An 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 Library of Congress Control Number: 2010923406 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) 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.