Ghosts of Memory
Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness
Published on 8. May 2008
272 pages
978-0-470-69154-0 (ISBN)
Description
Ghosts of Memory provides an overview of literature onrelatedness and memory and then moves beyond traditional approachesto the subject, exploring the subtle and complex intersectionsbetween everyday forms of relatedness in the present and memoriesof the past.
* * Explores how various subjects are located in personal andfamilial histories that connect to the wider political formationsof which they are a part
* Closely examines diverse and intriguing case studies, e.g.Catholic residents of a decayed railway colony in Bengal, and sexworkers in London
* Brings together original essays authored by contemporaryexperts in the field
* Draws on anthropology, literature, memory studies, and socialhistory
Reviews / Votes
"A welcome addition offering rich ethnographic cross-culturalaccounts and successfully demonstrates how the work of memory playsout in intimate, informal, non-ritualistic, everyday forms andpractices of kinship." (Journal of the Royal AnthropologicalInstitute, March 2009)"This volume is full of insights into the manifold ways that people negotiate disruption in family relations, compensate for the absence of close kin, and work through loss. A fascinating and nuanced account of the play of continuity and discontinuity at the heart of human cultures." Olivia Harris, London School of Economics "This superb collection of papers inaugurates a new direction in the study of kinship and politics grounded in the complexities of memory. Carsten and her colleagues link everyday processes of relating with larger webs of power and authority through the ghosts - those whose existence is contested - they have in common. Thus they show that the sociality of remembering and forgetting lies above all in the creation and destruction of persons." Gillian Feeley-Harnik, University of MichiganMore details
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
07/2007
1st Edition
Wiley
€138.50
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Person
Janet Carsten is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community (1997) and After Kinship (2004). She has co-edited About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond (1995) with Stephen Hugh-Jones, and edited Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (2000). Her current research deals with new approaches to kinship in anthropology, adoption reunions, kinship and memory.
Content
Contributors.
Acknowledgments.
1. Introduction: Ghosts of Memory: Janet Carsten (University ofEdinburgh).
2. Ruins and Ghosts: The Domestic Uncanny and theMaterialization of Anglo-Indian Genealogies in Kharagpur: LauraBear (London School of Economics and Political Science).
3. Enlivened Memories: Recalling Absence and Loss in Mongolia:Rebecca Empson (University of Cambridge).
4. Connections and Disconnections of Memory and Kinship inNarratives of Adoption Reunions in Scotland: Janet Carsten(University of Edinburgh).
5. Memories of Movement and the Stillness of Place: KinshipMemory in the Polish Highlands: Frances Pine (Goldsmiths College,University of London).
6. Moving on? Generating Homes in the Future for DisplacedNorthern Muslims in Sri Lanka: Sharika Thiranagama (University ofEdinburgh).
7. Belonging to What? Jewish Mixed Kinship and HistoricalDisruption in Twentieth-Century Europe: Stephan Feuchtwang (LondonSchool of Economics and Political Science).
8. Threading Time in the Biographies of London Sex Workers:Sophie Day (Goldsmiths College, University of London).
9. Kinship, Memory, and Time in the Lives of HIV/AIDS Patientsin a North American City: Veena Das (Johns Hopkins University) andLori Leonard (Johns Hopkins School of Public Health).
10. The Cares of Alice Alder: Recuperating Kinship and Historyin Switzerland: Michael Lambek (London School of Economics andPolitical Science).
Index
