Table Of ContentAn Anthropology of Absence
Mikkel Bille Frida Hastrup
●
Tim Flohr Sørensen
Editors
An Anthropology
of Absence
Materializations of Transcendence and Loss
Editors
Mikkel Bille Frida Hastrup
University of Copenhagen University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen Copenhagen
Denmark Denmark
[email protected] [email protected]
Tim Flohr Sørensen
University of Aarhus
Hoejbjerg
Denmark
[email protected]
ISBN 978-1-4419-5528-9 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-5529-6
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-5529-6
Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London
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Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank the Danish Research School of Cultural Heritage,
the Graduate School of Regional Studies, and the Department of Cross-Cultural
and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen for funding the seminar The
Presence of Absence: Materiality and Beyond in April 2008, from where most of
the chapters of this book originate. We are grateful to all the participants in the
seminar, including those whose papers are not presented in this volume.
Chapter 9 ‘Absent Powers: magic and loss in post-socialist Mongolia’ by Lars
Højer has been published in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(3),
575–591. We are grateful to the original publisher for permitting us to reprint the
work here.
Copenhagen, Denmark Mikkel Bille
Frida Hastrup
Tim Flohr Sørensen
v
Contents
Part I Toward an Anthropology of Absence
1 Introduction: An Anthropology of Absence ........................................... 3
Mikkel Bille, Frida Hastrup, and Tim Flohr Sørensen
2 People Without Things ............................................................................. 23
Severin Fowles
Part II Embodying Absence
3 Missing Bodies Near-at-Hand: The Dissonant Memory
and Dormant Graves of the Spanish Civil War...................................... 45
Layla Renshaw
4 A Sense of Absence: The Staging of Heroic Deaths
and Ongoing Lives among American Organ Donor Families ............... 63
Anja Marie Bornø Jensen
Part III Temporalities of Absence
5 Derivative Presence: Loss and Lives in Limbo
in the West Bank ....................................................................................... 83
Lotte Buch
6 Materializations of Disaster: Recovering Lost Plots
in a Tsunami-Affected Village in South India ........................................ 99
Frida Hastrup
Part IV Materializing Remembrance
7 A Saturated Void: Anticipating and Preparing
Presence in Contemporary Danish Cemetery Culture .......................... 115
Tim Flohr Sørensen
vii
viii Contents
8 Bringing Home the Dead: Photographs, Family
Imaginaries and Moral Remains ........................................................... 131
Fiona R. Parrott
Part V Ambiguous Materialities
9 Absent Powers: Magic and Loss in Post-socialist Mongolia ............... 149
Lars Højer
10 Seeking Providence Through Things:
The Word of God Versus Black Cumin ................................................. 167
Mikkel Bille
11 Presencing the Im-Material.................................................................... 185
Victor Buchli
Part VI Commentary
12 An Anthropology of Absence: Commentary ........................................ 207
Lynn Meskell
Index ................................................................................................................. 215
Contributors
Mikkel Bille is an assistant professor at University of Copenhagen. He holds a PhD
in anthropology from University College London and has a background in near
eastern archaeology. His research has focused on the material and social negotia-
tion of heritage, ranging from UNESCO heritage proclamations to quotidian prac-
tices among the Bedouin in southern Jordan. Bille’s current interest centres on the
material orchestration and social conceptualizations of atmospheres, particularly
how light is used as a social and material phenomenon.
Lotte Buch is a PhD Student at the Department of Anthropology, University of
Copenhagen, working on a project about social suffering and violence in the
Occupied Palestinian Territories. Buch is also affiliated with the Research- and
Rehabilitation Centre for Torture Victims (RCT) in Denmark. She holds an MA in
anthropology from University of Aarhus, Denmark, and an MA in social anthropol-
ogy from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Victor Buchli is Reader in Material Culture at University College London. He received
his PhD in Archaeology and Anthropology from University of Cambridge and was later
Junior Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. His previous books
include An Archaeology of Socialism (Berg 1999) – an ethno-historical study of a con-
structivist housing block in Moscow, Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past
(Routledge 2001) with Gavin Lucas – an examination of the critical issues which arise
when the archaeological method is applied to the study of contemporary material cul-
ture, and Interpreting Archaeology (Routledge 1995) co-edited with Ian Hodder et al.
He has also edited The Material Culture Reader (Berg 2002), the five volume Material
Culture: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences for the Major Works Series, Routledge
Publishers (2004) and with C. Alexander and C. Humphrey, Urban life in Post Soviet
Asia (Routledge 2007). Buchli has been managing editor of the Journal of Material
Culture, and is founding and managing editor of Home Cultures with Berg Publishers
– an interdisciplinary journal for the critical study of the domestic sphere.
Severin Fowles is an assistant professor at Barnard College and Columbia
University. His research interests include the archaeology of religion, iconography,
and the evolution of societies in opposition to the state. Fowles specializes in the
ancestral Pueblo archaeology of the American Southwest and is the author of “The
Magician’s Progress: A Critique of True Religion”, forthcoming from the School of
Anthropological Research Press.
ix
x Contributors
Frida Hastrup is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Anthropology,
University of Copenhagen. She holds a PhD in anthropology from the University
of Copenhagen, and her doctoral research focused on notions and practices of
recovery after the Asian tsunami in 2004 based on fieldwork in a fishing village in
Tamil Nadu, India. Hastrup’s current research addresses local responses to climatic
changes in the Bay of Bengal area with a specific focus on flooding, cyclones and
coastal erosion.
Lars Højer is associate professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional
Studies, University of Copenhagen. Højer holds a PhD in anthropology from
University of Cambridge and has done extensive fieldwork in Mongolia, focusing
on social, economic, and religious transition processes. His current research con-
centrates on minority issues related to Western China.
Anja Marie Bornø Jensen is a PhD student at the Department of Anthropology,
University of Copenhagen. She has worked extensively with anthropological per-
spectives on organ donation and conducted several field studies among donor fami-
lies and healthcare staff in The United States and in Denmark. Jensen holds an MA
in anthropology from University of Copenhagen.
Lynn Meskell is Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Stanford University.
Meskell’s research and teaching interests include a broad range of fields, including
Egyptian archaeology, ethnography in South African, identity and sociopolitics,
gender and feminism, and ethics. Her current research examines the constructs of
natural and cultural heritage and the related discourses of empowerment around the
Kruger National Park, ten years after democracy in South Africa. Another project
is focused on the social constitution of the figurine worlds at Çatalhöyük, Turkey.
Meskell is founding editor of the Journal of Social Archaeology, and has published
several books, including Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies
Past and Present (Berg 2004).
Fiona R. Parrott is a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine. Her interests include the material and visual culture of loss,
remembrance and separation in Britain and Africa. Parrott holds a PhD in anthro-
pology from University College London, and her doctoral research focused on
death, memory and the home in London. Parrott’s current work in Northern Malawi
focuses on perceptions of death and fertility among people living with HIV in the
context of freely available antiretroviral therapy. She also works with psychiatric
patients in the UK on a project exploring the impact of secure psychiatric care on
patients’ relationships to their children.
Layla Renshaw lectures in forensic archaeology and anthropology at the School of
Life Sciences, Kingston University, London, and is course director of the BSc in
Forensic Science there. Renshaw holds a PhD in Anthropology from University
College London, and her thesis focused on the relationship between memory, mate-
riality and the contested representations of the past elicited by the exhumation
of Republican mass graves from the Spanish Civil War. In addition to forensic
Contributors xi
investigations, she has participated in civil war exhumations throughout Spain, and
her ongoing research interests include the materiality of bodies and objects, the
politics of exhumation, and the role of memory and material evidence in forensic
investigations into the traumatic past.
Tim Flohr Sørensen has recently submitted his PhD thesis in archaeology at the
University of Aarhus. He has a background in landscape archaeology (University
of Wales Lampeter) and Near Eastern archaeology (University of Copenhagen),
and now he works mainly with material culture, movement and emotion in prehis-
toric as well as contemporary Danish contexts. Sørensen’s PhD research focuses on
the choreography of movement and emotion in cemeteries, and the interaction
between materiality, affectivity and the senses. Other research interests include
lighting, landscape, architecture, design and methodology.
Description:In studying material culture, anthropologists and archaeologists use meaningful physical objects from a culture to help understand the less tangible aspects of that culture, such as societal structure, rituals, and values. What happens when these objects are destroyed, by war, natural disaster, or o
