Ghosts of Memory || Introduction: Ghosts of Memory

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Introduction: Ghosts of Memory

2 Janet Carsten 2

Residents of a marginal and decayed railway colony in Bengal are persistently troubled by domestic ghosts and by uncanny events featur-ing their recent ancestors. Pre-empted from asserting communal soli-darity or continuity with the Indian polity in the idioms of caste, village, or national ties, these families express their links to the past in tales of haunting and in commemorative practices that bind them to the places where they live. Sex workers in London apparently have diffi culty in telling their personal biographies as a coherent sequence of events linking the past to the present. Instead, their pasts are frag-mented, refracted through different lives and sets of relationships that are associated with the different names and personae that they have adopted. In Mongolia, nomadic herding, migration, and political per-secution disrupt people’s connections with absent or deceased kin. In these circumstances, women’s embroideries that capture signifi cant events and emotions in their lives, photographic montages of ancestors, and accounts of reincarnation, provide alternative media for displaying connections to the past.

These three examples indicate just some of the subtle and complex interconnections among everyday forms of relatedness in the present, memories of the past, and the wider political contexts in which they occur that are considered in this volume. They point to the myriad articulations – of temporality, memory, personal biography, family connection, and political processes – that are manifested in subjective dispositions to the past, and in the imagination of possible futures.

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They suggest, too, some common forms and themes that recur across the diverse geographical locations and social contexts that are threaded through the essays that follow: pasts disrupted by migration, personal trauma, or political upheaval; the present disturbed by ghosts and hauntings, illness, absent or abusive familial relations. In different ways, these essays explore how their subjects – German Jewish families, Buryat pastoralists in Mongolia, Polish peasants in the Tatra Mountains, sex workers in London, displaced Muslim refugees in Sri Lanka, patients attending an HIV clinic in a North American city, Anglo-Indian railway workers, adult adoptees in Scotland, an alterna-tive healer in Switzerland – are located in personal and familial histories that connect to the wider political formations of which they are a part.

These essays stand at the intersection of three strands of scholarship. One is recent work on memory in history, a theme in which writing on the commemoration of war, and on the Holocaust, has been par-ticularly prominent. The second is a literature on anthropology and memory, which has attended closely to the politics of memory. The third is recent studies of kinship in anthropology. These have illumi-nated the experiential, emotional, and everyday dimensions of related-ness, but have tended to leave aside the political signifi cance of kinship.

The work of Nora (1984–92) on sites of commemoration in France, and of Yerushalmi (1996[1982] ) on Jewish memory are key texts to understanding the role of memory in twentieth-century European identity. In the wider literature on European memory and history, the Holocaust has fi gured as the turning point in grand narratives of twentieth-century modernity. If the Holocaust is the trope for twentieth-century obliteration, then the injunction to remember, depicted by Yerushalmi as a key paradigm in Jewish history, is what emerges in the literature on history and memory in late twentieth-century Europe. This injunction necessarily encompasses not only the collective memories of killings on a mass scale, but also the personal and intimate aspects of loss.1 The imperative to witness and record the details of these events is the prerequisite for twentieth-century iden-tity.2 The massive disjuncture of the Holocaust can be said to stand behind other disjunctures of familial loss, displacement, or migration, which are the recurrent motifs not just of the academic literature on war and displacement, but also of fi lms, memoirs, and fi ctional writing

Introduction: Ghosts of Memory 3

that deal with personal or familial aspects of dislocations – whether as the direct result of the major events of European history, or in a minor register, of small-scale personal or family history (see Hodgkin and Radstone 2003). The sociological notion of “collective memory” (Halb-wachs 1980, 1992) draws attention to various kinds of ritual and sites, “realms of memory” (Nora 1989, 1984–92), in which such memories may be elicited, reinforced, or produced3 – including war memorials and rituals of commemoration of various kinds, and these have been the focus of a rich vein of historical scholarship (see Connerton 1989; Mosse 1990; Nora 1989, 1984–92; Winter 1995).4

Drawing inspiration from this historical work, one strand of a recent anthropological literature, focusing on the production of shared memory within particular social groups, has explored the “politics of memory” and the signifi cance of memorializing practices to the politics of the nation and the state (Boyarin 1994a; Hodgkin and Radstone 2003; Pine, Kaneff, and Haukanes 2004a).5 Such explorations have been fruitful in understanding the role of commemorative practices in pro-ducing or reinforcing political ideologies of nationalism or ethnic soli-darity. While this work has tended to foreground political processes and collective rituals rather than familial, intimate, and everyday prac-tices of relatedness, it also provides telling examples of how personal, familial, or local memories may explicitly or silently challenge offi cial versions of history.6

Anthropological studies have also documented the links between memory, colonial history, and/or political dislocation outside Europe, demonstrating the centrality of political autonomy to the possibility of performing commemorative acts in colonial and post-colonial contexts, or under repressive state regimes. In China, Madagascar, and else-where, anthropologists have shown the myriad linkages among com-munal rituals, kinship, mourning, and state policies in their historical unfolding.7

In contrast to writing on memory, however, recent work on kinship has, with some exceptions, often left aside the political implications of everyday processes of relatedness.8 Scholars in this fi eld have moved away from conceiving kinship as a discrete domain – in terms of par-ticular analytic paradigms, such as functionalism or structuralism, or technical models that focus on kin classifi cation – and instead have prioritized the lived experience of relatedness. Much of this work has highlighted indigenous practices and concerns. Studies which focus on

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the practical and symbolic elaboration of one or more facets of kinship – the house, procreation, personhood, feeding, naming, gender, or ideas of bodily substance – have illuminated the diversity of local practice.9 None of these idioms are taken to exclusively defi ne or contain kinship in any specifi c setting. Rather, they provide a fi lter through which local understandings and practices have been viewed by their ethnographers.

While scholarship on memory points back to the signifi cance of major political events, and work on kinship highlights the symbolic elaboration of the everyday world of the family, this volume is an attempt to bring these themes together. The essays that follow suggest how, cumulatively and over time, small everyday processes of related-ness – such as narrating stories of past kinship, tracing family histories, constituting small ceremonies of commemoration, making medical histories, creating or storing material objects – have a larger-scale political import. To bring this conjunction of the intimate and the political, the ordinary and the momentous, more sharply into focus, I turn to Veena Das’s writing on “critical events” (1995) that dominate local political and social imaginaries and change the shape of the lives of those who are caught up in them.10 Das has characterized critical events as moments when everyday life is disrupted and local worlds are shattered. But more than this, they bring into being new modes of action, which in turn change the categories within which people operate. People learn to relate to each other in new ways. Nor is the impact of these events confi ned to particular institutions or localities. Rather, their effects ricochet between different kinds of institutions, localities, and actors. Critical events are not only translocal, they are also necessarily open to expression in many registers. They involve individuals, families, law courts, multinational corporations, and the state (Das 1995:4–6).

These events are often apprehended and experienced at the time as chaotic and unexpected, accounts of them may be faltering or inarticu-late, experiences of time may be discontinuous and fragmented. The idea of the critical event is premised on the existence of multiple and often muted voices which express the suffering that has been visited upon them. Das proposes an anthropology which does not search for the meaning of these events – they cannot be accounted for in any simple way. Indeed, she suggests that in constructing metanarratives of such events, certain kinds of institutions – including the state –


appropriate the experience of victims for their own ends (1995:22–3, 200–1). And here the passing of time plays a part in the absorption of dislocation in national and familial narratives. Stephan Feuchtwang (2005) suggests that, especially in the generation following the one that experienced them, such events constitute shared breaks and points of orientation, or “caesurae,” in which generational reckoning and his-toriography coincide.

The critical events on which the essays in this collection turn, and which are absorbed in ordinary life, include both national and local phenomena: ethnic violence leading to the creation of internal or external displacement and long-term refugee status; the diagnosis of terminal illness; familial disruption leading to adoption; state repression; familial abuse; radical dislocations or transformations of political regimes. In such circumstances, the safeguarding of personal and family memories, or their obliteration and erasure, may contribute to larger narratives that constitute, maintain, or negate difference locally and nationally. Conversely, through large-scale political events, as well as the institutional structures of the state that impinge on personal and familial life, kinship emerges as a particular kind of sociality in which certain forms of temporality and memory-making, and certain disposi-tions towards the past, present, and future are made possible, while others are excluded.

In focusing on the place of kinship in memory, and of memory in kinship, the authors of these essays explore a more personalized terrain than most studies of the politics of memory. In so doing, they encom-pass biographical approaches to the life course and intimate processes of self-making. In the introduction to their edited collection, Tense Past, Michael Lambek and Paul Antze highlight the intricate, continu-ous, and reciprocal relations between the social and the intimate, and the centrality of memory, discursively framed, to creative refashionings of the self (1996:xx). Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s (1991) work on the imagination of community, they emphasize the “mobile and permeable” boundaries between imagined selves and imagined com-munities.11 The centrality of linkages between identity and memory to a Western sense of self, to which Lambek and Antze draw our atten-tion, thus provides another fruitful point of departure for this collec-tion. Their point that, “when memory is not in question, neither is identity” (1996:xxii), and the emphasis they place on the ways in which personal identities and wider collective ones are mutually

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embedded, suggest the importance of an exploration of the connec-tions among personal and familial memory and narratives of the nation.12 Similarly, in proposing a study of “history in persons,” Dorothy Holland and Jean Lave have suggested that we should “approach history as something that is in part made in and by persons, and . . . approach the study of persons as historically fashioned” (2001:30). Paying attention to the mixing, discarding, and accumula-tion of apparently incompatible elements in projects of self-fashioning, necessarily also illuminates wider processes of political affi liation and identity-making.

The Weight of Memory

Does it make sense to talk about “kinship” and “memory” as separate things? Several authors in this volume suggest it does not – precisely because memory is not a discrete thing in itself (see also Lambek 2003; Radstone and Hodgkin 2003). The entanglement is, however, the common terrain of novels, memoirs, and literary essays. I turn to this very different literature here for a commentary on how kinship and memory are intertwined, and on what happens when the many intri-cate connections between them are fractured or severed.

Two novels by Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (2004[1980] ) and Gilead (2005[2004] ), explore the transmission of kinship memory down the generations. In Housekeeping, the weight of memories is excessive. Two young girls are brought up after their mother’s death by their grandmother, and then by their mother’s sister, Sylvie. All these women’s lives are haunted by the deaths, fi rst of the grandfather, who drowns after a train on which he is working plunges off a bridge into the local lake, and then by the suicide of the girls’ mother, who, years later, drives her car into the same lake. Their aunt Sylvie’s pre-carious hold on reality is materialized in part by her previous life as a transient vagrant, to which, in spite of valiant attempts at proper housekeeping, she is always drawn back. The housekeeping is fated to miss the mark. Routine tasks are ignored; others, apparently pointless, are carried out with ritualistic fervor. The girls’ house is engulfed by their aunt’s tendency to hoard old newspapers and other apparently useless objects, and then by fl ooding, after which it never resumes its former sense of order. In a bizarre mimicry of normal housewifely


prudence and tidiness, Sylvie meticulously cleans and stores old tin cans, which she neatly piles up to no obvious purpose in the kitchen. Alternative transient places, haunted by vagrants and by the girls’ deceased relatives, threaten always to pull the girls and their aunt into a world of ghosts who inhabit the watery domains that surround them. As the story unfolds, it becomes increasingly explicit that, “Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it” (2004:194). Some at least of those left amongst the living will not escape the excessive accumula-tion of memory.

The tone of Gilead is less melancholy; the ambient elements more earthy than watery. The novel takes the form of a memoir written by an old preacher, the Reverend John Ames, who, towards the end of his life, seeks to reckon with his past, with his prodigal godson, and with his father and grandfather, both preachers before him. It is written as an extended, wise, and often humorous, letter to the young son of his old age whom he will not see grow into adulthood. Here the transmission of memory occurs between four generations of men rather than through women, and the writing is marked by an intimate knowl-edge of the Old Testament scriptures in which their lives have been steeped. While the protagonists of Housekeeping are freighted with an excessive accumulation of kinship memory, the memories embodied in Gilead, which have been blocked in the past by diffi cult relations between successive fathers and sons, show signs of moving more easily and lightly into the future and the imagined adult life of the preacher’s young child. The characters in both novels are surrounded by the ghosts of the past, but in Gilead they resolve themselves into more benign presences who are able to transmit the blessings of life and of the Old Testament to their children. These blessings are anchored in a stable sense of place: relations with the past are locatable in the parched and dusty earth where churches, graveyards, and houses have been built to last, and then in due time crumble and decay, rather than in the mobile and precarious media of water, trains, and bridges, or houses that are vulnerable to fl ooding.

In weaving together the themes of loss and accumulation with refl ections on the ways kinship memory can be passed on or become blocked, these novels have much in common with the essays that follow. They suggest the importance of a sense of place in these pro-cesses: relations, and memories of them, must be anchored in specifi c sites. In Gilead, the Reverend John Ames recalls in his memoir how,

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as a young boy, he was taken on a remarkable journey by his father, during which they both reached the limits of their endurance. John Ames’s father’s desire to fi nd the grave of his own father, who had abandoned his family towards the end of his life, has the status of a kinship imperative. The need to achieve a kind of peace, and a rec-onciliation with the father from whom he had become spiritually and emotionally estranged before the latter’s death is the driving force of the extreme journey he undertakes with his son. Locating the grand-father’s place of burial fi nally permits the reconciliation of John Ames’s father to the grandfather. Crucially, in this tale of transmission of patriarchal blessing, locating the burial site is also an epiphany that in turn binds John Ames’s father to his son.

Both these works are suffused with the memory of past kinship, and with the knowledge that these memories may become excessive, over-whelming the lives of those who inherit them, and obstructing their futures. They suggest too an alternative possibility – where lives may be hampered by too little memory of the past, and by a lack of kinship ties. This possibility is explored in W. G. Sebald’s extraordinary, ellipti-cal work, Austerlitz (2002[2001] ), which is written in the form of a precariously constructed biography. Its eponymous protagonist is a strange, lost, alienated, and isolated fi gure, a historian of architecture, who initially avoids his lost identity, but is eventually forced by his own isolation and inability to make relations, to try to retrieve it. Austerlitz has been brought up in a bleak corner of Wales as the child of a preacher and his wife, but he has no proper memories of his early childhood or sense of connection to this place. His attempts to piece together the gaps in his childhood are told to the fi ctional narrator of the novel by way of a kind of architectural journey through the obscurely signifi cant public buildings in Austerlitz’s life where the narrator and Austerlitz occasionally, and always by chance, happen to meet. Images of grandiose nineteenth-century railway stations of several European cities recur, especially Liverpool Street in London, which seems, inexplicably, to have a particular hold on Austerlitz’s imagination.

This is a book about the impossibility of achieving proper adult-hood, a full life and relationships, when the chains of connection to one’s own past have been broken. It is in fact a book about kinship and memory – or the signifi cance of their absence. Austerlitz suffers a kind of breakdown involving fugues, fi ts of absence, and bouts of


amnesia as the presence of the past asserts itself ever more strongly in his life. And, like the wandering protagonist, the narrative moves forward and backward in time without points of anchorage. There are no paragraphs or chapters to interrupt the fl ow, or provide an obvious structure. For the reader, as for Austerlitz himself, the signifi cance of images, buildings, or fragments of memory has to be read backward into the narrative towards its close.

Visual imagery has an unusual place in Sebald’s writing. Landscapes, corners of buildings, stairwells, windows, and sometimes people are not just described; they are captured in the narrative in the form of photographs, which Austerlitz has taken or comes across, and that evoke the shadowy times and places that elude him:

In my photographic work, I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long. (Sebald 2002:109)

Places are partly a means to locate the people and relations who are missing from Austerlitz’s past. But there is also the idea that these places, and the photographs of them, are the possessors of their own memories, equally elusive, of those who have previously gazed upon them.

Austerlitz’s relation to his past is evoked through the elusive loca-tions through which he passes, and which trouble his memory because of the manner in which they constantly evade being fi xed in a coherent narrative sequence. Ghosts or elusive presences, which in Housekeeping are apparently symptomatic of a kind of “memory overload,” in Austerlitz signify an absence of memory and of kinship relations.

Ghostly Presences

The stories to which I have referred apparently work on a principle of extrapolation, in which their characters are plagued by extreme excesses or absences of kinship memory that go beyond the realm of everyday experience.13 And yet I think we can readily fi nd their echoes

10 Janet Carsten

in the essays in this collection. In some of his non-fi ctional writing, W. G. Sebald refl ects on the connections between memory, mourning, and ghosts, and on the signifi cance of different kinds of mourning rites and the work of memory they entail.

Delineating a contrast between the elaborate, public, and dramatic funerary rites of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Corsica, and the contemporary urban tendency for brief cremations with truncated rituals, Sebald suggests that the common practice of moving the remains of the dead after a short period from their already overcrowded sur-roundings is a means of forgetting rather than remembering the dead, a sign of “a present without memory” (2005:35). Without necessarily adopting this view of the nature of funerary rites – which seems informed by Sebald’s own immersion in twentieth-century German history – it is worth pursuing some of the connections he makes.14 In particular, I am struck by Sebald’s evocation of the ghostly presences haunting everyday lives:

And for some time, too, I have known that the more one has to bear, for whatever reason, of the burden of grief which is probably not imposed on the human species for nothing, the more often do we meet ghosts. On the Graben in Vienna, in the London Underground, at a reception given by the Mexican ambassador, at a lock-keeper’s cottage on the Ludwigskanal in Bamberg, now here and now there, without expecting it, you may meet one of those beings who are somehow blurred and out of place and who, as I always feel, are a little too small and short-sighted; they have something curiously watchful about them, as if they were lying in wait, and their faces bear the expression of a race that wishes us ill. (Sebald 2005:33)

The idea that excesses of grief cause these ghosts to appear is refl ected in some of the essays collected here. It is evoked in Laura Bear’s depiction of the Anglo-Indian families in the railway colony of Kharagpur, whose connections to their past are troubled by their par-ticular colonially infl ected history, and the decay and ruin of their surroundings. These families materialize their connections to their ancestors through the presence of domestic ghosts. Their uncanny tales and experiences have a kind of bitter-sweetness, expressing a loss of legitimate sources of identity and connection to the past in the con-temporary Indian nation, and the present decay into which their lives


have fallen. But because they are fashioned in the idiom of Catholi-cism, these experiences are also a means of asserting connections to a history of religious affi liation that remains a positive source of identi-fi cation and a recorded continuity with a past stretching into the present and future. As those who mourn know all too well, attachment to ghosts is also a source of solace, and may sometimes be relinquished only with reluctance.15 In this case, while, as Bear demonstrates, ghosts can be friendly presences, and have a kind of externality that supports the authenticity of the history of these Anglo-Indians, their insubstan-tiality also speaks of the precariousness of connections to the past, and the fragility of current circumstances.

Ghosts also make an appearance in the adoption stories which I discuss in my contribution. Here the spiritual presence of the deceased birth mother of an adult adoptee is both a consolation and a mark of the absence and loss that the daughter expresses when talking about her life. In the narratives of reunions with birth kin to which I listened there were other mentions of uncanny events and ghostly beings – Ouija boards bearing messages from the spirits of the dead, strange coincidences, and moments when alternative selves with different names, and different possible lives seemed to exert a palpable reality (see also Yngvesson 2002). And this suggests too that the presence of ghosts speaks not only of unresolved griefs and excessive losses, but that these manifest themselves in parallel temporalities in which the past takes on a more than usually vivid existence.16 Such non-linear temporalities are a prominent feature, of course, of stories of reincarna-tion. In the Buryat case, described by Rebecca Empson, spatial disloca-tions of a migratory lifestyle, and the effects of political persecution, result in connections to the past that must be expressed in quite per-sonalized forms. Absences of place and of past connection manifest themselves in part through individual reincarnations. The souls of deceased relatives are “rehoused” in new bodies, but these are also precarious and elusive appearances. While memories of the deceased can be channeled into the present and ties with kin persist after death, such visitations may also be fl eeting, liable to disappear as swiftly as they have been recalled.

Reincarnation also occurs in the story of an alternative healer in Switzerland, whose life is considered in Michael Lambek’s contribution to this volume. It encapsulates the extraordinary features of this healer’s abilities, the unusual sources of her effi cacy, and the alternative political

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and social stance that she embodies in her personal biography and in a long familial history. Reincarnation, in other words, is part of Alice Alder’s claim to authenticity and effectivity that she asserts in opposi-tion to the religious and social conformity by which she is surrounded. The unexpected insertion of a past life lived in Nazi Germany, in which the terms of her moral and political resistance emerge more starkly than in contemporary Switzerland underlines, I think, the importance of this oppositional stance to Alice Alder’s rather solitary and eccentric sense of self. The capacity to “see another as oneself ” (and indeed to be another) here embodies both alternative temporality and alternative morality.

Before leaving the topic of ghosts and unfamiliar hauntings, I want briefl y to note other scenarios described in this volume where past or future lives take an unexpected form in alternative temporalities. This may not be expressed directly in the idiom of ghosts or reincarnation. Instead, it seems that the lives of past or envisaged future selves cannot necessarily be readily incorporated into the present, and sometimes must maintain separate and unresolved existences. The lives of sex workers described by Sophie Day, lived on the margins of legal and state institutions, necessarily involve the adoption of numerous differ-ent personae, names, personalities, and relationships that may have sequential or simultaneous existences, and are kept secret or revealed to only a few connections. Lives here are lived in a “vivid present” that is dislocated from the past and future. In retelling their biographies retrospectively, these existences are blurred or half-forgotten, resisting resolution in coherent or conventional biographical narratives. The sense of continuity between past, present, and future is acknowledged as illusory. If the presence of ghosts signifi es in part a reluctance to relinquish attachments in the past, the shadowy multiple identities alluded to here seem to indicate attachments that refuse to be anchored, histories of relatedness that remain partial or fragmented.

In the scenarios involving young HIV patients attending a clinic in a North American city considered by Veena Das and Lori Leonard, memories of kinship in the past do not provide a nostalgic or authentic source of identity. Encompassing violence, disruption, and abuse, relat-edness has resulted in illness, and the abrupt curtailment of possible futures by the probability of premature death. Here the revelation of illness becomes an alternative point of origin that, paradoxically, is also a liberation from previous abuse and relations that have been


concealed. While health workers try to pre-empt discussions of death on the part of their patients, these young people attempt to grasp the realities of their existence. Their assertion of control over their own future lives and deaths is strikingly demonstrated by their aggressive participation in the funerary rituals of their friends, and by the violent disruption of the normal bland procedures of these rites. In refusing to consign their consociates to the past, or to the annulment of memory, they demonstrate not so much an excessive attachment to the past, but a refusal to countenance its pastness. Here Sebald’s refl ec-tion that contemporary Western funerary practices are a means of over-hasty forgetting seems all too apt. One senses that allowing the funerary rites to go forward without inserting themselves in dramatic fashion would signal an acquiescence not only to the erasure of memory for these patients, but also to their own diminished futures.

The Unbearable Lightness of Loss

Much of the literature on memory and relatedness is necessarily concerned with loss. The presence of ghosts and uncanny hauntings suggests, as I have said, losses that are excessive, or circumstances in which those who bear them are not resigned to giving up their attach-ments. Sebald puts this another way:

Ghosts and writers meet in their concern for the past – their own and of those who were once dear to them. (Sebald 2005:149–50)17

But of course a “concern for the past” takes many forms, and there are numerous expressions of it in this collection. Attachments of the past do not necessarily result in hauntings – though in some cases one senses that ghosts might yet appear. In other scenarios, the losses go back many decades, and are apparently more processed; ghosts have eventually been laid. There can be no catalogue of the relative weight of memory in the diverse circumstances discussed in these essays – though we may distinguish some different processes and temporalities at work.

Frances Pine’s account of memory and kinship in the Podhale region of the Polish Tatra Mountains shows the ways in which the absences, losses, and accumulations that are incurred through life are

14 Janet Carsten

intricately woven into narratives that encompass personal, familial, and political histories. Here, rather than a sense of the uncanny, we are given a vivid picture of the rootedness of these processes in the local landscape, and the layers of time and history in which they occur. In terms that echo Sebald’s writing but in a different register, it is land rather than buildings that is the keeper of memories in the Podhale. This sense of rootedness is so strong that it draws in the memories of the anthropologist too, whose ties to the people she studies go back more than twenty-fi ve years, and encompass her own familial history. The immobility of place thus provides a counterpoint to the move-ment of people. But as Pine makes clear, the slow incorporation of loss that she describes does not imply a history without sudden ruptures or discontinuities. Peasants of the Podhale are in no way untouched by the troubled events of twentieth-century Polish history. Indeed, the point of her essay is precisely to show how these too are interwoven with the more personal and intimate sagas of family life.

A different kind of time-depth is integral to Sharika Thiranagama’s depiction of the losses of Muslim refugees in Sri Lanka. The traumatic eviction of these Muslims from the north of Sri Lanka to the Puttalam district in 1990, and their relocation in a variety of refugee camps and settlements, has resulted in an existence that is permeated by loss and by memories of home. Tellingly, these take different forms for the different generations of refugees. Whilst home, for the oldest genera-tion of grandparents, is fi rmly located in the places from which they were evicted, and this generation is oriented to an eventual return, young people, who have spent most of their lives in the camps, have quite different memories of past kinship that focus on their present place of residence, and those with whom they have grown up. Where kinship derives from both procreative ties and the locality of one’s upbringing, encompassing soil and food, as is the case here, this diver-gence between generations results in a kind of unresolved suspension in time, a present that is caught between the past and future. Future marriages of the younger generation imply an inevitable slow relin-quishing of the past homes of their parents as a source of identity. The predicament of these refugees is encapsulated most starkly by the middle generation, the parents for whom memories of home are inte-gral to their own identities, and yet who are obligated to enable the marriages of their adult children, and thus set in train further losses of kinship and memory. Investment in the present and future of


kinship relations here inevitably entails deepening the rupture with the past.

Stephan Feuchtwang’s discussion of the different identifi cations of fi ve Jewish families, who either live in Germany, or have a past associ-ated with Germany, encompasses another set of refugee experiences. For these families, the losses of kinship and memory have had many decades to settle. Some of the ruptures considered in this essay were experienced more than half a century ago – and this gives pause for thought when juxtaposing these cases with the situation of Muslim refugees in Sri Lanka evicted in 1990. Feuchtwang’s discussion of several family stories, including his own, makes clear just how long the process of accommodation to extreme dislocation may take. Rather than being resolved within one person’s lifespan, the identities that are the subject of this essay have been “in process” over several generations.

In her evocative memoir, Lost in Translation (1998[1989] ), Eva Hoffman has written about the experience of exile in Canada as the child of Holocaust survivors from Poland. She describes the “bifocal vision” (1998:213) imposed by the experience of exile, and the diffi -culty of resolving this duality of experience. Refl ecting on the suicide of a childhood friend, Hoffman writes, “I think sometimes, that we were children too overshadowed by our parents’ stories and without enough sympathy for ourselves” (1998:230). This sense of lives lived in the shadow of parents and grandparents, and the momentous politi-cal events which shaped their trajectories, is palpable in Feuchtwang’s essay. The very different mixed identifi cations of the families he describes, including that of his own conjugal family with its apparently quite minimal allegiance to Jewish identity, are underlain by a self-conscious assumption of the experiences of loss, which involves the transformation of loss into the acknowledgment of debt and obligation. We are shown how these experiences, rather than dissipating with time, accumulate and take different forms over successive generations. The continuity of kinship is here, in fact, a history of successive disruptions.

This self-conscious attitude to loss, and the perceived importance of undertaking a work of memory, may be strongly associated with a Western sense of self as Lambek and Antze (1996) suggest. Such processes are described in several of the cases considered in this col-lection – including adult adoptees’ attempts to trace connections with their birth families in Scotland, or Alice Alder’s recounting of her

16 Janet Carsten

experience of opposition to conventional Swiss society, encompassing Church and professional institutions, and to her own family, in which we might also perceive a sense of a lost childhood. But the examples of HIV patients in the United States, or of London sex workers, remind us that this kind of “work of kinship” is not equally available or desirable for all. Where pasts are fragmented among several former selves that cannot be resolved into a coherent unity, or when memo-ries of kinship are “testimonies of its instability” as Das and Leonard evocatively put it, and the sense of possible futures is abruptly curtailed by illness, then the assumption of loss entailed in such works of memory is beside the point. In these cases, retrospection is painful or impossible, and the links between past, present, and future are tenuous or unclear.

Regenerative Practices

While loss is a prominent theme uniting the essays in this volume, the incorporation of loss in memory and kinship is not only a matter of depletion or pain. The intertwinings of memory and relatedness neces-sarily also involve creative processes of rearrangement of the past, and of regeneration. Memory work in this sense can be seen as a restora-tion of the disjunctures of the past, or may be side-stepped by the vivid assertion of alternative scenarios of social engagement against the perceived restrictions and impositions of normative familial life. Self-improvement and escape are in this way also part of the script for modernity. The entrepreneurial practices of London sex workers described by Sophie Day highlight how a creative engagement in business provides one such alternative avenue as a counterweight to unsatisfactory relatedness in the past, and a liberating alternative to the pressure of familial obligation. Here “normal life” can signify depres-sion; prostitution can entail freedom. The attractions of personal autonomy and a capacity to spend freely offer an image of a lifestyle that is based on creative self-fashioning rather than an acquiescence to dominant social norms. Ironically, perhaps, the practices of these London sex workers suggest the epitome of Thatcherite small-business values, and entrepreneurial attitudes of self-improvement.

Self-fashioning as a means of escape from excessive familial and wider social restrictions can also be discerned in Alice Alder’s narration


of her past that is the subject of Michael Lambek’s essay. Memories of childhood are here selected and interpreted to create a particular version of the self counterposed to the conventional expectations of class, family, and religion in Switzerland. Both Lambek’s and Day’s essays highlight how these interviews entail narrations of the self that may resist integration into a coherent whole. The selectivity of what is narrated in interviews, in which forgetting of course takes an active part, is one crucial element in this retelling of the self, and applies not just in the lives considered by Lambek and Day but also in the inter-views discussed by Carsten, Feuchtwang, and others in this volume. Such narrations may involve the selection of elements of the past as particularly formative, the segmentation of the past into different eras, and the attempted reintegration of past rupture. These processes may bring together apparently incompatible elements in the construction of kinship memory, and in the conscious articulation of the self. While the telling and listening that occurs in interviews highlights the selec-tivity of what is retold, as well as the crucial role of forgetting that many scholars have noted,18 this aspect of remembrance is of course not confi ned to interviews. In the long durations of the transmission of memories of past kinship from one generation to another discussed by Thiranagama and Pine in their essays, we can discern how such processes may be consciously articulated, but also occur in less obvious ways, such as gradual processes of attachment to and detachment from the landscapes of home, which I discuss in the following section.

Images of home are of course not simply atrophied versions of past familial life. They are selectively refashioned both in telling about the past, and in the creative rearrangements, restorations, and redecorations that are part of everyday house life (see Bahloul 1996). Homes and their furnishings can silently evoke, negate, or transmit memories of past relatedness and more distant ancestral practice. The embroidered pictures created by Buryat women in their marital homes that depict episodes of their biographies, together with the photographs of remem-bered ancestors that hang on the walls, are a means of fi xing memories that might be effaced by nomadic lifestyle or by state repression, as well as offering a commentary on the interweaving of gender, move-ment, and kinship through time.

House decorations, including photographic images, are not, however, simply oriented to the past and to the fi xing of memory. The photo-graphs of kin displayed in the homes I visited whilst interviewing adult

18 Janet Carsten

adoptees about their experiences of meeting birth kin, rather than evoking previous lives, seemed to express the desire of these inter-viewees to demonstrate materially their immersion in their present and future families. The mixing of elements of old and new furnishings, heirlooms, and objects may thus express how houses capture the creative and regenerative aspects of memory work, rearranging the past, and also setting out a vista for the future. Nor are such evocations and innovations restricted to house furnishings. They are present too in other sensory media – in the smells and landscapes of home expe-rienced in new sites by Sri Lankan refugees, and in the Anglo-Indian culinary practices described by Laura Bear. And like Sylvie’s eccentric and careful preservation of old tin cans in the kitchen of Marilynne Robinson’s novel, these practices may combine serious and more playful elements of housekeeping.

The Placing of Memory

The fi ctional writings of Marilynne Robinson and W. G. Sebald illu-minate the centrality of a sense of place to processes of kinship and memory. The Reverend John Ames’s story, and those of his father and grandfather, that are transmitted to his young son, are rooted in the dusty landscape of the town of Gilead in Iowa, and the neighbor-ing state of Kansas in which he has lived his long life. In Housekeeping, the lives of the young orphaned sisters and their aunt are without adequate anchor – they seem to fl oat precariously in the watery sur-roundings of the American northwest, which threaten to submerge them. Austerlitz wanders across Europe, charting its municipal build-ings in an apparently random manner, without a sense of his own place of origin, or his past kinship. Alternative dispositions in time, sus-pended temporalities, are threaded through these stories, as is the idea that kinship memories need to be placed in their own geography. Without this possibility, existences are fragile, and relations precarious.

The essays in this collection amply demonstrate how a sense of place is interwoven with kinship and memory.19 They also show how memories can be misplaced in time and in space, threatening the stable existence of those who hold them. One might think that, among the Buryat people discussed by Rebecca Empson, historical displacement,


nomadic herding practices, and marriage patterns that are predicated on female migration would make the anchoring of kinship memories in specifi c locations necessarily contingent. Instead, we see how the artefacts of memory are compressed and made portable – as indeed is often the case for migrants and refugees for whom books, photographs, articles of clothing, and other objects kept in chests, cabinets, and suitcases are repositories of memory (see Benjamin’s wonderful essay, “Unpacking My Library” in Illuminations, 1968). Houses for the Buryat have qualities of mobile exhibitions; they are indeed “houses of memory,” in Bachelard’s phrase (1964:14). They are the containers for women’s embroideries that fi gure the signifi cant moments of their lives, and for the photographic montages in which deceased ancestors are displayed. These montages have replaced the traditional genealogies that were banned and destroyed during the Soviet era. The concealed storage of hair cuttings and umbilical cords of small children in house-hold chests seems to prefi gure and anchor the inevitable outward movement of these children as adults. Together with reincarnation and adoption practices, these various artefacts enable the containment – hidden or revealed – of connections with absent or deceased relatives. In this way, the absences and losses of kinship are materially “placed” in portable vessels rather than being silently papered over.

In the railway colony of Kharagpur, the encroachments of time and history seem likely to overwhelm its residents. Here mobility is a prized attribute, and the localization of kinship memories in graveyards and other sites of mourning, as well as family altars, appears as a double-edged attempt to anchor a precarious existence. The seemingly inevitable processes of decay in their surroundings suggest that these sites of memory are an all too poignant materialization of the fragile predicament of the living, and their uncertain futures. The lives of Muslim refugees in Sri Lanka embody another kind of tenuous hold on the localization of memory. These refugees have been resettled only a relatively short distance from their original homes. Their surround-ings thus constantly evoke the sights and smells of the homes to which they are unable to return. And here once again it is landscape itself, permeated by loss, that has an uncanny presence in the lives of those who inhabit it. Thiranagama shows how, for the oldest generation, home is located only in memory, while, for the youngest, home is rooted in the context of displacement, and in the refugee camps where they have grown up. Her insights about the centrality of the idea of

20 Janet Carsten

home to the transmission of memory and kinship can be transposed to the European refugee context discussed by Feuchtwang. Here rup-tures and migration have resulted in ambivalent dispositions to past places of residence and to burial sites in Germany, Russia, and Poland, and in complex and divergent identifi cations of nationality, religious affi liation, and family ties. These divergent identifi cations divide individual members of the same family as well as their different generations.

It is not of course only refugees, or those for whom migration is a way of life, who have diffi culty in locating kinship memories in a stable sense of place. Those who live their lives at the margins of the state through poverty, economic or other forms of exclusion, are likely to contend with notions of home that are shifting and precarious – a prospective and rarely attainable bourgeois dream of “a baby, house, and kids” for sex workers in London, or a dangerous source of violence and abuse for the North American teenagers studied by Veena Das and Lori Leonard. Tellingly, Sophie Day draws a parallel between an enlarged sense of the present in the lives of sex workers and in those of labor migrants. The costs entailed by these livelihoods in terms of disconnections of the self do not necessarily allow a return to a stable origin point, or the reintegration of past dislocations.

Conversely, it is not surprising that those who have historically made their living from the land, and who have a kinship history that is tied to a particular locality, should vividly demonstrate the positive source of identifi cation that may be offered by the memory of succes-sive generations living their lives in the same place or returning to it after periods of absence. The rich interweaving of landscape, kinship, and memory that Frances Pine substantiates in intricate detail for Gorale peasants is dense enough to accommodate economic hardship, migration, political disjuncture, and personal divergences from the restrictive norms under which people are expected to live. Here people move but the land is a constant presence that holds familial memory. Rather than displaying the absences, pains, and ruptures of kinship and memory, as is the case for Buryat living in Mongolia, in the Podhale one has the sense of a landscape that is capable of absorbing and cov-ering them over. Between the interstices of concealment of kinship and memory that are sometimes afforded by long-held attachments to particular places, such as those Pine describes, and the abrupt


dislocations of place documented in Feuchtwang’s essay, we can perhaps begin to discern a comparative ethnography of both loss and restoration that binds together memory, kinship, and the nation.

Kinship Memory and the State

Anyone who has had to deal with the death of close relatives knows all too well that the state is heavily implicated in the transmission of kinship memories. Clearing my parents’ house in London after the death of my father in 1998, my brothers and I came across the usual assortment of documents and certifi cates issued by the various state institutions and authorities which had jurisdiction over their lives. But there were some unexpected asymmetries in what we found: in my father’s case, a document which brought to light an improbable recon-nection; in my mother’s, a document that had apparently gone missing. Stored in my father’s desk were two current passports in his name, Francis Carsten: one British, the other from the Federal Republic of Germany. The latter, issued in about 1990, more than forty years after his naturalization as a British citizen following migration to England as a refugee from Nazi Germany, refl ected his belief in a new European identity that surpassed the heightened rhetoric of historical ties to religion or nation. It materialized a deeply held political com-mitment to a Europe without borders, and a profound distrust of nationalism in its many exclusive forms. I happened to know of the existence of this passport, through a conversation we had had a few years before. But it had come as a considerable surprise then, as it did, I think, to my brothers when they saw it.

The missing document was also a passport. I assume that my mother destroyed it when sorting through her papers some years before her death. But I vividly recalled coming across it unexpectedly, probably sometime during my twenties, when my mother, Ruth, and I had been looking through old photographs together. Stamped with a large, red “J,” as well as the insignia of the German Reich, and giving her name as “Rebekah” Moses, it was issued in 1936 and announced the bearer’s permission to leave Germany. The shock of holding this docu-ment in my hand, with its offi cial stamps and my mother’s name falsely recorded, was a visceral reminder of the invasive and minutely bureau-cratic machinery of the state, and the horrors that she had managed

22 Janet Carsten

to escape.20 This passport was nowhere to be found, nor could my brothers recall ever having seen it.

The asymmetry of these two passports, one apparently surplus to requirements, the other no longer there, speaks to the complex inter-twinings of national, familial, and personal histories. The simultaneous presence and absence of these documents refl ects, too, political and ethical stances that circumscribed what was there to be “found,” or what might be transmitted down the generations. And in the way that knowledge about these documents was differentially distributed between my brothers and myself (as no doubt is the case with knowl-edge about the past in all families), we can see how familial history is always partial, fragmented between different bearers and paths of trans-mission, as well as the chance occurrences of family life.

The history of kinship is always, among other things, a political history, and every one of the essays in this volume is thoroughly politi-cally infl ected, as are the simultaneous presence and absence of the two passports I have recalled here. Each of these essays speaks of inscriptions and transmissions, as well as blockages and erasures, of memory and relatedness. They are located in a politics of the state that permeates personal and familial life. What knowledge gets passed on, what is concealed, is the outcome of a myriad of circumstances and small decisions that are not only politically circumscribed, but which in turn form part of the fabric of the political world in which they occur. Pine’s observations about the manner in which the domestic realm can be fi gured as a safe haven from harsh political realities, even when it is most thoroughly permeated by those political circumstances, are particularly stark, but they are refl ected in the other contributions to this volume.21 In this regard too, all of the essays amply demonstrate Lambek’s point that remembering is an ethical and moral practice (see also Lambek 1996, 2002; Yerushalmi 1996[1982] ). Remembering, he observes, is “the discovery of a kinship obligation.” But this may emerge more clearly in some contexts than others. And this goes considerably further than a reiteration of the well-recognized fact that the political ideology of the nation is often expressed in the idiom of kinship (Anderson 1991; Schneider 1977). Empson’s depiction of the various ways Buryat people record and transmit knowledge about their ancestors is an account of how such knowledge can be displayed more or less explicitly to counter state suppression. In the case of the Indian railway colony described by Bear, memories of past relatedness are


also (though perhaps less explicitly) pitched against a state ideology. Nevertheless, we are shown how the alternative values they embody provide a fragile counterpoint to the dominant idioms of belonging in the Indian nation.

In what circumstances do people try to record and pass on knowl-edge about their ancestors to future generations? In what circumstances is such knowledge unimportant or not the subject of concern? When is it forgotten or suppressed? And how can we, as actors or as social analysts, tell the difference? How do these processes occur, and what are their political implications? The essays in this volume provide some different answers to these questions. The examples of the colonial history of the Betsimisaraka and the Karembola in Madagascar dis-cussed by Cole and Middleton (2001), and which I cite in my essay, suggests that, at one extreme, forgetting who one’s ancestors are can carry connotations of enslavement. In the Malagasy context, the proper observation of rituals involving obligations to the dead implies political autonomy, while being unable to carry out these ritual obligations is the mark of being enslaved by others (see Feeley-Harnik 1991a). In quite other circumstances, among the Malays I lived with on the island of Langkawi in the 1980s, a lack of interest in particular origins or in tracing genealogies is the outcome of a long history of migration, and of economic and political marginality to centers of power (Carsten 1995).

There are of course many differences between choosing not to transmit knowledge, and being prevented from transmitting it (see Passerini 2003). The history of names may, as we have seen, express or conceal the transmission of kinship memory. Multiple names are a marker of the secret lives and concealments of the past of London sex workers. In these circumstances, Day shows how the past offers very limited possibilities for the “routine memory work” that is usual in kinship relations. The future cannot be seen as the outcome of the past, and conventional idioms of biography in terms of a retrospective narrative of continuity and development are precluded. Tellingly, there is tension here between the idea of sex work as exploitation and oppression, and the sense that it may also be a liberation from the oppressiveness of normative kinship. Both kinds of relations can be construed in positive or negative terms.

In the cases of refugees discussed by Feuchtwang and Thiranagama, we can see the possibility of numerous different stances where radical

24 Janet Carsten

dislocation disrupts the smooth transmission of memory to future gen-erations. Here the moment of departure is also a new point of origin, and passports or birth certifi cates refi gure and solidify transient identi-ties. As these essays show, different generations and different family members may embody different temporal dispositions as well as taking on different national, religious, political, and familial affi liations. Tracing family connections in these and other cases may entail crossing remade national borders temporally and spatially. And this underlines the tenuousness of links between future and past. In the detailed tracing of these dispositions in time we can see how loss can constitute its own form of historicity.22

A Politics of Loss and Restoration

The essays in this collection can be read as a comparative ethnography of how loss is absorbed and transformed, and in time becomes the source of creative refashionings, in and through everyday processes of relatedness. They document the myriad personal and small-scale exchanges that are involved in the transmission of loss, its attempted erasure from memory, or its gradual effacement in new and regenera-tive personal, familial, or collective histories.

In many cases, the conscious or implicit assumption of such losses is an integral part of adulthood, and of creating new kinds of related-ness in the present and future. In this sense, we might say that a work of memory is the necessary counterpoint to kinship relations in their broadest sense. Conversely, the essays here document, too, the many ways in which, where such a work of memory is rendered diffi cult or impossible, the possibilities for present and future relatedness become radically constrained. In the fragile positionings of Sri Lankan Muslims, Anglo-Indian railway workers, or London sex workers we can read futures that are uncertain, and personal and familial lives that may easily be vulnerable to further disruptions. In these and other examples, the state has imposed itself on what kinds of memory it is possible to transmit – although, as in the Buryat case or that of sex workers in London, these may be dealt with or resisted in unexpected ways. Many of the subjects of these essays seem poised between pre-carious pasts and futures that are equally uncertain. The HIV patients described by Das and Leonard are not only the product of “disrupted


pasts.” The losses that have shaped these lives have also cut off their futures, and in attempting to absorb or express this reality, these young people display a dramatic refusal to consign their own lives to the past.

The inscriptions of memory that are a necessary part of relatedness are woven in the detailed language of personal and familial history. But they encompass the broader sweep of the political confi gurations in which they emerge. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Jonathan Boyarin has underlined the centrality to political identifi cations of

efforts to retain the image of the past – to rescue the dead and oppressed ancestors by giving their lives new meaning. Much as genetic informa-tion is a “narrative,” memory resists the disintegration of consciousness. And the most powerful memory for this purpose is that of one’s own “generations” – those from whom one stems “body and soul” – or those who can be metaphorically described as one’s ancestors. (1994b:27)

In this light, the tales of ghosts and uncanny events that are threaded through these essays are not only the signs of fragile or unsettled con-nections between past and present; they also, as Laura Bear argues, link the production of the self to narratives of romantic nationalism.

National scripts of identity-making can be read as smoothed-over versions of dominant narratives of identity, in which the stories of the marginalized or the dispossessed have largely been omitted (see also Boyarin 1994b; Hodgkin and Radstone 2003; Pine, Kaneff, and Haukanes 2004a). They correspond to cleaned-up family genealogies from which the messy details of personal biography or shameful rela-tives have been expunged. Boyarin’s reminder of the importance of the links among the body, memory, and the nation are pertinent here. State ideologies, as he points out, legitimize themselves through appeals to the sovereign individual and through the rhetoric of kinship and community (1994b:25). In the case of the HIV patients studied by Das and Leonard, we are shown how state institutions of health care are explicitly committed to encouraging particular forms of family life and fostering the sovereign individual. Far from being given, Das and Leonard illuminate how, as in the other examples considered in this volume, kinship of certain kinds is actively produced through the intersection of state, family, and individual.

26 Janet Carsten

What we are faced with – what we are living – is the constitution of both group “membership” and individual “identity” out of a dynami-cally chosen selection of memories, and the constant reshaping, reinvention, and reinforcement of those memories as members contest and create the boundaries and links among themselves. (Boyarin 1994b:26)

The idea of autonomous personal, collective, or familial memory is, as Frances Pine demonstrates in her essay, a chimera that only occa-sionally seems to correspond to actual processes. More usually, these memories merge into and out of each other as they are continuously created and reconstituted. The state may co-opt the language of kinship, constrain the forms of familial life, and shape possible disposi-tions to the past, present, and future, but the accumulations, losses, and restorations of memories of relatedness are part of the very fabric of national identity-making as much as they constitute more intimate narratives of personal or familial history. While those who are persis-tently consigned to the margins of the state may be unlikely to recoup the losses of their pasts, the manner in which such merging, separation, and reworking of memory occur nevertheless leaves room for some unexpected and creative reformulations of remembrance and rela-tedness in the future. In this sense, neither the production of the self nor that of collective expressions of identity is pre-scripted or foreclosed.

NOTES

1 See also Feuchtwang (2003). I am indebted here to Olivia Harris for the guidance of her insightful closing comments at the conference on Kinship and Memory where these papers were fi rst presented.

2 This theme emerges particularly starkly in the work of Primo Levi, see If This is a Man (1987, fi rst published in Italy in 1958), and The Drowned and the Saved (1989).

3 The idea of collective memory, however, necessarily also raises questions about the analytic status of “memory,” and the relation between indi-vidual and collective memory. Drawing on the work of psychologists such as Baddeley (1976, 1990), Bartlett (1932), and Luria (1976), anthro-pologists interested in the relation between cognition and historical processes have emphasized the signifi cance of different kinds of


knowledge, and the role of long-term memory as central to an investiga-tion of the relation between individual and social memory or private and public representations (see, for example, Bloch 1996, 1998; Sperber 1985; Tonkin 1992). For recent discussion of the articulation between personal memory and the social or public sphere, see Hodgkin and Radstone (2005); Radstone (2005), and in the specifi c context of Bosnia in the wake of the 1990s warfare, Sorabji (2006).

4 Winter’s study of mourning and commemoration practices during and after the First World War is also notable as an attempt to “place the history of war memorials within the history of bereavement, a history we all share in our private lives” (1995:116).

5 See Olick and Robbins (1998) and Pine, Kaneff, and Haukanes (2004b) for overviews of this literature.

6 See, for example, Eidson (2004); Feuchtwang (2003); Filippucci (2004); Gay y Blasco (2004); Richardson (2004); Stewart (2004).

7 See Cole (1998, 2001); Feeley-Harnik (1991a, 1991b); Lambek (2002); Mueggler (2001).

8 Although some recent studies of kinship in anthropology have touched on memory (e.g. Carsten 1997; Gow 1991), the political resonance of both kinship and memory have sometimes been left implicit – perhaps partly because of the diffi culty in achieving historical depth from avail-able records.

9 For overviews of these developments in kinship studies, see Carsten (2000a, 2004); Franklin and McKinnon (2001); Parkin and Stone (2004); Peletz (1995). For detailed depictions of how kinship is made and lived through material elaboration in houses in Algeria, see Bahloul (1996); in gendered activities and emotions in south India, Busby (2000); through the changing constitution of private domesticity in China, Yan (2003); through the lens of place and belonging in Britain, Edwards (2000); or in the interplay between doing and being, activity and descent, in Madagascar, Astuti (1995).

10 Stephan Feuchtwang (2000) has also used the idea of the “cataclysmic event” to bring together social and personal memory and national histories.

11 Lambek and Antze note that a focus on memory as a set of practices, and on the dialectical relation between experience and narratives, in which each continuously produces the other, while neither is fi nite or closed, is clearly divergent from the objectifi ed approach to memory of cognitive psychologists (1996:xi, xviii, xix).

12 In looking at how memory is socially and historically constituted, Lambek and Antze place the salience of memory (and discourses about memory) in the public domain in twentieth-century Europe and North America

28 Janet Carsten

at the center of their discussion. The insights they offer about some of the sources of the recent prominence of the very idea of memory in the West draw both on the work of scholars like Nora, and on work on trauma and memory by psychologists, historians, and others (see also Feuchtwang 2003; Hacking 1995; Radstone 2005; Radstone and Hodgkin 2003).

13 Michael Lambek in this volume (see ch. 10) suggests that it is only when memory is considered as a utility rather than a capacity that questions of excess or scarcity arise, and that memory is not normally experienced in these terms. The reference to Das’s discussion of critical events and the manner in which states may have an interest in the appropriation of particular kinds of memory, as well as some of the more self-conscious familial and personal memory projects described in these essays suggest, however, that memory can also be mobilized as a means to self-fashioning in quite utilitarian ways (see below).

14 Discussing German literature of the immediate postwar period, Sebald fi nds there a striking obliteration of memory and an “inability to mourn” (2005:102) that he sees as a response to the events of the Nazi period, involving as he puts it, “the murder of memory” (2005:87). Those who write on the obliteration of memory as a feature of twentieth-century life that goes together with the facility of reproduction are indebted to the work of Walter Benjamin (1968), and his key insight that “the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability” (Arendt 1968:38). See also Andreas Hyssen (1995) for a discussion of the juxta-position between an obsession with memory and a “culture of amnesia” in late twentieth-century postwar Germany. Hyssen argues that, in post-modern, post-Auschwitz culture, memory and amnesia should not be analytically opposed but must be understood together (1995:3–7, 260). For a thoughtful commentary see Radstone (2000).

15 The classic reference here is Freud’s essay on Mourning and Melancholia (1950[1915] ). See also Jay Winter’s discussion of the rise of spiritualist practices during and after the First World War as a response to wide-spread bereavement (1995:547–7); and Bennett (1999) for a remarkable account of everyday experiences with ghosts of kin among recently bereaved people in late twentieth-century Manchester (I am grateful to Fenella Cannell for this reference).

16 Barbara Yngvesson (2002) has also explored how “ghostly places” appear in the accounts of transnational adoptees. In a recent paper Yngvesson and Coutin (2006) explore comparatively the uncanny moments and different kinds of temporality that occur in the stories of transnational adoptees and deportees.


17 This sentence is taken from an essay on Nabokov’s memoir, Speak Memory, which is itself worthy of a further series of refl ections – in part on the connections between Nabokov’s and Sebald’s writing.

18 Recent ethnography has documented the importance of forgetting in the study of memory; see, for example, Battaglia (1992; 1993); Taylor (1993); Pine, Kaneff, and Haukanes (2004a).

19 There is an extensive anthropological literature on the interweaving of place and memory in different cultural contexts. See, for example, Basso 1996; Feeley-Harnik 1991b; Fox 1973; Küchler 1987; Kuipers 1984; Rosaldo 1980.

20 Under the Nazis, Jews with Aryan-sounding names were required to adopt Jewish-sounding names, or add “Israel” or “Sarah” to their names, to distinguish them from the Gentile population. See James Scott’s dis-cussion of the connection between state-building, taxation, property regimes, and the development of permanent, inherited surnames (1998:64–7, 373 n. 60; and also Scott, Tehranian, and Mathias 2002).

21 See Funder (2003) for an extraordinary account of the complex inter-weavings of the small exchanges of family life and a state whose opera-tions encroached into its very heart in the former German Democratic Republic. The dismantling of this complex apparatus of surveillance after the fall of the Berlin Wall necessarily also involved the reinscription of memory. Such retrospective reinscriptions of history and memory, and their often bizarre links with the dead, the conservation of relics, and political rites of commemoration are explored in a more academic vein for post-communist Hungary by István Rév (2005).

22 I have adopted this formulation from a comment by Sophie Day at the conference at which these essays were presented.

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Documents

Ghosts of Memory || Introduction: Ghosts of Memory