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- Convenors:
-
Regina F. Bendix
(Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
Francisco Martínez (Tampere University)
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- Discussant:
-
Patrick Laviolette
(FSS, MUNI, Masaryk Univ.)
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Heritage
- Location:
- B2.44
- Sessions:
- Saturday 10 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Prague
Short Abstract:
We welcome papers that address the resurfacing of remnants of past wars. Fossils of aggression raise questions in an unsuspecting present, such as issues of responsibility and disposal, as well as reflections on the dematerialization of purpose and the survival of historic evidence.
Long Abstract:
The underground is a realm of cultural and historical density. It holds irregularly layered assemblies of defunct dwellings, lost toys, and broken cars, but also unexploded bombs, bullets and landmines (Arensen 2022), forgotten deposits of chemicals, and other products of the past that remain dangerously active. Different fossils and leftovers are resting beneath yet occasionally expulsed, holding within them an untimely or unrealized accomplishment. Under the ground is a holding space for alternative pasts and futures while threatening the stability of the present. Impossible coalitions meet there, thanks to the very durability of modern warfare (Schofield et al. 2002).
This panel welcomes papers that deal with the resurfacing of dangerous remnants of conflict. The underground harbors remnants of outmoded chains of production and socio-political organization, bringing the visions and knowledges of other times into the present. They also can carry within them socio-economic and environmental hazards, The resurfacing of dangerous residues enacts both a separation and a reconnection, depending upon what kind of rituals of reintegration are deployed. In some cases, they point at non-discursive and non-rational realms (Olsen et al. 2021), materializing notions of excess and sacrifice.
Alas, what kinds of messages do the residues of past wars carry and pass on to new generations? What challenges do they present as they resurface? Forgotten or at least suppressed, in their longevity, in their very durability, the material waste of aggression embodies an incalculable aspect of living with uncertainty, and demand attention, skill, and forward-looking responses (DeSilvey 2018).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 10 June, 2023, -Regina F. Bendix (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
Paper short abstract:
What is entailed in normalizing the diffusion of bombs still surfacing 77 years after WWII? Focusing on data from a German city, the bracketed time of war is contrasted with the timeless labor of devising practices to protect civil society from the potent materiality of weapons of war.
Paper long abstract:
Speaking about his exhibit “History of Bombs” at the Imperial War Museum in 2020, Ai Weiwei assessed “the horrible ingenuity of the weapons we innovate to kill each other.” This paper focuses on the kinds of ingenuity required to confront such weapons when they failed to ignite, explode, destroy, and kill. World War Two ended in 1945, yet some of its most dangerous detritus endures, present if generally hidden in the form of unexploded ordnances. They surface regularly if unpredictably when new building construction or street and sewage repair are undertaken. The presentation examines the processes of normalizing the extraordinary, drawing on ethnography and historical records of a German university town. As in many other German cities. WWII bombs are being discovered underground and generate a complex set of institutional as well as private practices to normalize and integrate what is a clear and present danger into the flow of everyday life. The paper traces the difference between the “horrible” but often celebrated ingenuity of weapon development and the painstaking logistics and skills entailed in diffusing threats that were intended to destroy livelihoods of the past. It probes the visibility of framed time – the beginning and end of wars – and the invisibility and normalcy of uninterrupted, continuous ever more ingenious weapons’ production and the struggles of civil society to foresee or else mend the impact of slumbering danger.
Áron Bakos (Babeș-Bolyai University)
Paper short abstract:
Through a self-reflexive interpretation of what digging out, storing, showing around and circulating remnants of war mean for members of a local ethnic minority group, I wish to offer an understanding of the contested histories and vernacular memories of past armed conflicts.
Paper long abstract:
The paper focuses on a bullet, that was given to me as a present during the ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in a smaller region of Transylvania, Romania, within the communities of the local Hungarian minority. The research centred around the stories of soldiering, military service and the memory of past armed conflicts. Ethnographers are possibly hardwired to take any act of kindness, friendship or gifting as an act of initiation into the studied group. From my topic it kind of followed that receiving such an object, that was brought back from the past to the present through the portal of agricultural work, was such an occasion. Besides the feeling of becoming part of the group of local men who circulated such objects between themselves, I also had a historical experience in its Ankersmitean sense, a moment in which the stories that I had listened to for months suddenly materialized in my hands. Through this subjective field experience I wish to reflect on what the private possession of such remnants of war mean in a local context in which histories are contested, public commemorations are biased and the memories become distant, yet some of the consequences of the war shape the everyday reality of the locals.
Francisco Martínez (Tampere University)
Paper short abstract:
Decommissioned defence sites are one of the many flagrant examples of what humans leave behind and the need for new generations to work with scraps, rubble and in some cases, toxic debris of past conflicts that are not that past, as we can see in Eastern Estonia.
Paper long abstract:
This paper argues that the problem with ordnance and military waste is not just that they might be dangerous, but also that they remain in a wrong way. In their upset resurfacing, army remnants trouble well-fixed cultural categories and historical representations, claiming that there is something more to say. It is a form of negativity that does not stand as a negation of war, but an extension of it instead, confronting us with the limits of our corporeal and mental capacities.
Certain elements that might produce pain or phantasms have to be moved off the sight, to prevent them from conditioning agency in the present. The complication, however, is not just that they might contest optimism or entail political critique, but the intransitive repercussion that the resurfacing entails – forcing us to notice what had successfully become unperceivable and moved aside.
Based on a long-term field research in Eastern Estonia, this paper describes a series of phantasmagorias that the traces of WWII still arise in the region. Ghostly matter and absent-presences resurface itchy uncanny emotions, the unknown well-known. These ways of dys-appearing partly relate to social choices made long ago, yet affect younger generations in unplanned ways and make visible contemporary failures. I conclude that the problem of military remnants is their wrong way of resurfacing, generating a phantasmagoric quality to them, one that connects past and present conflicts (such as the one in Ukraine).