-anthropological insights into thrift, an issue recently re-explored by economic anthropologists.

The second case is based on interviews I conducted with Elżbieta Szewczyk, an agricultural pensioner, former cow breeder, and long-time local councilor from the village of Broniów in central Poland. I will show how she provides a sort of sociohistorical theory in her personal history, which she develops and updates daily, circling back to the start, and then expanding it. I will argue this transforms into a sort of 'necessary literature', like writing passionate letters for official purposes, usually applications, or complaints, that was deeply embedded in the affective atmosphere of socialist developments in rural Poland.

In conclusion, I will show how in both cases the personal has been transformed into memorial, imaginative, and ultimately social systems of thought, thereby reaching an advanced individual historical genre.

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This paper examines East Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, through the analytical lens of generation, foregrounding the city as a socio-temporal landscape shaped by generationally differentiated engagements with historical rupture, family memory, and ethno-national political claims in everyday life.

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This paper explores how the city of East Sarajevo is lived, narrated, and consolidated through generationally differentiated ways of inhabiting the post-Yugoslav present in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how this newly built city emerges as a socio-temporal formation in which the aftermaths of socialist Yugoslavia, the Bosnian War (1992-1995), and the political order produced by the Dayton Peace Agreement (1995) are continuously negotiated in everyday life.

Building on the concept of generational positioning (Palmberger 2016), the paper traces how experiences of historical rupture are interpreted and reworked across different life-course positions and within intimate family relations. Rather than treating generations as fixed cohorts, it shows how generational temporalities are relationally produced through socio-historical experience, everyday practices, and intergenerational encounters. The family emerges as a key mediating site through which past, present, and future orientations are negotiated, shaping attachments to place and legitimizing East Sarajevo as a distinct “Serbian” urban space.

Foregrounding the city as a relationally constituted socio-temporal landscape, the study demonstrates how personal biographies, inherited memories, and political claims become entangled in the domain of the everyday. By tracing the generationally differentiated and intimately situated practices of (non-)remembering, it shows how the contemporary ethno-national reality is both normalized and, at moments, unsettled through everyday temporal orientations. The findings illuminate how these orientations tend to sustain the present Dayton order by constraining political imagination and delimiting future horizons, while simultaneously creating fragile openings of possibility within and across generations.

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Based on ethnography drawn from life stories, family photo archives, and photo elicitation, this paper analyzes how a microhistory of grief in Ayacucho reveals the interweaving of intimate experience, memory, and historical processes in post-conflict Peru.

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Memories of violent pasts, necessarily partial and fragmented, constitute a field of dispute over the hegemony of historical truth, marked by silences, forgetfulness, and political polarization. These disputes not only reshape interpretations of the past, but also influence our understanding of the present and broader political dynamics. In this paper, I analyze the grieving experience of a family from Ayacucho during and after the internal armed conflict in Peru (1980–2000), focusing on the lack of state recognition they felt in relation to their loss and the strategies they deployed in the face of such indifference.

The family lost its youngest member, Víctor, a second lieutenant in the Peruvian Army, an institution that still faces serious allegations of crimes against humanity. Faced with this situation, the family develops forms of resistance that include negotiation and collaboration with actors linked to critical discourses on state violence, establishing a dialogue between historically antagonistic positions and showing how history becomes personal, while the personal intervenes in history.

From an ethnographic approach that combines family photo archives, life stories, and photo elicitation exercises, we examine how this family, motivated by affection, resists the marginal place assigned to it by the state, particularly through its efforts to include Víctor's name in the El Ojo que Llora memorial, which has been the subject of intense controversy. It is argued that these actions reveal processes of internalization, resistance, and re-signification of the social forces and temporalities that shape memory, grief, and social life in post-conflict contexts.

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Based on interviews with members of the Bektashi-Alevi community of Western Thrace, this paper explores the multi-layered mobilization of historical narratives and their role in the process of understanding and representing different facets of their communal identity.

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Based on interviews with members of the Bektashi-Alevi community of Western Thrace, this paper explores the multi-layered mobilization of historical narratives and their role in the process of understanding and representing different facets of their communal identity. Within this process, a fragmented, quasi-historical landscapes of different aspects of communal self(s) emerges where the boundaries between myth and history blur.

In this context, mythic narratives are often articulated as non- questionable historical facts, while well- established historical events might appear blurred, hastened, obsured, contested and ultimately resolved when subjectivities converge to factualities through discussion. The paper discusses how these diverse levels of narrating the past allow multiple, and often shifting, interpretations of communal self-representation and self-understaning. Ultimately, I argue that Bektashi-Alevi historicity is characterized by these overlapping layers of mythical and historical narratives. Myth, large-scale history, personal accounts, anecdotal stories and communal memories constitute a multi faceted construction for articulating the present through a non-linear and non-cohesive past

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This paper examines how residents of an ancient Egyptian necropolis live with and within history, when local homes become a “universal common” and the land of the living becomes the land of the dead. The tombs’ oral and material traces reveal micro‑histories of multi‑temporal, personal narratives.

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This paper argues that ethnographic attention to micro‑histories adds complexities and deepens universal heritage narratives. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Upper Egypt and collaboration with a team of archaeologists, it explores the histories of Pharaonic tombs through material and oral‑history approaches, highlighting the paradoxical relationship between life and death.

The paper takes its starting point in a 3,500‑year‑old Pharaonic tomb. Besides serving as a burial site, the mountain tomb was until recently part of a vibrant village demolished in 2009. It was inhabited by local communities who resided there for centuries and built their houses as extensions of ancient tombs.

The tomb primarily testifies the violence of history‑making: the ancient erasure of its owner Qen‑Amon’s name and face, colonial‑era antiquities theft, and the spatial cleansing and eviction of the village’s 20,000 inhabitants to create an open‑air museum. Ethnographic exploration of Qen‑Amon’s tomb, however, uncovers micro‑histories beyond the dominant heritage narrative. It reveals intricate, multi‑temporal traces of the past and exposes ontologically different categories and tensions that characterize the Upper Egyptian heritage landscape: what locals call the “door of the stone” (bāb al‑ḥaǧar) is a lived and intimate space, while archaeologists refer to it as a “grave” (maqbara), emptied and cleaned for research and tourism. Oral histories from displaced and remaining residents show how living with, in, or on top of history unfolds in the present.

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'Inheritance' embodies the ‘history’-‘person’ nexus. By examining how inheritances are engendered, transformed, and transmitted, we can see how these are vectors of connection/disconnection that converge/diverge in time. These delineate belonging and continuities, but also enable distance from kin.

Paper long abstract

One modality through which the interweaving and mutual shaping of the ‘historical’ and the ‘personal’ can be glimpsed at is by attending to forms of inheritance, broadly conceived. This requires attending to how inheritance in its varied forms is engendered, valued, transformed, and transmitted, and the consequences for persons and their relations. Inheritances are vectors of connection and disconnection that emerge in response to historical losses and new opportunities, and which converge and diverge in time. Inheritance can delineate belonging and continuities, but it can also enable distance from kin and lifeworlds. It shapes subjectivity and can enable persons to embark on novel trajectories. In pursuing this picture of inheritance, I foreground the perspective of lateral and diagonal kin – primarily siblings, but also cousins and aunts/uncles – while bearing in mind that the boundaries of these categories can be fuzzy and permit the absorption of others. Attending to these ties, I suggest, sheds light on how heirs relate to, benefit from, or are harmed by, bequests in different ways, and as such, enables a dynamic view of the relation between forms of inheritance and their recipients. In pursuing this personal and historical view of inheritance, I draw from a longitudinal (2014-25) ethnography of kinship and social mobility in the central Philippines. Through the story of one sibling set and their neighbours and relations, I chart how, in the face of landlessness, ordinary villagers mobilised alternative bequests with far-reaching and ambivalent implications.

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This paper explores the burning of British child migrant records as archival silencing within colonial governmentality. It argues that while imperial power was embedded into individual lives through erasure, the lost archive emerges not only as absence but also as a productive force shaping memory.

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This paper examines the deliberate destruction of personal records of former British child migrants as a form of archival silencing, through which colonial knowledge management is experienced by former migrants as a profound “writing out of history.” The research focuses on British child migrants—removed from their families and permanently resettled in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) between 1946 and 1962. Shortly before the closure of the migration scheme, the children’s archive was allegedly set on fire. This violent erasure epitomizes what Das (2007) terms a “cancellation of context”: an emptying of the past and an obscuring of identity already fractured by forced displacement. While record-keeping and archiving were fundamental aspects of colonial governmentality, colonial archives were themselves constituted by fragments, broken traces, and silences—some negligent, others purposeful. Archival silencing thus emerges as an inherent force of colonization, intensified during moments of political transition, such as the end of British colonial rule, when documents liable to embarrass the British state were systematically destroyed. I argue that the burning of the child migrant archive exemplifies a form of knowledge management by purge, through which the structures of colonial power are inscribed into individual lives via the distortion and elimination of personal histories. Paradoxically, however, repressive erasure does not simply suppress history but rather draws even more attention to it. In its absence, the lost archive acquires a haunting presence within former migrants’ social memory work, becoming a potent symbol of loss of legitimate sources of identity and a sense of rootedness.

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Based on ethnographic research among Indo-Fijian smallholders, this paper operationalizes historicity as lived practice, showing how agricultural labour enables people to inhabit history through embodied memories, everyday work, and claims to belonging in the present.

Paper long abstract

In this paper I examine how Indo-Fijian farmers construct subjectivities through historically oriented everyday practice, arguing that working the land constitutes a primary site through which history is embodied and experienced in the present. Based on long-term ethnographic research among Indo-Fijian smallholders, I show how agricultural labour operates as a mode of historicity by linking past labour, present practice, and future obligation in everyday life.

Methodologically, I operationalize historicity as a duality. First, I approach it as an ethnographic mode that provides access to people’s experience of moving through time as a “human situation in flow” (Hirsch and Stewart 2005). Life histories, farming routines, and ritual engagements with land are treated not as sources for reconstructing past events, but as situated expressions of how temporal relations are lived and negotiated in the present. Second, I conceptualize historicity as lived experience and cognitive practice: a way of inhabiting the present shaped by embodied memories of indenture, hardship, and moral labour.

Among Indo-Fijian farmers, narratives of ancestors who “broke the land” and “sacrificed their bodies,” together with practices such as cultivation and ritual offerings, embed individual biographies within longer histories of marginalization. Through these practices, land becomes a material and moral archive through which claims to dignity, autonomy, and belonging are articulated under conditions of precarity.

Building on this ethnography, I suggest that treating land as an archive offers a concrete way of developing an ethnography of historicity, allowing temporal experience to be traced through practice rather than inferred from narrative alone.

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This paper draws on ethnographic research with older Black women in Detroit to explore how late-life reminiscence can serve as a method of both remembrance and generativity, and to reimagine the relationship between persons and collectives.

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From memoir-writing groups to reminiscence therapy to life-story companies to figures of the wise elder, contemporary US social practices and cultural ideals naturalize and valorize reminiscence among older adults. Indeed, gerontological research demonstrates that reminiscence can be pleasurable and meaningful for those who engage in it, and that it can promote wellbeing for older persons. Yet from an anthropological perspective, reminiscence is not universally seen as an implicit good, nor is it always encouraged in late life. Moreover, reminiscence is never wholly individual, as interpersonal, institutional, regional, and (trans)national social relations shape the form and content of reminiscence. This paper presents findings from an ongoing multi-sited ethnographic study of reminiscence practices among diverse groups of older adults in the Detroit, Michigan metro area. Specifically, this paper draws on data from group reminiscence sessions and individual interviews over three months in Fall 2025, with a group of older Black women who are longtime Detroit residents. Sessions focused on a range of topics, including homes, education, work, food, clothing, and friendship. As women narrated their life experiences of these intimate, personal topics, they simultaneously narrated local, national, and transnational histories. Reminiscence served as a mode of creating new forms of relatedness, and generated and fulfilled desires for intergenerational legacy. This paper explores the moral, sociocultural, and political-economic aspects of late-life reminiscence, offers methodological reflections on reminiscence as ethnographic form, and works to reimagine the relationship between the life course of persons and of collectives.

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This paper draws on long term ethnography with British magical religious Witches and Wiccans to explore how histories are lived, forgotten, and remade. I examine shifting historicities in unstable contexts to consider what happens when historically minded anthropology itself becomes historical.

Paper long abstract

This paper offers a reflexive, long-term ethnographic engagement with history in person among practitioners of modern magical-religious witchcraft in Britain, drawing on over twenty-five years of research with Witches, Wiccans, and Pagans. I examine how large-scale historical narratives are challenged, refashioned, and made meaningful through everyday practices, and how these micro-histories continue to reshape broader historiographies of modern Witchcraft.

In the early 2000s, practitioners actively scrutinised their past, rejecting claims of continuity since antiquity. Encouraged by historians such as Ronald Hutton, they acknowledged Witchcraft’s realist history: twentieth century origins inspired through rich roots that included Romantic philosophy, anthropology, occultism, mythology, and literature. This, despite some conflicts, were accepted as necessary for a public-facing Pagan Nature religion. At the same time, practitioners continued to privilege alternative historicities grounded in Celtic pasts, popular magic, cunning folk traditions, and European shamanism, drawing on expanded historicities: personal, experiential, and sensory.

Twenty-five years later, surprisingly, these formal historical revisions have not become the dominant histories of Witchcraft amongst practitioners. Instead, new mythic narratives are foregrounded, that rely on vernacular, practice-based micro-histories. These shifting historicities illuminate the politics of memory and forgetting, and the affective and temporal labour involved in living with history.

Methodologically, the paper reflects on what happens when a historically minded anthropology itself becomes historical, arguing for the necessity of historicising ethnographic data and attending to changing contexts, meanings, and subjectivities over time, as well as my relationship to this ‘old data’ and its shifting contexts.

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This paper combines oral history and ethnography to examine how the Estado Novo is lived and remembered through everyday memories, silences, and family narratives, and how these micro-histories complicate Portugal’s public accounts of dictatorship and its afterlives.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on oral history interviews and ethnographic encounters with men and women who lived under the Portuguese dictatorship of the Estado Novo (1933–1974) to ask how authoritarian rule becomes “history in person”. Rather than approaching Salazarism only as an institutional past, I explore how it is carried through intimate registers: family stories, gendered expectations, silences around censorship and fear, and memories shaped by colonial imaginaries.

These accounts rarely follow the chronology of official history. Instead, they reveal how dictatorship is remembered through ordinary life, and how personal recollections complicate public narratives that frame the regime as either a closed chapter or a distant exception. Micro-histories of accommodation, resistance, or everyday constraint illuminate the affective labour involved in living with an authoritarian past.

Crucially, these memories do not remain confined to private worlds: they shape contemporary political emotions and inform present-day struggles over nationalism, democracy, and the resurgence of far-right imaginaries in Portugal.

Methodologically, the paper brings together oral history and ethnography as a shared space where subjectivity and archive intersect. Testimonies emerge not simply as sources about the past, but as situated practices of remembering in the present.

By foregrounding these lived memories of the Estado Novo, the contribution shows how everyday moral worlds remain deeply entangled with Portugal’s authoritarian and colonial past. The paper is part of the ERC project F-WORD, which investigates how fascist meanings endure and circulate through everyday life and memory across contemporary Europe.

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The history of pastoralism in Sardinia informs the way in which shepherds today fight legal battles to preserve the specificity of their cheese production against industrial dairies. The intervention will address the issue of the flexible relationship between shepherds and industrial dairies.

Paper long abstract

The history of pastoralism in Sardinia informs the way in which cheese-producing shepherds today fight legal battles to preserve the specificity of their production against certain industrial dairies. These shepherds navigate between different opportunities and difficulties, seeking to reclaim the dynamics that have affected their production since the early 20th century. Industrial cheese production gradually established itself on the island in the early 1900s. Shepherds have been and still are part of this industrial history (through the creation of cooperatives and/or their role as milk suppliers to private companies, or through commercial relationships for the cheese they produce directly). They have an ambiguous and flexible relationship with it, at times one of alliance and at others one of conflict. Today, shepherds who produce cheese are fighting legal battles to try to rewrite the history of their political and economic role within the supra-local production flows in which the cheeses they produce are included. This presentation will address these issues based on research conducted with photographer Franco Zecchin over the last 15 years, combining ethnographic and photographic perspectives.

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This paper considers different forms of affective engagement with socialist past progress, including irony and nostalgia, which evaluate the past through contemporary ideas about solidarity, socialism, capitalism, and their interrelations, revealing personal ideological commitments.

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There has been a recent surge of interest among cultural workers, scholars, and local populations in post-Yugoslav countries in Yugoslav ‘past progress', especially in the anticolonial and antiracist projects through which socialist Yugoslavs contributed to the Non-Aligned Movement. Numerous exhibitions, films, books, and research projects are being produced today, in an attempt to make sense of the socialist past progress within the epistemic infrastructures of neoliberal capitalism.

In this paper, I consider different forms of affective engagement with socialist past progress, including irony and nostalgia. Ironic engagement assumes that Yugoslav solidarity with (formerly) colonized populations during the Cold War was an empty rhetoric driven by a pragmatic desire to establish itself as a significant player on the geopolitical stage. Nostalgic engagement, by contrast, is shaped by the belief that Yugoslavs were motivated by an honest ideological commitment to solidarity and antiracism that ultimately placed them on the ‘right side’ of history. Both ironic and nostalgic engagements with past progress evaluate the past through contemporary ideas about solidarity, socialism, capitalism, and their interrelations. As such, they reveal more about the ideological commitments of those engaging in these interpretations than about the Yugoslav socialist past itself.

To understand past progress in its own terms, I suggest that scholars need to employ the analytical strategy of reading against the double grain – that is, reading both against the categories of the socialist state and against the liberal triumphant narrative of the ‘end of history’, which led to decades-long amnesia regarding socialist past progress.

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How are environmental disasters documented in archives, and how are they remembered by those who survived them? Combining archival research and oral history interviews, this paper juxtaposes top-down and vernacular forms of knowledge production about environmental history.

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The highlands of Adjara, a western region of the Republic of Georgia, have been known for land shortage, erosion, and frequent landslides. As far as highlanders remember, the landslides have always been part of their and their ancestors’ lives. During the Soviet period, environmental policies, including laws on the rational use of resources, led to systematic documentation of disaster prevention and land management, such as monitoring risks and implementing erosion control measures like terracing. Yet, how do highlanders themselves remember these events and the changing ecology around them? This paper combines archival research with oral history interviews with disaster survivors to explore the lived experience of environmental change in the Georgian highlands. It examines the implementation of Soviet environmental governance and highlights the stories and perspectives that remain absent from official records, offering new insights into how vernacular micro-histories can reshape our understanding of environmental history.

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In this paper, I take the first name-change practice of brides by their grooms within two communities in India, as an ethnographic method to explore the relation between something as intimate and personal as first names to broader structures of caste, gender, marriage and the political contexts.

Paper long abstract

In the Marathi Brahmins and Sindhi Hindu communities in India, the groom changes the first name of his bride at the day of their wedding. This practice effectively changes the first, middle, and last names of the bride from the day of her wedding till the rest of her life. This practice, informed by the polarities and hierarchies of caste and gendered expectations from women, superimposes a ‘new’ history for the bride on her ‘old’ history through this name-change practice. The question this paper then raises is what histories live within these women through their two names – that although changed never truly leave the women through their lives. Drawing from my twelve-month ethnography (2020-2021) in the western Indian city of Vadodara, I explore how power relations within marriage can be understood through paying close attention to names and naming. In doing so, something as everyday as names become potent means to bring forth broader histories of families, political contexts, kinships, friendships and often unexplored titbits of life within these communities. In this paper I present name-narratives of women who draw links between intimate histories and broader social and political processes of their time. Thus, in this paper I propose to explore first names as an ethnographic method to capture the various histories within the named person.

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Through life-history interviews in Barbados, this paper examines how enslavement and racial and social hierarchies are lived and remembered, showing how micro-histories turn colonial pasts into embodied, emotional, and morally charged personal and collective experiences.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the large-scale history of enslavement and racial hierarchy in Barbados is lived, remembered, and narrated through individual biographies in the ethnographic present. Drawing on oral history interviews, I explore how colonial violence becomes embedded in personal memory, moral subjectivity, and everyday understandings of belonging.

I focus on life stories that reveal how plantation histories persist beyond archives and monuments, shaping lived experiences across generations. One interlocutor recounts a childhood memory of collecting fallen coconuts near his home on a former plantation, only to be expelled by a white plantation manager who told him that “Black people should not be on the plantation unless they are working.” The following day, the manager cut down all nearby coconut trees. This episode illustrates how colonial property regimes, racialized exclusion, and historical power relations continue to structure embodied memory, spatial belonging, and moral injury.

I argue that such micro-histories do more than illustrate colonial legacies; they actively reshape how history is understood, contested, and emotionally inhabited. Through narrative, people negotiate dignity, resentment, resilience, and historical accountability, transforming abstract pasts into lived moral worlds.

By foregrounding biography, affect, and memory, this paper contributes to debates on “history in person,” political emotions, and decolonial anthropology. It shows how personal narratives operate as sites where history becomes intimate, ethically charged, and politically meaningful, revealing how postcolonial subjects live with, resist, and reinterpret the enduring presence of the plantation in contemporary Barbados.

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The decolonizing discussion would benefit from a nuanced look at the lived histories of the anticolonial experience. Oral history with survivors of Cypriot intercommunal violence across the Left/Right axis shows divergent views on coloniality, highlighting the grey zone in which history lives.

Paper long abstract

The decolonizing turn in anthropology needs historicization. Drawing from philosophy, much of the decolonizing discussion seems to be ignoring the existing histories of anticolonial struggles. As such histories are built in people’s biographies, looking into the oral history of anticolonial fighting should then be an obvious place to begin an assessment of what coloniality was and, crucially, still is. When the ethnographer investigates the memories of people who lived under colonial regimes and were embroiled in anticolonial mobilization, nuanced narratives arise. As colonized peoples were enmeshed in ideologies of modernity, including the political axis of Left and Right, many claimed an alternative modernity of liberation for their own communities. Within this horizon, communities were often divided on the form of state independence. The contested futurity built in anticolonial struggles still lingers in contemporary communities, dividing them decades after decolonization.

This paper looks at communist and far-right stories by survivors of a conflict in a Cypriot village during the late 1950s and the EOKA-led anticolonial insurgency against the British. Based on interviews with elderly people, it argues that the different, often widely divergent ideas of a futurity for Cyprus that brought left and right-leaning activists to violent conflict are ongoing. It also argues that the decolonizing discussion in anthropology would benefit from a nuanced look at the lived histories of the anticolonial experience. Colonized by the shape of postcolonial statehood, which celebrates anticolonial insurgency and denigrates other visions for modernity, contemporary narratives replicate a never-finished division on the horizon of modernity.

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The paper examines how post-Soviet transition in Azerbaijan becomes “history in person” and "living with history" through gendered household memories, contrasting intimate recollections with contemporaneous media representations.

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Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Azerbaijan underwent profound social, political, and economic transformations after more than seventy years of Soviet rule. While these changes have been extensively documented in historical and political accounts, less attention has been paid to how they were lived with, remembered, and morally negotiated within intimate social worlds. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Azerbaijan in 2025, this paper examines the post-Soviet transition through gendered memories embedded in households. Focusing on siblings and spouses who experienced late socialism and the transition of the early 1990s together, the paper asks how collective memory of this period is differently constructed by women and men, and how these gendered memories engage with, resist, or reinterpret dominant historical narratives. The ethnographic data is based on focus group interviews, in which participants reflected on themes of ethnic cohabitation, economic precarity, and national identity. These discussions were prompted by selected articles from 'Azerbaijani Woman' (1989–1993), a socio-political and literary-artistic monthly magazine published by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, allowing participants to respond to contemporaneous media discourses. By comparing first-hand memories with archival media representations, the paper explores how history becomes personal through gendered experiences of social, economic and political change, while also showing how intimate recollections complicate and unsettle official narratives of the post-Soviet transition. In doing so, the paper reflects on the epistemological possibilities of an anthropology that treats history not only as context, but as lived experience.

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In Tibetan southwest China, history-in-person is lived through ghost-inflicted pain. Ritual-medical diagnostic manuals archive ghosts by the fatal historical events in which they died and guide cures, making diagnosis a technology of historicity that links bodily symptoms to historical deaths.

Paper long abstract

What does history look like when it is lived as affliction rather than recalled as memory? This paper examines ghost-inflicted pain as a mode of history-in-person in a Tibetan community in southwest China, based on 20 months of fieldwork (2021–2023). I argue that ghosts make the past present not primarily through narrative memory but through episodic pain and illness. Here, history is not primarily told, but suffered, diagnosed, and treated.

A key ethnographic focus is ritual-medical experts’ diagnostic manuals – a local archive that catalogues ghosts through fatal historical events and guides specialists in identifying which ghost is afflicting a patient and how to expel it. Drawing on healing encounters that use these manuals, I show how this archive of ghostly affliction enacts practical historical reasoning: it links bodily symptoms to relations with the dead, to historical events of violence and misfortunes, and to local topographies and cosmological time.

Developing an account of history-in-person, I show an alternative historicity in which fatal historical events never fully recede, but return without warning, taking hold of persons as sensations, pain, and symptoms. This points to an alternative temporality in which “the past” is not a completed domain, but is entangled with space and circular time, capable of intruding into the present, and confronting people unexpectedly in and through their bodies.

I argue that ghost manuals and diagnostic practice constitute a technology of historicity through which haunting becomes an embodied form of history-in-person, extending anthropological theories of historicity beyond memory and representation.

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This paper draws on intergenerational stories about marriage and the metaphor of “promise” which links generations, diverse social histories and their memories. It asks how history, temporality and social transformations shaped their decisions, choices and life trajectories.

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This paper examines the intergenerational stories of marriage of a mother and her daughter in a middle-class suburb of Athens. It focuses on the challenges they faced before and during their marriages. It considers how H/history, temporality and social transformations shape personal decisions, choices and life trajectories. Central to the analysis is the concept of the “promise”, which is perceived not only as a moral commitment between two persons, but also as a metaphor linking generations and the diverse social histories they carry with them. Family’s histories bear stories, traumas, silences and emotions in different contexts relating to laws, bureaucracies and political frameworks, which younger generations inherit, reorganise and reinterpret, thereby contributing to broader social change and transformation. Each generation produces different “promises” regarding marriage, kinship and intimate relationships more broadly. Marriage emerges as a place where personal biography and collective history intersect and where everyday life becomes a medium through which H/history is inscribed and continually reimagined.