Paper short abstract:

Building on discussions of object-oriented ontology, hauntology, and archeologies of the future, I suggest a hybridity of these forms to be used as an ethnographic lens. Here, I ask how notions of nostalgia, longing, forgetting, and accumulation can produce an archeological site.

Paper long abstract:

What agency do future archeological subjects possess? How can we, as anthropologists, folklorists, and cultural critics, apprehend the future in the past? How can ghosts become key informants on the future? In addressing these inquiries, this paper builds on discussions of object-oriented ontology (Harman 2002, Bryant 2011) and Derrida’s (1993) concept of hauntology, along with Jameson’s (2007) notion of archeologies of the future in order to develop a hybridity of these forms to be used as an ethnographic lens. Here, I ask how notions of nostalgia, longing, forgetting, and accumulation (of materiality, time, and capital) can produce a potential archeological site, from both an ideological and phenomenological perspective. This inquiry unpacks the significance of the authentic subject of both archeology (as a reflection of Kantian dualism) and ethnography (as a humanistic pursuit) in the context of late capitalist landscapes of becoming-ruin (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). As its ethnographic subject, this experiment utilizes the author's recent fieldwork (Armstrong 2020) in the deserted Hornstrandir region of Iceland as its primary locus of exploration. Beyond an elemental thought experiment, I hope to unearth a new ontological methodology for anthropologists of the Anthropocene, one that emerges from a necessary and timely bricolage (Lévi-Stauss 1966) of the anthropologies of the past, present, and future to produce a fluid and adaptive approach to writing culture (Clifford 1986).