Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness

Ghosts of Memory Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness

Edited by Janet Carsten

Ghosts of Memory

Ghosts of Memory Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness

Edited by Janet Carsten

© 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd blackwell publishing 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Janet Carsten to be identified as the Author of the Editorial Material in this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1

2007

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ghosts of memory : essays on remembrance and relatedness / edited by Janet Carsten. p. cm. “Essays . . . originally presented at a conference on ‘Kinship and Memory in Anthropology and Beyond’, held at the University of Edinburgh in December 2004” – Ack. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-5422-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-5423-9 (papercover : alk. paper) 1. Kinship. 2. Memory–Social aspects. I. Carsten, Janet. GN487.G56 2007 153.1′2–dc22 2006034733 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 11 on 13 pt Bembo by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd, Hong Kong Printed and bound in Singapore by Markono Print Media Pte The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com

Contents

Contributors Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: Ghosts of Memory

vii x

1

Janet Carsten

2 Ruins and Ghosts: The Domestic Uncanny and the Materialization of Anglo-Indian Genealogies in Kharagpur

36

Laura Bear

3 Enlivened Memories: Recalling Absence and Loss in Mongolia

58

Rebecca Empson

4 Connections and Disconnections of Memory and Kinship in Narratives of Adoption Reunions in Scotland

83

Janet Carsten

5 Memories of Movement and the Stillness of Place: Kinship Memory in the Polish Highlands Frances Pine

104

Contents

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6 Moving On? Generating Homes in the Future for Displaced Northern Muslims in Sri Lanka

126

Sharika Thiranagama

7 Belonging to What? Jewish Mixed Kinship and Historical Disruption in Twentieth-Century Europe

150

Stephan Feuchtwang

8 Threading Time in the Biographies of London Sex Workers

172

Sophie Day

9 Kinship, Memory, and Time in the Lives of HIV/AIDS Patients in a North American City

194

Veena Das and Lori Leonard

10

The Cares of Alice Alder: Recuperating Kinship and History in Switzerland

218

Michael Lambek Index

241

Contributors

Laura Bear is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics. She is the author of a novel based on her fieldwork among Anglo-Indians, The Jadu House (Doubleday, 2000), and of a historical ethnography, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy and the Intimate Historical Self (Columbia University Press, 2007). 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 (Clarendon Press, 1997), and After Kinship (Cambridge University Press, 2004). She has previously coedited About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 1995), and edited Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Veena Das is Krieger–Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and was previously Professor of Sociology at the University of Delhi. Her books include Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 1995) and Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (University of California Press, 2006). She has edited books on themes of social suffering, violence, and the state. She is also editor of the Oxford India Companion to Sociology and Social Anthropology (2001). She is Foreign Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Contributors

Sophie Day is Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has published extensively on sex work in London; her monograph On the Game: Sex Work in London, 1986– 2000 is published by Pluto Press in 2007. She has previously coedited Lilies of the Field: Marginal People who Live for the Moment (Westview Press, 1999), and Sex Work, Mobility and Health in Europe (Kegan Paul, 2004). Rebecca Empson is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. She studied anthropology at the London School of Economics, and was a doctoral student at Cambridge. Her PhD thesis focused on ideas about personhood in relation to children and daughters-in-law in northeast Mongolia. During her Fellowship, she published a book that explores the role of prophecy in the political imagination of the Mongolian cultural region. She has also conducted fieldwork on the Mongolian– Russian border on ideas about landscape and has been preparing a manuscript concerned with the generation of people and place in relation to different forms of sociality in Mongolia. Stephan Feuchtwang is Professorial Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics. His current research interest is in anthropology of history, which he is pursuing by inquiry into the transmission of grievous loss, and which in turn will lead him to joint projects of research on self-realization, its hopes and ambivalence, its frustration, and its substantiation at the expense of others. His main area of research has been China and Taiwan, but now includes Germany. His most recent book is Making Place: State Projects, Globalisation and Local Responses in China (UCL Press/Routledge, 2004). Michael Lambek is Professor of Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics, and holds the Canada Research Chair in Anthropology at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. He is author of three books on the western Indian Ocean: Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte; Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession; and The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar, as well as editor or

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coeditor of works including Tense Past; Illness and Irony; and A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. Lori Leonard works as an ethnographer within the field of public health, and is Assistant Professor in the Department of Health, Behavior, and Society at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. In addition to conducting the three-year research project with young, HIVpositive women, from which the chapter in this volume is derived, she works in Chad (Central Africa), most recently on a long-term project to look at how people adapt and change in response to the development of a major oil and pipeline project. Frances Pine is Senior Lecturer of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and a Senior Research Fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. She has conducted research in Poland for almost thirty years, mostly in the southern mountains, and in Lodz and Lublin, and the surrounding countryside. She is the coeditor of Surviving Post Socialism (Routledge, 1998), Memory, Politics and Religion: The Past Meets the Present in Europe (LIT Verlag, 2004), and On the Margins of Religion (Berghahn, forthcoming), as well as articles on kinship, gender, work, land, landscape and memory. Sharika Thiranagama is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2005. She is currently working on a monograph based on her fieldwork in Sri Lanka on issues of memory, kinship, displacement, and home.

Acknowledgments

The essays in this volume were originally presented at a conference on “Kinship and Memory in Anthropology and Beyond,” held at the University of Edinburgh in December 2004. I am grateful to the British Academy for a Conference Grant, and to the Research Support Fund of the School of Social and Political Studies at the University of Edinburgh, which together enabled this event to take place. Two contributions at the conference are not included in this collection. One was a memorable paper on the Freud family by Leonore Davidoff, which made a deep impression on those who heard it: “The Legacy of the Nineteenth-Century Bourgeois Family and the Wool Merchant’s Son,” published in Transactions of the RHS 14 (2004):25–46. The other was some characteristically perceptive and acute concluding comments made by Olivia Harris, which I have drawn on in my Introduction, and for which I record my debt of gratitude here. All of the contributors have collectively and singly helped to shape this volume. I am particularly indebted to Sophie Day, Rebecca Empson, Stephan Feuchtwang, Michael Lambek, and Frances Pine for their advice at various points, and for detailed and helpful comments on earlier drafts of the Introduction. Laura Bear’s and Sharika Thiranagama’s writings provided part of the original impetus for this project. The work of Veena Das and Michael Lambek has been an inspiration over many years, and I have gained much from discussions with them on the themes of this volume in Edinburgh, London, and the United States. Sophie Day and Frances Pine helped me to plan the original

Acknowledgments

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conference, and they have been involved in a long conversation on kinship and memory that goes back many years, and encompasses our own familial memories. Jane Huber, former anthropology editor at Blackwell, adopted this project with warmth and excitement, and helped to find it a title. Finally, Jonathan Spencer, as always, nurtured the original interest and plans, helped me to order an intimidating wealth of literature, read and reread several drafts of the Introduction, and encouraged me to write it differently.

1 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 featuring their recent ancestors. Pre-empted from asserting communal solidarity 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 difficulty in telling their personal biographies as a coherent sequence of events linking the past to the present. Instead, their pasts are fragmented, 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 persecution disrupt people’s connections with absent or deceased kin. In these circumstances, women’s embroideries that capture significant 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, AngloIndian railway workers, adult adoptees in Scotland, an alternative 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 particularly 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 illuminated the experiential, emotional, and everyday dimensions of relatedness, but have tended to leave aside the political significance 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 figured 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 twentiethcentury 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 identity.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 films, memoirs, and fictional writing

Introduction: Ghosts of Memory

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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” (Halbwachs 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 significance 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 producing or reinforcing political ideologies of nationalism or ethnic solidarity. While this work has tended to foreground political processes and collective rituals rather than familial, intimate, and everyday practices of relatedness, it also provides telling examples of how personal, familial, or local memories may explicitly or silently challenge official 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 elsewhere, anthropologists have shown the myriad linkages among communal 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 field have moved away from conceiving kinship as a discrete domain – in terms of particular analytic paradigms, such as functionalism or structuralism, or technical models that focus on kin classification – 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 define or contain kinship in any specific setting. Rather, they provide a filter through which local understandings and practices have been viewed by their ethnographers. While scholarship on memory points back to the significance 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 relatedness – 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 confined 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 inarticulate, 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 –

Introduction: Ghosts of Memory

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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 historiography 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 dispositions 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 encompass 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, continuous, 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 communities.11 The centrality of linkages between identity and memory to a Western sense of self, to which Lambek and Antze draw our attention, thus provides another fruitful point of departure for this collection. 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 connections 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 accumulation of apparently incompatible elements in projects of self-fashioning, necessarily also illuminates wider processes of political affiliation 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 intricate 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, first 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 precarious 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 flooding, after which it never resumes its former sense of order. In a bizarre mimicry of normal housewifely

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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 accumulation 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 knowledge 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 difficult 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 flooding. In weaving together the themes of loss and accumulation with reflections 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 processes: relations, and memories of them, must be anchored in specific 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 find 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 reconciliation 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 grandfather’s place of burial finally 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, overwhelming 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, elliptical 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 figure, 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 fictional narrator of the novel by way of a kind of architectural journey through the obscurely significant 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 adulthood, 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 significance of their absence. Austerlitz suffers a kind of breakdown involving fugues, fits of absence, and bouts of

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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 flow, or provide an obvious structure. For the reader, as for Austerlitz himself, the significance 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 locations through which he passes, and which trouble his memory because of the manner in which they constantly evade being fixed 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 find their echoes

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in the essays in this collection. In some of his non-fictional writing, W. G. Sebald reflects on the connections between memory, mourning, and ghosts, and on the significance 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 surroundings 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 reflected 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 particular colonially inflected 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 contemporary Indian nation, and the present decay into which their lives

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have fallen. But because they are fashioned in the idiom of Catholicism, these experiences are also a means of asserting connections to a history of religious affiliation that remains a positive source of identification 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 insubstantiality 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 reincarnation. In the Buryat case, described by Rebecca Empson, spatial dislocations of a migratory lifestyle, and the effects of political persecution, result in connections to the past that must be expressed in quite personalized 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 fleeting, 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 efficacy, 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 opposition 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 briefly 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 different 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 signifies 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, relatedness 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

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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 reflection 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 attachments. 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

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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-five years, and encompass her own familial history. The immobility of place thus provides a counterpoint to the movement 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 generation of grandparents, is firmly 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 divergence 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 relinquishing 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 integral 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

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kinship relations here inevitably entails deepening the rupture with the past. Stephan Feuchtwang’s discussion of the different identifications of five Jewish families, who either live in Germany, or have a past associated 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 difficulty of resolving this duality of experience. Reflecting 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 political events which shaped their trajectories, is palpable in Feuchtwang’s essay. The very different mixed identifications 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 selfconscious 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 collection – including adult adoptees’ attempts to trace connections with their birth families in Scotland, or Alice Alder’s recounting of her

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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 memories 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 necessarily also involve creative processes of rearrangement of the past, and of regeneration. Memory work in this sense can be seen as a restoration 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. Selfimprovement 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 depression; 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

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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 interviews 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 selectivity 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 confined 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 remembered ancestors that hang on the walls, are a means of fixing memories that might be effaced by nomadic lifestyle or by state repression, as well as offering a commentary on the interweaving of gender, movement, and kinship through time. House decorations, including photographic images, are not, however, simply oriented to the past and to the fixing of memory. The photographs of kin displayed in the homes I visited whilst interviewing adult

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adoptees about their experiences of meeting birth kin, rather than evoking previous lives, seemed to express the desire of these interviewees 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 experienced 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 fictional writings of Marilynne Robinson and W. G. Sebald illuminate 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 neighboring 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 float precariously in the watery surroundings of the American northwest, which threaten to submerge them. Austerlitz wanders across Europe, charting its municipal buildings in an apparently random manner, without a sense of his own place of origin, or his past kinship. Alternative dispositions in time, suspended 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,

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nomadic herding practices, and marriage patterns that are predicated on female migration would make the anchoring of kinship memories in specific 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 figure the significant 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 household chests seems to prefigure 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 surroundings 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

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home to the transmission of memory and kinship can be transposed to the European refugee context discussed by Feuchtwang. Here ruptures 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 identifications of nationality, religious affiliation, and family ties. These divergent identifications 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 difficulty 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 identification that may be offered by the memory of successive 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 covering 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

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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 certificates 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 reconnection; 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, reflected 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 commitment 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 document in my hand, with its official stamps and my mother’s name falsely recorded, was a visceral reminder of the invasive and minutely bureaucratic machinery of the state, and the horrors that she had managed

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to escape. 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 intertwinings of national, familial, and personal histories. The simultaneous presence and absence of these documents reflects, 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 knowledge about the past in all families), we can see how familial history is always partial, fragmented between different bearers and paths of transmission, 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 politically inflected, 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 figured 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 reflected 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

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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 knowledge 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 discussed 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

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dislocation disrupts the smooth transmission of memory to future generations. Here the moment of departure is also a new point of origin, and passports or birth certificates refigure and solidify transient identities. 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 affiliations. 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 regenerative 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 relatedness 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 difficult 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 precarious pasts and futures that are equally uncertain. The HIV patients described by Das and Leonard are not only the product of “disrupted

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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 configurations in which they emerge. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Jonathan Boyarin has underlined the centrality to political identifications 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 information 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 connections 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 relatives 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.

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Janet Carsten What we are faced with – what we are living – is the constitution of both group “membership” and individual “identity” out of a dynamically 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 occasionally 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 dispositions 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 persistently 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 relatedness 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 first presented. 2 This theme emerges particularly starkly in the work of Primo Levi, see If This is a Man (1987, first 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 individual and collective memory. Drawing on the work of psychologists such as Baddeley (1976, 1990), Bartlett (1932), and Luria (1976), anthropologists interested in the relation between cognition and historical processes have emphasized the significance of different kinds of

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5 6 7 8

9

10

11

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knowledge, and the role of long-term memory as central to an investigation 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 specific context of Bosnia in the wake of the 1990s warfare, Sorabji (2006). 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). See Olick and Robbins (1998) and Pine, Kaneff, and Haukanes (2004b) for overviews of this literature. See, for example, Eidson (2004); Feuchtwang (2003); Filippucci (2004); Gay y Blasco (2004); Richardson (2004); Stewart (2004). See Cole (1998, 2001); Feeley-Harnik (1991a, 1991b); Lambek (2002); Mueggler (2001). 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 difficulty in achieving historical depth from available records. 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). Stephan Feuchtwang (2000) has also used the idea of the “cataclysmic event” to bring together social and personal memory and national histories. 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 finite or closed, is clearly divergent from the objectified approach to memory of cognitive psychologists (1996:xi, xviii, xix). 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

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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). 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 selffashioning in quite utilitarian ways (see below). Discussing German literature of the immediate postwar period, Sebald finds 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 juxtaposition between an obsession with memory and a “culture of amnesia” in late twentieth-century postwar Germany. Hyssen argues that, in postmodern, 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). 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 widespread 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). 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.

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This sentence is taken from an essay on Nabokov’s memoir, Speak Memory, which is itself worthy of a further series of reflections – in part on the connections between Nabokov’s and Sebald’s writing. 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). 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. 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 discussion 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). See Funder (2003) for an extraordinary account of the complex interweavings of the small exchanges of family life and a state whose operations 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). I have adopted this formulation from a comment by Sophie Day at the conference at which these essays were presented.

REFERENCES

Anderson, Benedict, 1991 Imagined Communities. 2nd ed. London: Verso. Arendt, Hannah, 1968 Introduction. Walter Benjamin 1892–1940. In Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Hannah Arendt, ed. Pp. 1–55. New York: Schocken Books. Astuti, Rita, 1995 People of the Sea: Identity and Descent among the Vezo of Madagascar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Astuti, Rita, 2000 Kindreds and Descent Groups: New Perspectives from Madagascar. In Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Janet Carsten, ed. Pp. 90–103. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Bachelard, Gaston, 1964 The Poetics of Space. New York: Orion Press. Baddeley, A. D., 1976 The Psychology of Memory. New York: Basic Books. Baddeley, A. D., 1990 Human Memory: Theory and Practice. New York: Basic Books. Bahloul, Joelle, 1996 The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937–1962. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bartlett, F. C., 1932 Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Basso, Keith, 1996 Wisdom Sits in Places. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Battaglia, Deborah, 1992 The Body in the Gift: Memory and Forgetting in Sabarl Mortuary Exchange. American Ethnologist 19:3–18. Battaglia, Deborah, 1993 At Play in the Fields (and Borders) of the Imaginary: Melanesian Transformations of Forgetting. Cultural Anthropology 8: 430–42. Benjamin, Walter, 1968 Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Hannah Arendt, ed. New York: Schocken Books. Bennett, Gillian, 1999 “Alas, Poor Ghost!” Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse. Logan: Utah State University Press. Bloch, Maurice, 1996 Internal and External Memory: Different Ways of Being in History. In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. P. Antze and M. Lambek, eds. Pp. 215–33. New York: Routledge. Bloch, Maurice, 1998 How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory and Literacy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Boyarin, Jonathan, ed., 1994a Remapping Memory: The Politics of Timespace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Boyarin, Jonathan, 1994b Space, Time and the Politics of Memory. In Remapping Memory: The Politics of Timespace. Jonathan Boyarin, ed. Pp. 1–37. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Busby, Cecilia, 2000 The Performance of Gender: An Anthropology of Everyday Life in a South Indian Fishing Village. London and New Brunswick: Athlone Press. Carsten, Janet, 1995 The Politics of Forgetting: Migration, Kinship and Memory on the Periphery of the Southeast Asian State. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 1:317–35. Carsten, Janet, 1997 The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Carsten, Janet, ed., 2000a Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Carsten, Janet, 2000b “Knowing where you’ve come from”: Ruptures and Continuities of Time and Kinship in Narratives of Adoption Reunions. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 6:687–703. Carsten, Janet, 2004 After Kinship. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cole, Jennifer, 1998 The Work of Memory in Madagascar. American Ethnologist 25(4):610–33. Cole, Jennifer, 2001 Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cole, Jennifer and Karen Middleton, 2001 Rethinking Ancestors and Colonial Power in Madagascar. Africa 71(1):1–37. Connerton, Paul, 1989 How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Das, Veena, 1995 Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Edwards, Jeanette, 2000 Born and Bred: Idioms of Kinship and New Reproductive Technologies in England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eidson, John, 2004 From Avoidance to Engagement? Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past in a German Home Town. In Memory, Politics and Religion: The Past Meets the Present in Europe. F. Pine, D. Kaneff, and H. Haukanes, eds. Pp. 59–91. Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia. Münster: LIT Verlag. New Brunswick and London: Transaction. Feeley-Harnik, Gillian, 1991a A Green Estate: Restoring Independence in Madagascar. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Feeley-Harnik, Gillian, 1991b Finding Memories in Madagascar. In Images of Memory. Susanne Küchler and Walter Melion, eds. Pp. 121–40. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Feuchtwang, Stephan, 2000 Reinscriptions: Commemoration, Restoration and the Interpersonal Transmission of Histories and Memories under Modern States in Asia and Europe. In Memory and Methodology. Susannah Radstone, ed. Pp. 59–77. Oxford and New York: Berg. Feuchtwang, Stephan, 2003 Loss: Transmissions, Recognitions, Authorisations. In Regimes of Memory. Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin, eds. Pp. 79–90. London and New York: Routledge. Feuchtwang, Stephan, 2005 Mythical Moments in National and Other Family Histories. History Workshop Journal 59:179–93. Filippucci, Paola, 2004 Memory and Marginality: Remembrance of War in Argonne (France). In Memory, Politics and Religion: The Past Meets the Present in Europe. F. Pine, D. Kaneff, and H. Haukanes, eds. Pp. 35–57. Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia. Münster: LIT Verlag. New Brunswick and London: Transaction.

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Fox, James J., 1973 “Standing” in Time and Place: The Structure of Rotinese Historical Narratives. In Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia. A. Reid and D. Marr, eds. Pp. 10–25. London and Singapore: Heinemann. Franklin, Sarah and Susan McKinnon, 2001 Introduction: Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. In Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. S. Franklin and S. McKinnon, eds. Pp. 1–25. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Freud, Sigmund, 1950[1915] Mourning and Melancholia. In Collected Papers, Vol. IV. Joan Riviere, trans. London: Hogarth Press. Funder, Anna, 2003 Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall. London: Granta. Gay y Blasco, Paloma, 2004 Evangelical Transformations of Forgetting and Remembering: The Politics of Gitano Life. In Memory, Politics and Religion: The Past Meets the Present in Europe. F. Pine, D. Kaneff, and H. Haukanes, eds. Pp. 255–72. Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia. Münster: LIT Verlag. New Brunswick and London: Transaction. Gow, Peter, 1991 Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hacking, Ian, 1995 Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Halbwachs, Maurice, 1980[1950] The Collective Memory. Mary Douglas, ed. New York: Harper & Row. Halbwachs, Maurice, 1992 On Collective Memory. L. Coser, ed., trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hodgkin, Katharine and Susannah Radstone, 2003 Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory. London and New York: Routledge. Hodgkin, Katharine and Susannah Radstone, 2005 Feature: Rethinking Memory. Introduction. History Workshop Journal 59:129–33. Hoffman Eva, 1998[1989] Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. London: Vintage. Holland, Dorothy and Jean Lave, eds., 2001 History in Person: Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Oxford: James Currey. Hyssen, Andreas, 1995 Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York and London: Routledge. Küchler, Susanne, 1987 Malangan: Art and Memory in a Melanesian society. Man (N.S.) 22:238–55. Kuipers, J. C., 1984 Place, Names and Authority in Weyéwa Ritual Speech. Language and Society 13:455–66. Lambek, Michael, 1996 The Past Imperfect: Remembering as Moral Practice. In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. P. Antze and M. Lambek, eds. Pp. 235–54. New York and London: Routledge.

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Lambek, Michael, 2002 The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lambek, Michael, 2003 Memory in a Maussian Universe. In Regimes of Memory. S. Radstone and K. Hodgkin, eds. Pp. 202–16. London and New York: Routledge. Lambek, Michael and Paul Antze, 1996 Introduction: Forecasting Memory. In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. P. Antze and M. Lambek, eds. New York and London: Routledge. Levi, Primo, 1987 If This is a Man and The Truce. S. Woolf, trans. London: Abacus. Levi, Primo, 1989 The Drowned and the Saved. R. Rosenthal, trans. London: Sphere Books. Luria, A. R., 1976 Cognitive Development: Its Structural and Social Foundations. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Mosse, George, 1990 Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. New York: Oxford University Press. Mueggler, Erik, 2001 The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Nora, Pierre, ed., 1984–92 Les Lieux de Mémoire. 7 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Nora, Pierre, 1989 Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. M. Roudebush, trans. Representations 26:7–25. Olick, Jeffrey K. and Joyce Robbins, 1998 Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices. Annual Review of Sociology 24:105–140. Parkin, Robert and Linda Stone, eds., 2004 Kinship and Family: An Anthropological Reader. Malden, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell. Passerini, Luisa, 2003 Memories between Silence and Oblivion. In Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, eds. Pp. 238–54. London and New York: Routledge. Peletz, Michael G., 1995 Kinship Studies in Late Twentieth-Century Anthropology. Annual Review Of Anthropology 24:343–72. Pine, Frances, Deema Kaneff, and Haldis Haukanes, eds., 2004a Memory, Politics and Religion: The Past Meets the Present in Europe. Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia. Münster: LIT Verlag. New Brunswick and London: Transaction. Pine, Frances, Deema Kaneff, and Haldis Haukanes, 2004b Introduction. Memory, Politics and Religion: A Perspective on Europe. In Memory, Politics and Religion: The Past Meets the Present in Europe. F. Pine, D. Kaneff, and H. Haukanes, eds. Pp. 1–33. Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia. Münster: LIT Verlag. New Brunswick and London: Transaction.

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Radstone, Susannah, 2000 Working with Memory: An Introduction. In Memory and Methodology. Susannah Radstone, ed. Pp. 1–24. Oxford and New York: Berg. Radstone, Susannah, 2005 Reconceiving Binaries: The Limits of Memory. History Workshop Journal 59:134–50. Radstone, Susannah and Katharine Hodgkin, 2003 Regimes of Memory: An Introduction. In Regimes of Memory. Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin, eds. Pp. 1–22. London and New York: Routledge. Rév, István, 2005 Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism. Stanford: University of California Press. Richardson, Tanya, 2004 Disciplining the Past in Post-Soviet Ukraine: Memory and History in Schools and Families. In Memory, Politics and Religion: The Past Meets the Present in Europe. F. Pine, D. Kaneff, and H. Haukanes, eds. Pp. 109–39. Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia. Münster: LIT Verlag. New Brunswick and London: Transaction. Robinson, Marilynne, 2004[1980] Housekeeping. London: Faber & Faber. Robinson, Marilynne, 2005[2004] Gilead. London: Virago. Rosaldo, Renato, 1980 Ilongot Headhunting 1883–1974: A Study in Society and History. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Schneider, David M., 1977 Kinship, Nationality, and Religion in American Culture: Towards a Definition of Kinship. In Symbolic Anthropology: A Reader in the Study of Symbols and Meanings. J. L. Dolgin, D. D. Kemnitzer, and D. M. Schneider, eds. pp. 63–71. New York: Columbia University Press. Scott, James C., 1998 Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Scott, James C., John Tehranian, and Jeremy Mathias, 2002 The Production of Legal Identities Proper to States: The Case of the Permanent Family Surname. Comparative Studies in Society and History 44(1):4–44. Sebald, W. G., 2002[2001] Austerlitz. Anthea Bell, trans. London: Penguin. Sebald, W. G., 2005 Campo Santo. Sven Meyer, ed. Anthea Bell, trans. London: Hamish Hamilton. Sorabji, Cornelia, 2006 Managing Memories in Post-War Sarajevo: Individuals, Bad Memories, and New Wars. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12:1–18. Sperber, Dan, 1985 Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations. Man (N.S.) 20:73–89. Stewart, Michael, 2004 Remembering without Commemoration: The Mnemonics and Politics of Holocaust Memories among European Roma. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 10:561–81.

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Taylor, Anne Christine, 1993 Remembering to Forget: Identity, Mourning and Memory among the Jivaro. Man (N.S.) 28:653–78. Tonkin, Elizabeth, 1992 Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winter, Jay, 1995 Sites of Memory Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yan, Yunxiang, 2003 Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village 1949–1999. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 1996[1982] Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Yngvesson, Barbara, 2002 Placing the Gift Child in Transnational Adoption. Law and Society 36(2):227–56. Yngvesson, Barbara and Susan Bibler Coutin, 2006 Backed by Papers: Undoing Persons, Histories and Return. American Ethnologist 33(2):177–90.

2 Ruins and Ghosts: The Domestic Uncanny and the Materialization of Anglo-Indian Genealogies in Kharagpur 2 Laura Bear 2 This chapter explores the difficulties Anglo-Indian families in the railway colony at Kharagpur in West Bengal have in materializing continuities in their family histories and genealogies. Their inability to fashion their selves according to the principles of jati and desh (commonly translated as caste and village) constituted in the history of railway labor that underpin many of their fellow Indian railway workers’ family histories has a curious effect.1 It leads to Anglo-Indians experiencing a dematerialization of their memories, histories, and family inheritances. In tandem with this, the physical space of the railway colony appears to be a place of ruins. Unable to assert continuities between the past and the present, Anglo-Indians are left with a sense of the invisibility of their own selves and of the chaotic degeneration of their community. However, they rematerialize connections between generations and to the place of Kharagpur through unexpected mediums – tales of domestic ghosts and experiences of haunting. These uncanny tales are linked to a particular vision of Catholicism held by Anglo-Indians. They see the community of worship as providing a connection to past ancestors and a transcendent underpinning for their own identities. It heals the breaches in the family histories and selfhood of Anglo-Indians that are introduced by other Indians’ reckoning of family histories, genealogies, and regional nationalisms through categories of jati and desh. Overall, this example pushes us towards an analysis not just of the materializations of kinship and family history, but of the specific relational contexts in which they appear to be disappearing and which provoke moves to

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refound them. By relational contexts I mean something more specific than wider national and historical events. I mean the local manifestations of community identities, regional nationalisms, and workplace hierarchies as they are expressed in the self-fashioning of neighbors, schoolmates, colleagues, and friends. Important to my analysis of the significance of ghosts to AngloIndians in Kharagpur are recent discussions of the uncanny in anthropology that have drawn on Lacan and Freud’s psychoanalytic theories (Ivy 1995). But Anglo-Indian accounts cast a different light on the phenomenon of the uncanny. As we will see, for them ghosts are domestic appearances, who are often welcomed or at least familiar presences. Rather than being a source of anxiety these ghosts involve the return of an authenticity of self-being. In particular, they offer the possibility of asserting connections between generations, to a place and with the past in general. In addition they reveal a particular characteristic of uncanny experiences, which is that they reify the forces of the past and space as external influences that act on people from outside. In the conclusion, I argue that this feature of the uncanny makes it a particularly significant domain for the interaction of chronotopes of romantic nationalism with local concepts of genealogies and connections to place. Overall, this discussion of the experiential force of the uncanny reminds us that in our attempts to trace the material culture of kinship we need to pay attention to the specific kinds of experiential reifications involved. What is it that is externalized as irrefutable proof of connections? Is this proof effective because it involves sentimental experiences within the body or because it draws on practices from within scientific, religious, and national institutions? How in people’s accounts of connectedness does one kind of proof (institutional) become converted into emotional and experiential proof? How do these conversions of evidence relate to the practices and conceptual frames of religious, national, and local moralities of origin and belonging? The experiences of Anglo-Indians point to the general importance of such questions.

The Relational Context of Kharagpur: Colonial History, Railway Morality, Jati, and Desh In order to understand the attempts by Anglo-Indians in Kharagpur to materialize their genealogies and family histories it is important to trace

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the context that their longing for origins emerges from. Railway colonies such as Kharagpur, which was built in the 1890s, were designed to be spaces in which national affiliations and moralities could be nurtured among British and Anglo-Indian employees through the medium of architecture, domesticity, and leisure routines (Bear 1994). Employment on the railways under British rule followed a logic of racial and community difference with groups arranged in hierarchical roles according to “natural” capabilities and loyalties. By the 1930s, on the outskirts of colonies such as Kharagpur, settlements for Indian employees were sponsored by the railway companies. These housed Indians separated along lines of community. At Independence, these particular forms of hierarchy ended. This institutional change, however, did not dissolve the forms of railway morality that had emerged in colonial workplaces from disciplinary practices, hierarchies of command, housing policies, and Indian workers’ protests against the legitimacy of their colonial rulers. This railway morality fused ideas of jati with British officials’ notions of racial distinction, pedigree, and natural communities of interest. In this railway morality there was and is at work an expansive notion of jati that applies its language to a new range of social units and relationships. Ideas of purity and pollution turned into more broadly applicable criteria for the social judgment of political legitimacy, class distinction, and professional propriety (Bear 2001, 2006). This railway morality is a microcosm of wider social trends of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that have given the term jati a broad range of references in the present. In the context of the contemporary workplaces and domestic spaces of the railway, as in formal dictionary definitions of the term, jati can be understood as referring to a type, sort, or class. The type it indicates can be anything from nation, race, religion, tribe, lineage, region, breed, pedigree, community, species, or caste.2 It is a term that suggests that in the flow of social life there exist hidden, shared, and often inherited essences that are revealed by personal demeanor. The term easily shifts from an inclusive to exclusionary border-marker and it collapses domestic, public, and physiological or “natural” indicators of commonality. As it moves in language use from domestic, national, and naturalized contexts, it carries with it associations from each. It also links together these discrete forms of essential and moral identities. This railway morality has been given continuing life in the present by post-Independence disciplinary institutions and the private practices

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of railway families (Bear, in press). The summary powers of colonial officers to dismiss employees have not been removed, but expanded since Independence. Vigilance departments modeled on wartime institutions were introduced in the 1960s in order to stamp out corruption. Both of these disciplinary forms make the workplace a domain for constant commentary on the morality of fellow workers and superiors that use idioms of jati. Among railway families, in particular Bengali families of middle-ranking castes, jati is also emphasized in the private domain. Here it is an inherited quality of superiority demonstrated by the cultivation of respectability, non-materialism, and Bengali culture. This culture is always referred to by the term sanskriti, which is contrasted to the polluting alien culture (English term used) of the railway. Railway culture is understood to be alien in that it reproduces the disciplinary practices of the Raj and is materialistic. These private versions of jati attempt to separate public (inessential) and private (essential) identities. Men can work on the railways using all the disciplinary habits of their colonial forebears without becoming them. At the same time, criteria of social distinction along lines of jati can also be maintained in a context of increased social mixing in the workplace. The difference of the Bengali home, its culturedness, is a coded demonstration of higher status. In these homes family history is anchored in the deep continuity of jati and in a spatial origin in a particular desh or village-home. Anglo-Indians emerge as the quintessential other in railway morality. For Bengali railway families that have worked for several generations on the railways, Anglo-Indians are an alien, dangerously egalitarian, materialistic, and polluted other that condense in their behavior all the problems of jatis mixing. They, and railway workers more generally, cannot seem to disassociate Anglo-Indians from the colonial past, and find it hard to see them as fully Indian. Anglo-Indians in Kharagpur report various examples of the exclusion that results from this. A 25year-old man who worked in the workshops at Kharagpur as a welder gave the following account. When he started out in the shops he was given other people’s jobs to do and is still given dirty work because he is an Anglo-Indian. His supervisors and fellow workers say to him that he had it good during the Raj, and that now he can feel what they felt during those days. A 30-year-old driver told me that his fellow workers kept on accusing him of not being Indian. He retorted by asking them how truly Indian they were since they made such

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distinctions between different kinds of Indians on the grounds of their being Bihari or Bengali. Despite going to the same schools, parents complained that their children could not find Indian friends to play with. Anglo-Indians also said that it was hard to find places to rent if they lived outside the railway colony because people didn’t want to rent to beef-eaters, or they asked them to promise not to leave bones lying around. The moral anxieties and fears about the dissolution of jati that these accounts reflect are condensed into a saying that is common in the railway workshops, “Tikri pa Tikri Loha ka maidan. Adra ki chokari bhooth se be Shaitan.” This translates as “Plate by plate making a field of iron. The girl from Adra [a railway colony in Bihar] is more wicked than a devil-spirit.” By implication, the dangerous female named in this phrase is an Anglo-Indian as it is only women from this community that “belong” to railway colonies. One workshop man who went out with an Anglo-Indian girl reported that his grandfather warned him off with this saying. This phrase condenses the sense that Anglo-Indian women are amoral predators seeking to entrap, that they are irrevocably associated with the industrial processes of the railway colony, and that they are akin to spirits. Their similarity to spirits works on several different levels. It reflects the sense that Anglo-Indians are remnants of the Raj who do not belong to contemporary India. It also invokes the popular imagination of spirits as predatory beings who are attracted by the moral weaknesses of those they appear to and sometimes possess. Bhuts and Djinns in general are understood to be drawn by the wearing of inappropriate clothes or behavior. The phrase about the girl from Adra therefore warns about the importance of maintaining proper conduct on the part of the person to whom the devil-spirit might appear if they behaved inappropriately. The similarity of Anglo-Indians to spirits also emerges from their uncanniness. Anglo-Indians represent everything that is suppressed in the attempt to preserve an ahistorical sense of an identity based on jati. They are born from indiscriminate mixing between castes and communities, practice a casteless egalitarianism, their identities cannot be separated from the industrial spaces of the railways, and their existence recalls the intimate effects of the colonial past. What then is the impact of this railway morality and associated notions of jati and desh on Anglo-Indian railway families? If we take the perspective of everyday kinship practice, which is based on ties of sentiment and nurture forged in particular households, there seems to

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be little impact. In fact we might be tempted to see Anglo-Indians as another example of the fluid concepts of relatedness described by Carsten for Langkawi Malays (1997). The legal constitutional definition of Anglo-Indians employs a restrictive genealogical and patrilineal logic. Following a colonial ruling made in 1919 in the context of defining separate electorates, Anglo-Indians are classified as those with a European relative in the male line. However, Anglo-Indian family structure and kinship links reflect an expansive bilateral definition of relatedness based on the sharing of food and sentimental ties in households. For Anglo-Indians, food is both a visceral and emblematic sign of their cultural identity that can be transmitted between generations and is a medium that creates relationships. Male and female family members nurture an Anglo-Indian culinary repertoire of typical dishes that includes Marie rose biscuits, fruit cake, and spiced dried ham at Christmas, and rice and ball curry. Women often showed me their family recipe books in which secret dishes are passed from generation to generation. Often Anglo-Indians joke that they are “spicy, like our food.” Food is used to distinguish Anglo-Indians from other groups. For example, one woman described how her British uncle “would only eat stew, but we used to eat pungent food because we are AngloIndians. To look at his food only we would get sick. His roast had to be uncooked – how dirty it was.” Other Indians were distinguished by their dislike of Anglo-Indian eating habits, especially the consumption of beef, and by their distinct regional cuisines. A culinary repertoire defines the cultural and family essence of Anglo-Indians. Food also makes bonds between people in households, ties dispersed families together, and changes the essences of people. Even in wealthier households women prided themselves on cooking rather than leaving it to maids because this act of caring was central to the unity of the family. Anglo-Indian women often distinguished themselves from other Indian women by their ability to “stand by a chillah [hearth] and cook.” Extended families who live in different households are bound by eating together on Sundays after church. Typically, one woman charted the decline of her family relationships in terms of the fact that they no longer ate Sunday lunch together. People expressed their continuing relationships with relatives living abroad by sending them elaborate food parcels. Non-related individuals were incorporated into households through the medium of food. I was absorbed into families in Kharagpur by both eating with them and later cooking

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with and for them. Adopted children became like their adopted parents through sharing food. One woman, for example, told me how her son (at birth her Muslim husband’s brother’s child) had a British boss, “a pure Englishman from London, and when he heard my son talk and saw his ways and habits he thought he was just like him. So my son told him his mother’s name was Donna.” Donna went on to say that this recognition of British-likeness in her son was because of her training and food. This logic of essences created through food could be used to assert the inevitable connections between people and places. Many Anglo-Indians told me that they would not settle abroad because they could not eat the food there. In the settlement of Anglo-Indians in Hijli, on the outskirts of Kharagpur, people attributed their essential nature to drinking the water of the place. Wells in this area were polluted with diesel. This gave the food a distinct flavor and washing felt like dousing yourself in diesel. People here suggested that this water gave them particular characteristics. For example, one woman suggested that their consumption of the well water made all the Anglos roundabout full of steam. For Anglo-Indian families, identities and connections to places are forged through the visceral medium of food shared within and between households. This fluid logic of connection gives structural priority to the sentimental ties formed in particular households rather than to some abstract moral duty of care to particular categories of relatives. The ties that are made in childhood houses to the people in residence there are those that ideally persist through life (Caplan 2001). On the railways, these households center on the conjugal couple. The allocation of railway housing to employees helps to make this core couple socially and economically central. Newly married people can immediately form an independent unit from their in-laws. Yet often, when the husband or wife’s parents retire or one of them dies, they join one of their children in railway accommodation or they all form a household in private accommodation on the outskirts of the colony. Unmarried, widowed, or divorced relatives on both sides often join this core couple for periods of time when they are financially insecure. People are likely to provide a home for any relatives from either side that they have developed close relationships with in childhood. Shelter was also provided for children of both the wife’s and husband’s brothers, sisters, and cousins. This occurred if they lost their parents, but also happened often as a means to advance the education or life chances

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of children. This expansive bilateral reckoning based on affective household ties gives particular weight to fraternal and sororal connections. These provide networks that cross-cut families of marriage and link them to families of birth. This bilateral reckoning makes affinal relationships and mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationships tense as such connections do not have automatic priority (Caplan 2001). It is likely that the flexibility of this bilateral kin reckoning and idioms of relatedness through food has emerged in relation to the particular colonial history of Anglo-Indians. It creates connections between family members that rest on present relationships, not on considerations of legitimacy based on either British principles of genealogy or Indian ideas of jati. The present-orientation and bilateral reckoning of family ties make them highly flexible in a historical context of abandonment, institutionalization, and fluctuating economic and social fortunes. The ancestors of Anglo-Indian families were often people who had been abandoned by British men and/or had been absorbed into institutions such as orphanages. To this day nuns and priests arrange marriages for “orphans” left in their care. A flexible system of kinship means that conjugal families can be remade instantly in the present even if one of the core couple, historically often the wife, had previously been in an orphanage and had unknown origins. Its bilateral form also reflects the frequent historical experience of children being abandoned by fathers to the care of their mother or to their mother’s relatives. It allows homes to be formed that do not rely on absent and often illegitimate paternal connections. This expansive and present-oriented reckoning of family has also allowed and allows Anglo-Indians to strategically make and break connections to kin in order to better their social and economic status. The account so far would suggest that the logic of jati and desh is irrelevant to AngloIndian ideas of relatedness. Yet, Anglo-Indians have the sense that they lack something significant. They long for a foundation for their self equivalent to that of the jati and desh possessed by many of their fellow Indian railway families. The absence of a deep kinship continuity is for them an emotionally experienced lack with political consequences. What then are the effects of the absence of jati and desh on AngloIndian railway families’ senses of selfhood, place, and time? One result is an overwhelming sense among Anglo-Indians in Kharagpur that they

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are a community filled with signs of degeneration and decline. This sensibility is revealed clearly in Hope Dover’s account of the chaos of the Anglo-Indian community in Kharagpur. Hope is the 41-year-old widow of a railway driver. I first met her when she was waiting to see the personnel officer to petition him for a job for her sons. She lives in a two-room shack next to the railway line that curves south from Hijli station. Pasted on the outside is a board saying “Mr Dover, ex-loco driver.” For Hope, her community is full of potential dangers of pollution and threats to physical integrity. She told me that when her husband died none of the doctors could figure out what was wrong with him. But she said that she knew that her husband caught his death at the Jensens’ house, where women force themselves on young boys for money. There, she suggested, they swap wives and husbands and sons and daughters too. Her husband, she added, got his death from a blue stone they put in his drink one night. It was this that killed him and this was why the doctors couldn’t find anything despite all their scans and tests. She suggested that the Anglo-Indian village compound called mini-Australia or Santa Barbara is also a place where these kinds of things happen. I should be careful not to eat in anybody’s house, she continued, adding that she doesn’t dare do this herself as she might be poisoned. Hope sees the railway colony as a site of decline that threatens her own integrity, and which killed her husband. Her vision is obviously extreme, born of personal losses, but it is characteristic of other Anglo-Indians in its sense of the chaos of the present. Anglo-Indian railway families find it equally difficult to ground themselves and a family history in the spaces of the railway colony. Before arriving in Kharagpur, I had imagined that Anglo-Indians there would be one of the few communities which proudly claimed this industrial space as their home. This impression was created by the way Anglo-Indians in Kolkata talked about railway colonies as a kind of desh or village home. Yet the Anglo-Indians who live in Kharagpur have no sense that it provides a solid foundation for their family and community identities. Instead, they suggest that it is a place of ruins. At times they even feel that Kharagpur is too evanescent to mold memories or to be a repository for them. This sense of the insubstantiality of Kharagpur was most clearly expressed by Colt Campbell. Colt is a 65-year-old retired loco inspector, who lives in a rented house, Dolly Villa in Hijli. His locality, even

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after thirty years of work in Kharagpur offers Colt no sense of place. The railway colony, for him, has lost its reality after Independence. He described how it used to be, “We had avenues, we had streets, all numbered and named with gates,” that guarded the entrance to beautiful gardens full of roses and dahlias. These streets and avenues still exist, but for him they have disappeared, lost specifically, according to him, in the application of cow-dung cakes and disguised by saris hanging out to dry. He said that, for him and all the Anglo-Indians in England, all their memories were here in Kharagpur. When they come back they just sit outside their old houses and recite the names of everybody who used to live in the blocks. He added that was why they come back in order to find their memories. He suggested that he and these returning people remember the old place, so they have affection for it, but that the next generation, including his sons, don’t have this. Kharagpur has lost its power as a place for memory with Independence. It has no substance to mold a future nostalgia. Colt added that the Anglo-Indians in Kharagpur were actually without a place at all, that now “We are nowhere.” This sense of the insubstantiality of place as a foundation for memory, family history, and identity was echoed in many of my conversations. For Anglo-Indians who still live in railway colonies such as Kharagpur, the transition of Independence and their loss of economic privileges has meant the loss of a home territory. They are painfully aware that, especially since the 1960s, when their right to reserved posts expired, the railway colony homeland has ceased to exist. The railway colony quite patently is not “their” space, and perhaps never has been. Their desire for a villagehome equivalent to that of other Indians in the colony cannot be fulfilled. Therefore the spaces of the colony feel increasingly insubstantial and like ruins. Historical narratives of Anglo-Indian family histories are equally problematic. Anglo-Indians, lacking the crucial qualities of jati and desh, find it hard to place their memories into a continuous historical narrative that could act as an origin story of who they are. Especially problematic are accounts and memories related to events of colonial history. When I asked Anglo-Indians in Kharagpur about the colonial past and the events of Independence, they talked about an unspecified “then” that was elusive and fragmentary. A typical response was that I received from Colt Campbell. He and his wife, Loretta, told me they couldn’t remember when Independence came and Colt added, “I

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don’t want to remember also.” The only colonial event that emerged in his conversations was “the mutiny.” However, this was a freefloating signifier that, according to Colt, explained why Muslims and Hindus didn’t bother his family during partition riots in Kharagpur. He said they knew that the Anglo-Indians were very above them after the Mutiny so they didn’t touch them. This historical event only served to explain Anglo-Indians’ lack of visibility in the events of Independence. It explained, according to Colt, why Anglo-Indians were “nowhere to be seen,” not part of the transitions of Independence. Anglo-Indians in general evaded discussions of the impact of late colonial events on their families. The inability to weave colonial memories into continuous narratives of identity is due in part to the sense of humiliation Anglo-Indians experienced in the Raj era railway colony. Women described how, during the war, English soldiers stationed at Kharagpur and imported English train drivers looked down on Anglo-Indians. They also recounted sexual harassment, with one woman erupting into a tirade about the “bloody British” when relating her experiences in the Women’s Auxiliary Corps, India during the Second World War. Men recounted their exclusion from workplace leisure spaces, such as the tearooms. One man explained his childhood sadness that he and his father could go to the Railway Institute (the club for railway employees housed in the railway colony), but their Indian Christian mother couldn’t. He would sneak home food from the Institute in a napkin to give to her. Quite simply, the colonial past of the railway colony cannot provide a continuous ground for narratives of AngloIndian families because it was an ambivalent – and sometimes painful – experience. But more importantly, memories of this past cannot become narratives of legitimate selfhood. If Anglo-Indians cite their links to the Raj, then this only serves to confirm their illegitimacy in the eyes of other Indian railway families. It would also make them too fatally embedded in the events of history to possess jati, which has become associated with an ahistorical property. It is clear from these examples that the general longing among Anglo-Indians for a stable jati- and desh-like foundation is hard to resolve. This leads also to their feeling politically illegitimate. When I asked Anglo-Indians about their political commitments they expressed a hopeless apathy about the local and national situation. At the most, they said that they voted Congress because, as one 50-year-old woman

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put it, “when in Rome, you must do what the Romans do.” AngloIndians link this lack of proficiency with politics to an essential illegitimacy of their community and to their colonial origins. This emerges in their accounts of how Anglo-Indians were offered the Andamans as a homeland at Independence. People repeatedly recounted this fact, which condensed their sense that they were associated with the brutalities of colonial rule. The full significance of these references was made clear to me in a conversation with Colt. One day when we were sitting with his wife and brother-in-law he joked that the AngloIndians who had stayed back in India were the patriotic Anglo-Indians. His wife and brother-in-law giggled at the idea that such an adjective could apply to them. They then talked about how Nehru had offered Frank Anthony (a past president of the Anglo-Indian Association) an Anglo-Indian homeland in the Andaman Islands. Colt said that they would have messed this up because “in truth we are all bastards anyway.” The mixed and illegitimate origins of Anglo-Indians, embedded in the history of the colonial encounter, made it impossible for them to imagine founding or becoming involved with any political space. But, as we will see, there is one context in which the chronic instability that besets their projects of attempting to acquire a jati-like quality and embedding in place is overcome. This is in the domain of the uncanny.

The Domestic Uncanny: Irrefutable Proofs of Family Connections and Divine Citizenship I was surprised by the number of families in Kharagpur that told ghost stories and had their own personal ghosts in their homes. These domestic ghosts were usually quite benign. Typical of these ghost tales were those told in one sitting to me by the Dover family (related by marriage to Hope Dover). They live in a four-room mud house in an Anglo-Indian para or village compound in Hijli on the outskirts of Kharagpur. The family consists of Gracie and Freddie Dover who are retired and in their sixties. Gracie worked as a teacher in the railway primary school and Freddie was a mail driver. Gracie described her father as a Goan mail guard and her mother as an Irish Piggot. Freddie was born in Bombay and his Anglo-Indian father wrote dance music. His mother died when he was 6, and he and his three brothers were

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taken over by her sister and sent to boarding school in Asansol. Gracie and Freddie had brought up their son and daughter during an itinerant career in Chokradapur, Rourkela, and Kharagpur. They currently live with their son, Joseph who is a driver, his wife Maggie, who is a primary schoolteacher, and their six-month-old daughter Violet. One day when I was asking them about their family history, Gracie began to tell a stream of ghost stories, her tales punctuated by additions from Freddie and Joseph. First, Gracie asserted that her sister had lived in Anara, and that most cottages there are haunted. Her nephew, when he was only 5, used to get up at night and hide under the bed because he was so worried. But her sister told him it was a friendly ghost. Gracie explained that this haunting was because the place was built on a Christian cemetery. She then said that her neighbor’s son fell sick and went to see a Muslim to get a token to cure himself. His elder sister saw the token, got angry, and put it up on the altar. At night time, things started turning over and the gramophone started playing, when it had not played for years. The boy died after a week. From then on, at night, the gramophone used to start up and play a hymn that was the boy’s favorite. Joseph then said to his mother that she should tell me about what had happened to them in the house they had lived in before this one. He added that the events there had made even him believe in ghosts. Gracie said that in their house in the colony they had an extra member of the family. In the morning, she used to be shaken awake so she could get the tea ready for everyone. At night, if you were asleep on a particular bed, you would feel someone brushing past you. Even Joseph lay there once and woke up startled by the sensation. Gracie and her daughter-in-law saw a little boy of 11 or 12 in short black pants and a singlet walking past the house and inside as well. They used to set an extra plate for the ghost at the table during all the meals. At this point Freddie giggled, adding, “I’m not afraid of ghosts, I am one.” Everyone laughed and Joseph said, “That’s true enough.” Gracie just kept on with her stories. She said that there was a little 6- or 7-year-old boy who had holy communion in the church. A photographer took his picture. The boy died at 11. The photographer went back to the church to take a picture and then brought it to the mother because the boy was in it. The mother said that her son had been dead for three years. Gracie then said that her mother once told her a true story about the church. The priest in the church

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didn’t say the mass properly and died. One day the choristers heard the church bells ringing and people laughing and singing in the church. They ran in, and there was a ghost of the priest in the church, saying mass, and all the people who were dead and gone were at that mass too. In these stories and experiences of the uncanny, the Dover family draw a series of connections between ghosts, domestic and religious spaces in Kharagpur, dead family members, and the church. Gracie’s stories begin with the assertion that the domestic spaces of the railway colony at Adra are constructed on a Christian graveyard. This suggests that there is a potential continuity of Anglo-Indian domestic history underlying these spaces. The houses are founded literally on their ancestors. The importance of graveyards as one of the signs of a rooting in place of Anglo-Indian family history cannot be underestimated. Gracie’s emphasis on them was echoed in many accounts. Similarly, people worried about whether they would get spaces in graveyards. Families would carefully preserve and make a point of telling me about papers that guaranteed a right to be buried in Catholic cemeteries. Sometimes people who had, with foresight, collected a large number of these would hand them on as a treasured inheritance after their death to favorite members of the family. Close family (reckoned bilaterally) wanted to be buried together in these spaces, and people would tell me proudly about any relatives who were interred in them. The significance of the graveyard as a place where family history, ancestral continuity, and a connection to place can be asserted is made fully visible during the celebrations of All Souls’ Day on 2 November.3 On this day, families go to the church in order to offer prayers for the souls of the dead. They then go to the graveyard and wash the graves of their relatives. They scatter flowers, light candles, and burn incense on them. After the vigil at the grave, they return home and eat simple food with their extended families, including people from both their maternal and paternal lines. This occasion provides a renewal of connections to ancestors and to a place that is contrasted to the lack of family feeling that creates Anglo-Indian migrations. For example, when I joined one family for a meal after the ceremony, I found them discussing divided families. They described how one man was coming from England to Kolkata for a tour to try to trace his son and daughter. The mother had died when the children were young, and the father,

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wanting to get rid of them, sent them to Dr Graham’s Homes in Darjeeling, which were meant for orphans. The son resented the father and led his life independently. The family knew he was now dead. They were debating whether they should tell the returning father this piece of news. The consensus emerged that they had better keep quiet because the father didn’t care about his son anyway. He had had no, as they put it, “family feeling” in the past so what was the point of telling him of the death of his son and where he was buried? The moral failings and wanderings of this father were the inverse of the connections to family and place that they had just celebrated in the graveyard. Ghosts and graveyards are therefore assimilated to domestic spaces, quite simply, because they are one of the only contexts in which a family connection to the place of the railway colony and to the past can be made by Anglo-Indians. The ghost that visited Gracie’s nephew in Adra affirmed the links of Anglo-Indians to the railway colony in the form of an externalized and physically experienced manifestation. The next two stories Gracie told me add another piece to the puzzle of the significance of the uncanny to Anglo-Indians. She described two family hauntings. In the first, the grief of the loss of a child was externalized in a way that asserted a continuing connection to the dead family member and warned of transgressing the boundaries of an Anglo-Indian Christian community. The cause of the child’s death was attributed to his stepping outside of the boundaries of his community of faith, accepting a magic token from a Muslim. But the child’s return through the medium of a hymn signaled that in death the ties of family and community are remade. These ties are externalized into an irrefutable force that returns in a domestic space in Kharagpur. The boy’s ghost thus helps to affirm the permanence of ties between community, place, and family history. The Dovers’ friendly ghost reveals how welcome such domestic presences are and that all ghosts are strongly associated with lost family members. The Dovers incorporated their little boy ghost into the family routines and even laid a plate for him at the table. This ghost is a welcome external sign of temporal and spatial continuity, mediating in his youthfulness an image of the dead past and of the future represented by children. This is why he is welcomed into the family. He is both an ancestral Anglo-Indian presence and an image of the future made manifest in their home. The link of such ghosts to ancestors and family continuity is made explicit by

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Freddie’s comment that “I’m not afraid of ghosts, I am one.” This phrase has a double meaning, which is why the family laughed at it. On the one hand, it registers the sense that other Indians have of Anglo-Indians as uncanny remnants. On the other, it expresses the fact that Freddie is the oldest member of the family, almost ancestral, and the next to be a (friendly) ghost. This is why Joseph murmured his appreciation of his father’s phrase. This affection towards ghosts was repeated in many families in Kharagpur. Everyone agreed that Anglo-Indians were great ones for calling the spirits back, but only those of their relatives. Hope Dover recounted how her husband (Freddie Dover’s brother) came back to the family. Her granddaughter, when she visits Hope at home, hears him calling to her. Her eldest daughter, who is 20, sees him in dreams bringing sweets and food to their house. When her husband was on his deathbed, he heard his own family calling to him. The day before he died, he said his mother called to him saying, “Son, son, it’s your brother’s birthday tomorrow. Come home to celebrate it with us.” Her husband died the next day, thus fulfilling his kinship obligations. The accounts by Hope of her husband’s ghost confirm the association of ghosts with ancestors and connections across the generations. These are welcome presences because they externalize in a physical sensation and felt presence continuities in space and time. The forms of Catholicism practiced by Anglo-Indians provide the specific interpretative frame for these accounts of welcome hauntings. Gracie’s final two stories link the ghostly presences of ancestors explicitly to the practices of the Catholic Church. In the first story, the church and its ceremony of confirmation provide the site of the return of a lost son. In the second story, when the dead priest returns to say the mass properly, he calls up the whole community of Anglo-Indians who are dead and gone. This event provides a ghostly manifestation of the reality of the past community of Anglo-Indians. They are made present within the walls of the church and in relation to its practices. These stories reflect the more general sense that Anglo-Indians have, that the practices of Catholicism provide a means of mediating a relationship to dead family members, and of giving the transcendent authority of divine citizenship to their community.4 In the context of their exclusion from other forms of belonging based around notions of jati and desh, Anglo-Indians particularly emphasize the aspects of Catholicism that reify personal connections and pasts into a divine

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citizenship. They do this in a manner which serves to give transcendent substance to historical connections to a place, to ancestors, and to an Anglo-Indian community. We have already seen this dynamic at work in relation to graveyards and the celebration of All Souls’ Day. It is also present in the practices surrounding the picture of the Sacred Heart that is the image kept on the family altar in most Anglo-Indian houses. The family altar is usually in an intimate space of the house, either the area where the family sits most often, or in the bedroom of the core couple of the family. At first light and dusk, the wife of the core couple lights incense and puts flowers on the altar and says prayers for the whole family, including deceased relatives. Often photos of close dead relatives from the maternal and paternal line are placed next to the Sacred Heart or are the only other images put up on the walls of the house. On the birthday of recently deceased close relatives the priest is called to the house to bless the Sacred Heart picture. He dresses up in a gold and white robe and sprinkles holy water on the sacred heart picture. Close relatives of the deceased, such as partners, daughters, sons, sisters, and brothers, attend the ceremony and a meal afterwards. These events are an occasion to recall the lost family member. People also often started to tell stories about ghosts. These practices around the Sacred Heart give a transcendent permanence to the presence of dead family members, and create a sacred continuity of personal and community history. Catholicism is particularly productive for forging idioms of community continuity, in part because of the role its ceremonies and documentary practices have played in the making and breaking of social identities in India. Conversion to all forms of Christianity in the context of caste practices has at times produced a radical refounding of belonging, community status, and kinship network. Conversion and worship have also become articulated with local caste rivalries and hierarchies (Bayly 1999). Baptismal records became the grounds on which new origins and social substances were refounded. Different church allegiances were and are seen as markers of social distinctions. It is therefore not surprising that the sociological perceptions of AngloIndians and their ideas of origins are closely linked to their religious practices. Anglo-Indians, for example, often cite baptismal records as proof of their origins. This is in spite of the fact that these documents are telegraphic in their details, usually just recording the priest’s opinion as to whether someone is Indian Christian or Anglo-Indian. Some

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priests seem to be well aware of the significance of the Church for the creation of a sacred form of continuity in community and family substance. For example, I attended an Anglo-Indian wedding where the sermon went as follows. The Indian Christian priest began by talking about how the everyday lives and lives of this community went unrecorded in the history books. He then went on to suggest that we had come together to celebrate a moment of recorded history willed by God. Recorded in the church register, it could be found by generations to come, who would recognize the significance of this day and its holy bond, even if they found the names strange and antiquated. He added that this couple, even though they might not have intended to come together in marriage four or five months ago, had been brought together by God, and were part of his larger plan. Given this history of documentation and the implications of conversion, it is perhaps not surprising that Anglo-Indians appropriate Catholic practices to create a transcendent reality for their community and personal origins. The ghosts that haunt Anglo-Indian families articulate this transcendent substance to particular places in the railway colony, anchoring it into a topography. The very same ancestors and history that cannot be acknowledged in other social contexts are felt to act on the body as irresistible external forces. The uncanny is a particularly potent context for producing an authenticity of history, family, and community because it is made up of experiences in which the past and spaces are felt to act on you from outside. This sensation of external agency easily transforms into the idea that, as an individual, you are part of a larger transcendent community, a family with time-depth, caught up in long-term forces of history, and tied to a place that acts on you. Anglo-Indians therefore find solace in it as it provides a source for an authenticity that otherwise evades them.

Conclusion: On Secular Citizenship, Romantic Nationalism, and Genealogies After these discussions of jati, divine citizenship, and the uncanny it would be easy to assume that no secular solidarity of citizenship survives in the railway colony. This would be far from the truth. There are a few, usually unmarried, Anglo-Indian men in the colony who

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pride themselves on being the representatives of such a political vision based on workplace friendships and grass-roots union activity. Yet this is a possibility largely open only to men. Unions and the workplaces of the railway are male preserves. This solidarity is also, as we have seen, countered by other attempts to build hierarchical distinctions based on grounds of jati and desh. This simultaneous appearance in the railway colony of a secular vision of citizenship and hierarchies of essential belonging presents a microcosm of wider processes at work in the Indian nation state and in all secular nation states. Notions of the equality of citizens always have the shadow of genealogical and community origins cast over them, making some citizens more legitimate than others. This reminds us that personal quests for genealogical origins will often be in dialogue with existing practices of political community, and may be reaching for a desired form of political community that transcends these. It is important that we keep this dialectical relationship in mind when thinking through the nature of personal quests for family origins. The analysis of the longing for jati and desh among Anglo-Indians in Kharagpur provides a microcosm of the fact that, as Carsten (2004:161) puts it, “the kinship of the nation” is more than “mere metaphor.” Also important for our understanding of the desire for genealogy and lineage as signs of permanence in identity is a careful analysis of ideas of pedigree, race, and family that frame these desires. What is their relationship to changes in family law and bureaucratic practices for example? Although I have not discussed this here, the ideas of jati at work in Kharagpur are related to both British ideas of pedigree and class distinction deployed in the railway bureaucracy in the 1930s, and to changing ideas of jati linked to alterations in family law under British rule in India (Chatterjee 2004; Bear, in press). Bouquet (1996) has argued that, as anthropologists, we need to pay attention to the particular cultural meanings of genealogical diagrams. She has shown that they have their origins both in Christian ideas of the family of Christ and in folk notions of pedigree. She cautions that this particular origin should make us use our specific arborification of knowledge with care. I would like to point out here, on the basis of the experience of Anglo-Indians, that the ideas and practices of genealogy that are a product of European notions are often at work already in our field sites due to the long history of colonial encounters, bureaucratic practices, and popular nationalisms that have intervened in the reckoning

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of family histories. This suggests our project should involve tracing a genealogy of genealogies. In other words, we need to follow the encounters with bureaucracies and nationalisms that are related to our informants’ accounts of the history of their selves and families. Anglo-Indian experiences of the uncanny raise another different issue connected to the themes of nationalism and the emotional authentication of genealogical evidence. Appearances of ghosts in Kharagpur contain a particular view of the past as a potential origin point for personal belonging, and a permanent determining influence on the present. In this view, places manifest and are the anchor for these signs of origins and determining influences. This chronotope is characteristic of many forms of romantic nationalism. The modern discipline of history is marked by the emergence of the ideas of secular, homogeneous time, the malleability of human social forms, and the potential agency of people in making their own history. But in tandem with, and simultaneous to, this sense of the past is that associated with forms of romantic nationalism and ideas of origins. These of course have profoundly influenced the notions of culture in anthropology and phenomenological philosophy. In India, forms of romantic nationalism popularized in songs, poetry, and literature built on notions of jati, bhakti, and the territorial integrity of Bharat Mata (Chakrabarty 2000). These forms of nationalism often rested on an image of emotional connection to a specific place of origin, a desh, and to regional languages (Ramaswamy 1997; Benei, unpublished). In Kharagpur, this popular nationalism interacts with a local process of self-fashioning related to historically produced notions of railway morality and Catholicism. In this case, and perhaps in others, experiences of the uncanny link the chronotopes of romantic nationalism to local forms of selfproduction. In them the past and places are materialized as external influences that irresistibly act on individuals. Every ruin (or place) must have its ghost, and that ghost proves the irrefutable connection between the past and the present as a physical experience. The uncanny also can, as in the case of Anglo-Indians, suffuse these links to the past and a place with a religious register, connecting secular and sacred notions of history and community. Secular romantic histories of origins can be authenticated and rendered transcendent in the realm of the uncanny. The very ambiguous quality of the uncanny, as not quite the domain of official religion, but as otherworldly, enables such a fusing of secular and sacred concepts. The example of Kharagpur suggests that

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an exploration of the uncanny in other contexts (including in Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalytic case studies) might reveal important links between the experiences described and the particular content of the shifting chronotopes of romantic nationalism as they are refracted through personal quests of self-fashioning, local meanings of morality, and genealogical reckonings. Nationalist chronotopes do not determine the content or outcome of these quests for ethics, selfhood, and connectedness, but they are part of their frame.

NOTES

1

2 3

4 5

I have not translated the terms jati and desh into “caste” and “village.” These are too limiting. Usage in Kharagpur is very different from the usual academic debates around purity and pollution, etc. See the definition in Biswas 1992. This, as Rowena Robinson points out, echoes the practice of Hindus during the month of Bhadrapadh (August–September) in which they remember their dead lineal ancestors. It is commonly practiced among Goanese Christians with a much more directly Hindu and patrilineal inflection. See Robinson 1998. See Cannell 2005 for a similar sense of divinized genealogy among Mormons. See Van Dijk’s analysis of conversion to Pentecostalism in Malawi (1998). He contextualizes the attraction of forms of Christianity for a particular group of people in relation to the temporalities of nationalism as institutionalized in state practices in Malawi.

REFERENCES

Bayly, Susan, 1999 Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bear, Laura, 1994 Miscegenations of Modernity: Constructing European Respectability and Race in the Indian Railway Colony, 1857–1931. Women’s History Review 3(4):531–48. Bear, Laura, 2001 Public Genealogies: Nations, Documents and Bodies in Anglo-Indian Railway Family Histories. Contributions to Indian Sociology 35(3):355–88.

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Bear, Laura, 2006 An Economy of Suffering: Addressing the Violence of Discipline in Railway Workers’ Petitions to the Agent of the East Indian Railway from 1930–47. In Discipline and the Other Body. A. Rao and S. Peirce, eds. Pp. 243–72. North Carolina: Duke University Press. Bear, Laura, in press Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy and the Intimate Historical Self. New York: Columbia University Press. Benei, Veronique, n.d. Nationalizing Children: An Ethnography of Schooling, Gender and Violence in Contemporary India. Unpublished MS. Biswas, Sailendra, 1992 Samsad Bengali–English Dictionary. Calcutta: Shishu Sahitya Samsad Ltd. Bouquet, Mary, 1996 Family Trees and their Affinities: The Visual Imperative of the Genealogical Diagram. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 2(1):43–66. Cannell, Fenella, 2005 The Christianity of Anthropology. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 11(2):335–56. Caplan, Lionel, 2001 Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a PostColonial World. Oxford and New York: Berg. Carsten, Janet, 1997 The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Carsten, Janet, 2004 After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 2000 Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, Indrani, 2004 Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Ivy, Marilyn, 1995 Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 1997 The Pleasures of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil Nadu, 1891–1970. Berkeley: University of California Press. Robinson, Rowena, 1998 Conversion, Continuity and Change: Lived Christianity in Southern Goa. New Delhi: Sage. Van Dijk, D., 1998 Pentecostalism, Cultural Memory and the State: Contested Representations of Time in Postcolonial Malawi. In Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and Critique of Power. R. Werbner, ed. Pp. 155–82. London: Zed Books.

3 Enlivened Memories: Recalling Absence and Loss in Mongolia 2 Rebecca Empson 2

This chapter is concerned with the way in which a memory reveals itself and the impact this has for concepts of the person. I suggest that, in Mongolia, relations between living kin, who are absent from each other for parts of the year, are maintained through practices that involve attending to certain objects in the house. These include photographic montages which emphasize agnatic relations and embroideries that lace the inside walls of people’s homes and draw attention to the mobility of women and their transformations. In contrast, techniques that allow for continued relations with the deceased pivot around the necessary objectification of another person’s body. This involves a particular way of looking at another person that allows for a recollection of a person and a reinscription of that person when Mongolians observe deceased kin members as reborn in the living. The chapter examines the political motivations behind locating memories in people and things, and explores their effects in terms of different forms of sociality.1 The literature on memory in anthropology can, broadly speaking, be said to fall into two main strands. Firstly, anthropologists drawing on the work of Halbwachs (1992) and Connerton (1989) have focused on “collective” or “social” memory to explore how extraordinary events, such as war or migration, are recalled through a collective mnemonic medium (see Antze and Lambek 1996; Said 2000; Humphrey 2003). Here, anthropologists have focused on the way memory is reproduced by a group of people who may or may not

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define themselves as kin. Secondly, a focus on how individual life stories are recalled and narrated through different mnemonic devices has allowed anthropologists to explore how memory plays an important role in the construction of the person and the creation of different forms of subjectivity (see Hoskins 1998; Küchler 1987; Radley 1997[1990] ). These approaches reach out to wider debates concerned with the access or ownership of knowledge among people who define themselves as kin (see Strathern 2005).2 This chapter will bridge debates found in these two prominent approaches. It focuses on the way collective or shared memories are recalled by individuals. It also examines how individual memories may be reproduced over generations. In both cases, memory becomes a political device that shapes knowledge as a cultural artefact which can be passed between people. Yet, memories can also influence the way we perceive the world without our directly wanting them to. Arnheim (1974[1969] ), for example, has drawn attention to the way memory always supplements and influences our perception of things.3 He suggests that past experiences are not simply stored as representations that project outwards through the mind’s eye. Instead, there is always a relation between seeing and recalling, so that in perceiving something, we simultaneously draw attention to our own history and what we have seen before. Similarly, Casey suggests that: “In remembering, there is a tenuous but consistently felt “self-presence” of the rememberer that inheres in what is remembered” (2000[1987]:ix–x). The idea that our perspective is influenced by what we have experienced before means that it is hard to keep the concepts of kinship and memory distinct from each other. When thinking about kinship, ideas about inheritance and obligation come to the fore, so that what makes people kin always seems to be dependent on knowledge of what has been before.

A Kinship based on Separation In a very general sense, memory, or reflection, allows one to recall an event that one has been temporally or spatially separated from. Drawing attention to a severed past influences the way we construct our own self-fashioning and relations with others. Among the Buryat, an ethnic Mongolian group who live along the northeast Mongolian–Russian border, and with whom I did my fieldwork, a sense of absence, of

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being separated from some place or person, grips many levels of sociality. Primarily, there is a sense of absence from place, as the Buryats migrated to Mongolia from Russian Buryatia in the early 1900s. Leaving behind most of their possessions, they fled at night, crossing the border in small groups through the forest. Settling in Mongolia in clusters based on previous kin networks, the Buryats reproduced links from the areas which they had fled. Although they escaped war and disruption in Russian Buryatia, life in Mongolia has not always been peaceful for the Buryats. They were heavily persecuted during the socialist period, to such an extent that almost all the adult male members of the community were taken away or killed. People were charged with being counter-revolutionaries or siding with the Japanese. Expressions of a distinct Buryat identity were held to be politically polluting and representative of a kind of history that had to be erased for the socialist world to come into being. Commenting on ideas about loss and the annihilation of cultural forms during the Mongol-Soviet government, Humphrey (1992) has noted that this period “cannot accurately be described merely as a ‘social transformation’ . . . , but was more like a strange apocalypse, in which ordinary people were stunned but nevertheless had to go on living” (Humphrey 1992:380). Notwithstanding this “apocalyptic” separation from place and people, a sense of absence from place and kin continues to permeate many aspects of Buryat relations, as it is also integral to the movement involved in nomadic herding practices that dominate the area. While agnatic kinship, based on the idea of “shared bone” (etsgiin töröl, yasan töröl), continues to permeate much of Buryat life, throughout the year people move to different locations, engaging in other types of relations, while still being tied to their agnatic household. In turn, as the people who inhabit a house change seasonally, the physical shell of a house also reconstitutes itself in different places. At different times of the year, wooden houses (baishin) as well as Mongolian felt tents ( ger), and the people who inhabit them move over the landscape to different seasonal pastures.4 The seasonal movement of people, and the places they inhabit, create the continual need to relocate both physical and relational boundaries as distinct forms of sociality are acted out in different places. This can give rise to the feeling that there is no fixed place or singular mode of sociality in which to situate people when trying to define kin relations.

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For the Buryats, however, the separation and incorporation of people and place is not unsettling or difficult. The interior layout of the house allows for this shifting of people and place. As a one-roomed, openplan space, there are no personal areas inside a house. Instead gender, hierarchy, and status define the interior. This adaptability allows for the incorporation of different configurations of kin members, as well as outsiders, at any given moment. In turn, people remain attached to a house by ensuring that certain things remain contained inside the house as people and houses move location. These things act as sites that maintain aspects of people’s relations in their absence. Indeed, it is imperative for Mongolians that people are able to manifest themselves via things, in different spatio-temporal locations, beyond the confines of a single bodily form (see Gell 1998; Strathern 1994). Where movement is an essential aspect of everyday life, and locality is not given, the separation of people and place is not seen as a failure of relations. Rather, in this context, absence is a means through which people relate. In order to illustrate this, I present some ways in which the Buryat maintain relations with kin in the absence of people. This material will provide a contrast to ideas about how people maintain relations with deceased kin members through lay-rebirths.

Making Relations through Absence I open this section with a recollection concerning how I learnt that people were attached to a house, even in their physical absence. I came to understand this through the process of attending to and looking at things with others during which our interaction with objects sparked various memories. What I want to emphasize in the following account is that recalling absence is both a means by which to reveal knowledge to others and an end in itself. This idea echoes Lambek’s point (see chapter 10) that it is only when memory is considered a utility, rather than a capacity, that questions of excess or scarcity arise. The distinction between memory as capacity and as utility is important to keep in mind. In this chapter, the past imbues objects and people with a sense of history that can be drawn upon as a capacity for living. But memory can also provide a means or a utility by which knowledge is revealed to shape the present. In these moments, memories may be guarded or revealed for political means.

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In late summer of 2001, I was, for a couple of weeks, alone at the summer encampment with the eldest female member of the household, whom I shall call Toya. That summer the grass had been a lush emerald green, and the calves had grown into strong cows. At times, up to eighteen family members had gathered at the encampment and there had been a bustling and joyous atmosphere as we helped make milk products and gather berries. But the steppe that surrounded us was now turning a shade of pale yellow and we began to feel a chill in the evening air as we milked the cows. Other family members were in small glens deep in the forest at makeshift encampments collecting hay. As we carried the heavy pails of milk inside, I noted the familiar taut expression on Toya’s face. The pain in her right wrist was caused by the summer’s intensive milking. When I inquired about her wrist, Toya had explained to me that it was due to the fact that, as a young daughter-in-law, she had sometimes milked up to twenty cattle during the summer on her own, twice a day. After letting the cows out of the corral, we stretched out on the beds, a moment’s rest before we began to separate the milk and prepare firewood for the stove. This evening, however, the routine took a different turn. As we lay there, the sunlight casting its last long orange beam through the open door, Toya began to tell me about her family and about her life as a young daughter-in-law. With other family members absent, there was a sense of time standing still. We talked at our leisure as Toya showed me various things inside the house. Toya’s recollections that evening were a kind of turning point. Suddenly, the house was not simply a semipermanent structure that sheltered us from the heat or wind. Instead, it came to life with the history of past relations, and people in the family seemed to be very different people when viewed from this perspective. In recalling this occasion, my account signals some of the multiple levels on which memory works. The account is based on my own retrospective imagining of a particular evening that involves recalling spoken and unspoken details. Much memory works like this: we may recall some seemingly passing detail and this can trigger the recall of something else, so that any sense of scale between these links becomes untraceable. In this sense, recollection can happen to you without your intention. But once revealed, you can choose what to do with this knowledge. Toya’s recollections, and my own wish to reproduce them here, provide an opening by which we can begin to see how things

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in the household are enlivened with people’s relations. I turn now to examine three kinds of objects that Toya used to reveal different family memories: photographic montages, emotive embroideries and concealed pieces, and rebirths.

Photographic montages In the northern, rear part of the house, in the most honorable section, opposite the door as one enters, stands a painted wooden chest. On the chest’s surface, visible prized possessions that indicate wealth and prestige are displayed. In the center stands a large mirror. Surrounding this mirror on either side are two large frames containing a montage of three-quarter-length, portrait-style photographs of kin members on both the mother’s and father’s side. This montage creates a pile, or layering, of different images over time as old photographs are concealed behind new ones. Above the mirror, religious icons and images can be found that comprise a small shrine on which religious books, pictures of consecrated animals, and daily offerings of milk libations are placed. Above this shrine, on the wall behind the chest, hang large painted portraits of deceased patrilineal relatives. Around this fixed display, embroideries sewn by daughters-in-law are hung, depicting their views on different family relations. Guns, used by men for hunting, are placed at its side. Things kept inside the chest are never revealed to guests and are concealed from general view. What kind of relations does the viewer honor by attending to and responding to these things? I suggest that photographic montages of living kin members mirror some of the compositional forms used to represent agnatic relations in traditional Buryat genealogies (ugyn bichig). Unlike anthropological kinship diagrams, Buryat genealogical representations do not define age groups in hierarchy from the top to the bottom of the page over generations. They depict kin relations in the form of a cluster of male descendants, expanding outwards from a single founder in the middle or top half of the page. Similarly, in the montage, the photograph of a patrilineal elder is often placed, with his wife, in the center of the frame, surrounded by their siblings and children, whose images extend outwards towards the periphery of the frame. On closer inspection, however, we see that what links people together in photographic displays differs from the agnatic links that join people together in Mongolian genealogical diagrams. Photographic

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Figure 1 A photographic montage (photograph by R. Empson).

montages of kin members reckon relations through both the mother’s and father’s side and include images of other group relations, such as school friends. In the socialist period, Buryat genealogical records asserted a kind of difference that was threatening to the political ideology of the time. During the political purges of the 1930s, household chests were raided and genealogical records were burnt.5 Patrilineal distinctions were banned as people were forced to use their father’s name as their surname, thereby limiting knowledge of a familial history to a single generation. But through the display of photographic montages, people were able to recreate the kind of knowledge that was prohibited in genealogical descriptions. Like genealogical diagrams, the montage departs from a single person’s perspective and provides a memory-map in which past and present relations are imagined to exist at once. Photographic montages display connections given through agnatic relations, based on the concept of “shared bone,” in a visible form. In these foregrounded images, people appear as replicable members of static groups, with potentially infinite links to other groups. The

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photographic montage remains as a fixed site inside the house which anchors meetings between groups of people who may be absent from each other for parts of the year. This technology is meant to be seen and inquired about. Its efficacy acts as a shield against relations which are concealed.

Emotive embroideries and concealed pieces In contrast to these fixed displays, embroideries that surround the inside of the house provide a means by which women may visually appropriate their own space in the household. Women sew embroideries in the evenings and indulge in them as a creative endeavor. With no specific pattern to follow, they often draw inspiration from the world around them and there is a great variety of style and function. Inside the house one can find large wall hangings and smaller pieces, including runners that hang along beds with flowers and wild animals, duvet holders with swans and people, and triangular pieces with crochet edges that can be laid over chests. The designs in embroideries are very individualistic and their images stand as permanent reminders of the spirit in which they were made. Like a drawing, this sentiment remains contained in the piece as family members grow and change and, in turn, people relate to the fixed images differently over time. When moving pasture, a woman will choose which embroidery, and thus which sentiment, she wants to display at that given moment. At certain periods in her life, images of wealth and status may be appropriate. At another time, she may wish to emphasize her ability to depict beautiful flowers with an even and intricate stitch. Some embroideries are given away as gifts or exchanged with friends, so that ties of friendship are knotted into the very image displayed. A daughter-in-law may also inherit her mother-in-law’s embroideries. In these cases, sentiments expressed through embroideries are passed between women. When we were alone at the encampment, Toya pointed out two of her embroideries. Both were sewn when she was a daughter-in-law and had recently given birth. The first consisted of a large wall hanging in orange, blue, and green and was displayed on the wall behind one of the beds. It depicted three deer: one sitting, one standing, and one with folded legs on a mountain. She gestured toward it and explained: “. . . you see the three baby deer on this wall hanging. I made this

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Figure 2 Toya’s embroidery of three deer-sons (photograph by R. Empson).

embroidery when I gave birth to my third son. Because I have three sons I made an image of three deer. I embroidered three things for the blessing of having three children.” As a way of publicly celebrating her own achievement at having given birth to three sons, Toya chose to depict her children as three wild animals. In displaying this image, she forces the family to focus on her own transformed achievement from daughter-in-law to mother and the successful survival of her children from the vulnerable stage of infanthood. That she still hangs this embroidery in the house, even though her children have grown up, highlights her wish to continue to display aspects of her own biographical history to others. The second embroidery, again a large wall hanging, was of a rather common image of the “four good animals” (döröv saixan amitai) in a variety of colors. This image was hung near the door. Toya explained that the image was placed here because it is believed to keep feuds outside of the house. It was sewn after she had her last child, a daughter. With four animals resting on top of each other, Toya explained that the animal at the top was a

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bird, representing her daughter who would one day fly away to another family. In their marital homes, daughters-in-law frequently have to find alternative media through which to express their intentions and desires, as they are often unable to do so explicitly. Attending to Toya’s wall hangings, we see that embroideries are not simply images that serve to decorate the house. They display carefully selected sentiments that a woman wishes to emphasize and draw attention to. Although addressed to an implicit audience, they force other kin members to acknowledge their perspective and agency. It could be argued that, since the 1930s, when many women were left to bring up their children on their own and people were banned from expressing distinctive familial memories, women developed alternative media in which to recall their own histories for their children. Embroideries also provide a way for women to outwardly display their continued connection to their children, even though their sons belong to their husband’s kin groups, and daughters belong to another family. In this light, embroideries appear to offer a parallel commentary on kin relations to those in photographic displays. Through embroideries, women can spatially appropriate the household with images that celebrate their own achievements, and draw attention to their views and ideas as well as their skills. Inside the chest on which the photographic montage is placed, concealed from general view, Toya showed me hidden things that have been detached from people at moments of separation and transformation. Such things are individually wrapped in blue ceremonial silk scarves and are carefully placed at the bottom of the chest, as if they have the potential to move and disappear but must be contained. The things hidden in the bottom of chests comprise actual parts of people’s bodies, such as pieces of umbilical cords and children’s hair from the first hair-cutting ceremony. When we switch perspective to these concealed pieces, what has been delegated to the periphery momentarily becomes a different kind of center. Like relations based on the idea of “shared blood” (ekhiin töröl, tsusan töröl), which are passed between a woman and her children, and between siblings, things found in the bottom of chests are the products of the movement and separation of people, and are created out of alliance and exchange in one’s own lifetime. These relations are realized through a special type of communication (xüiin xolboo, tsusan xolboo) that allows people

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to have continued anticipations, feelings, and premonitions about each other, even though they may be spatially separated. Equally, it is imperative that people who have this type of relation are physically separated from each other. This is because relations based on “shared blood” are considered to be too close to live with. For example, it was suggested to me that when a child is first born, the mother and child merge into and become one another, so that the mother’s body becomes childlike, craving sweets and gifts from visitors and strangers. The ritual cutting of the child’s first hair creates a necessary distance between a mother and her child, separating their shared physicality. By creating a physical distance, and giving a part of oneself away, a livable version of the relation is formed. It is because of this that, when people are physically separated from each other, a part is often produced during this act of separation. By carefully hoarding a piece of the umbilical cord or pieces of the child’s first hair in the household chest, or through the display of embroideries, mother–child relations, relations between siblings, and a woman’s connection to her natal home are maintained as possible relations, regardless of people’s physical location. Things kept inside the household do not simply commemorate past relations; these things appear as a capacity or resource that maintains links between people in their absence. By focusing on the ways in which relations are maintained in the absence of people and place, certain ideas about Mongolian sociality emerge from our analysis. I have suggested that relations based on agnatic networks are visibly foregrounded in photographic montages, which appear as immobile centers from which people reach out to different connections with other groups. These group relations are, however, dependent on the separation and incorporation of people. Relations from which one must be separated, in order to support the possible growth of this center, are displayed in embroideries that surround the display, or are stored in objects inside the chest that are concealed from general view. Things kept inside the house draw our attention to different domains of connectedness between groups or individuals. Instead of people constituting a home, in Mongolia, valued things kept inside the house remain in place and stand for relations that are attached to it (see Empson 2006). In this sense, a bodily presence is not always needed for relations between kin. Things kept inside the house become the site or body through which relations are maintained.6 In contrast, techniques that allow for relations with

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the deceased revolve around the necessary presence of another person’s body.

Rebirths Talking about deceased people is something that Mongolians do in very specific ways and in certain contexts. One should not directly ask about, or provoke discussion of, the deceased. Through particular turns of phrase, people avoid uttering individual names, and find alternative ways to allude to people in the past (see Humphrey 2002). This includes displaying portraits of the deceased, attending to shamanic spirits and the abstraction of the “ancestors” in particular places in the landscape. Alongside these methods of recalling lost kin, the memory, or presence, of a deceased person is also kept “alive” via a living person’s body. Lay-rebirths are one way in which the Buryat retain very individual relations with people after their physical death. In my conversations with Toya, she recalled detailed and cherished memories of her deceased father and brother to me via references to their rebirth in her family. Before I turn to the kinds of relations that are created through rebirths, two points concerning terminology must be clarified. Firstly, when using the term “rebirth,” I am not referring to “high-level” Buddhist reincarnations (xuvilgaan, literally an incarnation, transformation, or metamorphosis of a high-ranking saint) among monks and prophets (see Humphrey 1992 and Bawden 1985:41–2). The Buryat distinguish between high-ranking religious reincarnations and layrebirths. Lay-rebirths are referred to by a set of different terms. These include: “to be born again” (irgej törsön/daxin töröx), “to change/ exchange birth” (töröl ariljix), “to find/obtain birth” (töröl olox), or “to be reborn” (xoit töröx).7 Secondly, lay-rebirths are identified in a variety of different ways from reincarnations. They involve recognizing a deceased relative’s “soul” (süns) as reborn in the living and are common to almost every family.8 At death, when a person’s body is still warm, people place an ink mark on their bodies. The deceased person’s soul is then said to travel for forty-nine days while it finds a new body to inhabit. When the soul has chosen to inhabit a new body, the deceased person’s ink markings reappear on that person’s body, in the form of a birthmark (temdeg). This indicates that a person has become the receptacle for a deceased person’s “soul.” Rebirth is,

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however, not solely apprehended through these markings. As a young child starts to speak and move about in the world, certain characteristics, stories of extraordinary experiences, idiosyncratic mannerisms, turns of phrase, and physical characteristics become recognizable to kin members as indicators of a rebirth. On the surface, rebirths look similar to the kind of transformations involved when ancestral spirits possess a shaman in trance (that is, a single body becomes the vehicle or container for several different ancestor spirits). On closer inspection, however, we see that when a rebirth is observed by a family member, only one person is ever visible in a single bodily form. While people within one family may claim that a kin member is a different rebirth, for each claim only one rebirth is possible. In this way, lay-rebirths are not about different souls momentarily possessing a single body. Instead, a single person “houses” another as an essential aspect of themselves.9

The Politics of Recalling Deceased Kin If our perception is influenced by what we have seen and experienced before (see Arnheim 1974[1969] ), what does this mean for the way we see and engage with others? In this section I note the contexts in which rebirths are recognized and the types of narratives that emerge when people recall aspects of deceased kin in the living. I examine this process in some detail because it is important to highlight that these types of recollections are different from the types of narratives evoked when glancing at a photographic montage or embroidery. As mentioned, in contrast to restrictions placed on recalling the deceased, lay-rebirths provide a way for people to talk openly among a group of relatives or friends about particular aspects of their kin that they would not normally discuss. Often confirming moral characteristics, these narratives also have the effect of asserting that living kin must have the same kind of character as that of one’s deceased relative. In such a way, recalling deceased kin involves exchanging knowledge about morally acceptable behavior. In cases where a person who suffered a difficult death is reborn, such as those experienced during the period of political persecution, people are able to acknowledge cherished memories of those who were condemned by the state. Acknowledging the rebirth of a deceased kin member is often

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something parents and elders cherish; it is charming and heartfelt, and leads to an extended reflection on the deceased person’s life. Drawing on Austin’s (1975) discussion of speech acts which do, rather than just say, something, the mannerisms and speech of children can be said to trigger, in the minds of their elders, recollections of the life of a relative (see Hallam and Hockey 2001:43–4). Importantly, however, rebirths do not only trigger a recollection through a mnemonic sign (such as a birthmark or a turn of phrase). Rebirths also shape the way that people view and interact with each other. Identifying a rebirth can be viewed as a type of action that has an effect in that a child’s performance and speech acts are doing something in the mind of their parents rather than just prompting them to recall a past person. This is because recognizing a rebirth leads to different perspectives that create very different subjects. For example, when people recognize that someone has been reborn, they will respond to that person with the type of respect that the reincarnated person would demand.10 When the mother of a friend of mine noticed that her eldest son’s child had a birthmark similar to that placed on her deceased husband’s body and enjoyed playing with the radio, she revealed to her family that her grandson was her deceased husband and advised her children to respect the young child: “because he is your father.” In this case, we see that when people treat children as elders or equals, individual memories of deceased kin are not the only thing being recalled. These recollections involve editing out memories of some in order for other people to be brought into focus (see Battaglia 1990). In so doing, they radically alter a group of people’s relations with the living. Equally, knowledge of a rebirth can be something that occurs at very specific and private moments. It can be a point of contention and something that one only tentatively mentions to others. In the case of a woman, for example, claiming that her son’s child is a part of her own genealogy, can be seen to undercut agnatic relations. While I was alone with Toya, she explained to me that she had noticed marks on her granddaughter’s arm that were similar to those placed on her deceased brother’s body, but she had not mentioned this to anyone. “I think that Altaa [her granddaughter] is my brother,” she explained: although she is a girl, she plays with toy cars. My brother was a tractor driver. He was just like she is, always fixing cars. The way she walks and sways her arms are very similar to him. My brother was a very

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Rebecca Empson hard-working man with abrupt movements. Altaa always runs and walks with fast and wide steps. . . .

Her husband, she claimed, had told her that he noticed characteristics in the child that reminded him of his deceased mother. Keeping the

Figure 3 Altaa as Toya’s deceased brother, swaying her arms as she walks with wide steps (photograph by R. Empson).

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knowledge of the marks on the child’s body to herself, it was as if she continued to keep this private in order to be able to maintain a sense that her brother was close to her, even though she lived with her husband’s kin. Implicit in the acknowledgment of intra-kin rebirths is a strong notion of rights over people. Identifying someone as a rebirth involves making particular claims on them. This is most obviously realized when we focus on the implications of claiming rebirth in adoption practices. While a child who is considered to be the rebirth of a woman’s deceased husband does not actually have to live with her as her husband, rebirths involving deceased children often involve the rebirth being adopted by the family of the deceased child. For example, in one family a young child died from severe burns suffered in an accident involving the family hearth. A few years later, a neighboring family gave birth to a son with a birthmark across his torso that looked like burns incurred from a fire. The family who lost their son adopted this child as it was believed by both families that he was the rebirth of their deceased son.11 Questions to do with adoption rights raise issues about the extent to which Mongols hold that the rebirth actually is the deceased person. We have seen that adoption practices suggest that Mongols do, to some extent, see the rebirth as the deceased person, and certain obligations flow with these claims. Yet, we have also seen that a person is sometimes held to be a different rebirth by different kin members. In these cases, people may respond to a given person in very different ways; acknowledging a rebirth does not determine every way in which people relate to a person. For example, it is very rare that a person will be given the name of their rebirth. People do not mention lay-rebirths in genealogical records, nor do they claim that they have no children because their child is the rebirth of their grandfather. It seems as though attending to a rebirth is contained within a type of perspective that allows one to view a person in a particular way, whereby a different kind of subject is created depending on who is doing the viewing and with whom they are doing it.12 Because rebirths are usually identified through another’s recollection, a given person is very much the author or creation of the person who views them. In a chapter concerned with concepts of origins and ownership, Strathern (2005) has drawn attention to the fact that people may be “owned” in different ways by different kin, and that what

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people count as kin may differ according to different people (Strathern 2005:138–42). Drawing on these ideas, I suggest that when a child is held to be a different rebirth according to the person who views the child, different kin members can be said to count kin in different ways. For example, we have seen that there is often a difference between who the mother and the father think that a child is a rebirth of, and claims of rebirth are often asserted to a select group of people. In such a way, recognizing a rebirth becomes a way of anchoring a person in relation to oneself (Strathern 2005:40), through a particular situated perspective, so that new and varied relations are created between the living. Examining the way in which rebirths are identified has revealed a relationship between recalling and perceiving. It has been fruitful to treat rebirths as a particular way of looking at people. This is not to suggest that the mind is simply a storehouse for memory. Nor do I see this as a psychological idea of “projection,” whereby recognizing a rebirth becomes an act of not successfully forgetting (see Bolles 1988). Instead, intra-kin rebirths involve recalling personal recollections of experiences and of relationships, but in so doing people are also placed “under the compulsion of other people’s expectations” (Humphrey 1992:386) of these recollections. We have seen that vision, situated in another person, is necessary for a person to become a form other than themselves. But we have also seen that this type of perspective is not the only way that people view each other. Given the temporal aspect of the perspective involved in recognizing rebirths, the idea of “commemoration” in the Western sense seems inadequate (cf. Hallam and Hockey 2001). Instead of acting as fixed sites in which people record the memory of a deceased person, I suggest that people’s bodies work as channels that allow people to actively create new relations with the living through the appearance of the deceased.

A Model for Social Immortality? I have suggested that viewing a person as the rebirth of a relative involves a switch in perspective. Initially one’s gaze is fixed on some detail, such as a familiar movement or turn of phrase that cues the recall of a memory. Here the rebirth’s body becomes an object by which the deceased person is made visible. However, a person’s body

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is not simply an object, via which the past is recalled. We have also seen that lay-rebirths allow for the soul of a given person to endure, through a succession of persons, over several generations. But the soul also makes them all one person as a single person is repeated, give or take some alterations, over generations. Given the fact that rebirths allow for the repetition of a single person over generations, does treating this idea as a kind of memory undermine the fact that Buryats hold that living people actually are their deceased kin? I hope not. Instead, intra-kin rebirths draw attention to the multiple kinds of perspectives that are inherent in the politics of reproducing kinship. At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that among Buryat nomadic herders, living people manage relations with absent people via certain objects that remain carefully contained or displayed inside the house. Relations with deceased relatives are maintained through their appearance in another person’s body. In relation to this, I draw attention to an analogous example. Recalling a person through another person’s body has certain similarities with Malangan practices described by Küchler (1987) in northeast New Guinea. Like Malangan art, intrakin rebirths can be said to provide a model for social immortality. Küchler explains that Malangan sculptures are conceptualized as providing a “skin” for a deceased person’s life-force (Küchler 1987:240). Küchler highlights that the immortality of a person is achieved through its rechanneling in different sculptural containers. She states: “Like the human body after death, so the sculpture after it has been ‘killed’ in ceremonial exchange has to decompose to set free the force so that it can be rechannelled into [new] people and sculptures” (1987:240). In the Mongolian context, people rarely talk about deceased kin. Yet, through rebirths, the deceased can be said to reach out to the living as they display themselves in people’s bodies. Like Malangan art, the form in which this display occurs is temporary and varied, depending on who is viewing the subject. But it is also repeated over generations. As long as someone is able to recognize a rebirth, the deceased person continues, irrespective of the person’s temporary existence in different forms. Being able to recall knowledge of the deceased person is an important factor in what makes this continuation possible. In turn, when the recognition of a rebirth has occurred, it transforms the temporary objectification of a person’s body, and the subject is revealed as a version of another. In that moment, the viewer sees the

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embodiment of a memory, and through recalling it they literally bring that memory to life.

Concluding Remarks In this chapter I have presented three ways in which memory informs different forms of sociality. Photographic montages, women’s embroideries, and pieces of people concealed inside household chests anchor people who may be physically absent or silenced to particular networks of relations. In contrast, intra-kin rebirths allow people to draw on the past and attend to the deceased in a new form. In the early 1990s, Humphrey (1992) suggested that Mongolians were in the process of rethinking their “deep [pre-socialist] past” as a source of moral authority for the present. Since this knowledge was not presented through any single institution, it had to be sought through means of diverse and individualized actions (see Humphrey 1992). Focusing on these diverse actions, Humphrey suggests two types of enactment by which various past-orientated meanings may be evoked. The first, termed “historical mimicry,” refers to the reproduction of events or physical objects that are held to have the symbolic or metonymic capacity to represent ideas from the past. Here, the aim is to recreate a copy of an event or object that represents a past idea, and the reproduction of ideas is more important than the need to reproduce the features of the past in its entirety. The second enactment defined by Humphrey is referred to as “embodiment.” This involves the identification of living people or actions with those of the past. Here, an event or person is said to be of essentially the same nature, or to have the same identity, as some past event or person. Regardless of their different outward appearances, then, the manifestations are all of a single spiritual entity. The material discussed in this chapter echoes these two kinds of enactments. When separated in life, people are able to maintain relations with each other by distributing themselves through things that are carefully contained inside the household. Photographic montages reproduce relations between agnatic groups. These images are not an exact replication of the networks themselves but, like the genealogical diagrams which they succeed, they outwardly project the idea that

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people who are tied to the house have infinite links to other groups. In turn, embroideries present female biographies and life histories. They could be said to act as “biographical objects” (see Hoskins 1998) in that they serve as vehicles by which women can narrate stories about themselves to others. In such a way, embroideries appear as “supplements to an existing self [rather] than means that help selves become what they are” (Keane 1999:183). Pieces kept inside the chest draw attention to alternative relations that facilitate movement and transformation. In contrast, relations are also contained in people as links with the deceased are mediated through the living. Here memories and subjects are mutually constitutive through ideas about embodiment as a living person’s body is necessary for maintaining a relationship with the deceased. By rendering the body an object to be observed, a person is able to recall the memory of a deceased person. They then bring the memory of that person to life through the body of another, reconfiguring a new relationship to the subject. This way of making the deceased visible allows for memories to be made into present realities. These three ways of evoking the past also run counter to secular memories that have been preserved by the state. During the socialist period, for example, when people were prohibited from communicating with their ancestors through shamanic performance and many male members of the community were either killed or taken away, relations with the deceased persisted through rebirths.13 In the present day, rebirths are often used to recall events and people that are not present in wider public discourses. In turn, photographic montages became popular at a time when genealogies and ideas about individual or familial differences were prohibited. In the current democratic climate, they serve to exhibit networks that differentiate status and prestige. In all cases, people turn to these means as a way to claim authority over their own past (see Carsten 2000:689 and Humphrey 1992:379). This chapter has focused on the containment of relations in things and people. It has highlighted the politics involved in revealing or concealing knowledge and the different ways in which this knowledge is then reproduced and communicated to others. With the multiple senses of absence and loss created by the politics of migration, I suggest that viewing the body or objects in the household as enlivened containers or sites is necessary for the remaking of Buryat kinship.

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I thank those at the “Kinship and Memory” workshop (2004) at the University of Edinburgh for a stimulating context in which to develop these ideas. I especially thank Janet Carsten for arranging the workshop and for her invaluable comments on this chapter and in other areas of my work. I also thank Marilyn Strathern for her crucial discussion and suggestions on some of the ideas presented here. Material in this chapter is drawn from fieldwork on the northeast Mongolian–Russian border from June 1999 to October 2000, August to October 2001, May to July 2003, and August to October 2005. I thank the extended networks of Buryat families that live in this area for generously incorporating me into their lives and for showing me the generative potential of absence. This paper was written under the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme (BA PDF/2003/145). I gratefully acknowledge their support. Naturally, none of these people should be held accountable in any way for any of my deficiencies, which are wholly my responsibility.

NOTES

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2

3

Part of the material presented in this chapter is also discussed in another article where I explore objects in the Mongolian house in relation to the generation of people and place (see Empson 2006). This is, of course, not an exhaustive review of the approaches to memory in anthropology. In contrast to works which focus on how memory plays an important part in the construction of identity and self, anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers have focused on memory as something that we encode in our mind (see Cole and Gay 1972; Bloch 1998; Sperber 1989 [1985]; Yates 1974). Others have focused on embodiment, whereby memory is constituted in the act of bodily recalling (see Casey 2000[1987]; Connerton 1989; Csordas 1994; Hallam and Hockey 2001). A good overview of approaches to memory in the humanities and social sciences can be found in Olick and Robbins (1998). In a similar way, Casey (2000[1987] ) has highlighted the plurality of memory and the “intermediate forms” of remembering involved in perception. These concern moments such as recognizing X as Y, or being reminded of B by A, and reminiscing as a wide-ranging practice that can also be seen as a type of memory (see Casey 2000:x). Drawing on a phenomenological approach, Casey suggests that these intermediate

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8

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mnemonic modes take us from the mind into the world of lived experience. See Humphrey (1995): “The Mongols do not take over any terrain in the vicinity and transform it into something that is their own. Instead, they move within a space and environment where some kind of pastoral life is possible and ‘in-habit’ it” (1995:135). Kaplonski (1999) explains that, when carrying out such raids: “The Ministry of Internal Affairs operated according to a set pattern. The ministry’s men arrived most often at night, usually in a group of two or three. If household items were not confiscated on the spot, chests were sealed and the most valuable items were removed. In due course, everything was confiscated from the families. . . . Repeat confiscations were not unheard of if a family managed to acquire animals or property from friends or relatives after the initial arrest and confiscation” (Kaplonski 1999:97). The landscape surrounding the house is also marked with stone cairns, sacred trees, buried placentas, and tethering posts that invoke a sense of inhabited space in the absence of houses and people. This marking of space creates a sense of being attached to a homeland (nutagyn gazar), even though the Buryats are relative newcomers to the area they currently inhabit. For ideas about memories residing in the landscape, see Pine (ch. 5). Lack of information in the ethnographic record about such ideas can, in part, be attributed to Buddhist scholars who have dismissed this way of thinking as somehow a misinterpretation of Buddhist doctrine. It is important to note that ideas about lay-rebirth exist not just among Buddhists in Mongolia. In this chapter, I refer to the Mongolian term süns as “soul” (see Humphrey with Onon 1996:213). It is important to note that the reincarnated aspect, or “soul,” shapes the physical body as well as the mind of the person that it inhabits. In this sense, the soul refers to an entity (or a cluster of entities that encompass a single concept) which leaves the body at death and can return in another person. A local Buddhist monk explained that a person has several different souls. When a person is scared, experiences some polluting influence, or has its soul “stolen,” one of these souls may leave the body. The idea of multiple souls allows for the possibility that a soul can be reborn in someone else while that person is still alive. This idea does, however, leave some questions unanswered. For example, if the soul is called back to the original person, then will the person whom the soul temporarily embodied die? When focusing on lay-rebirths, I focus on a very particular concept of the person. It is important to keep in mind that other aspects also shape

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Rebecca Empson people. For example, the shared substances of “blood” from the mother and “bone” from the father also determine a person’s physical body, their ethnic identity, and aspects of their personality. Nevertheless, when rebirths do occur within families, they scramble linear ideas about shared substance and allow people to contract or expand their network of kin beyond those based on shared blood and bone. Such a view challenges Euro-American ideas that knowledge is indexed to age, by the fact that reincarnated children actually are their elders (see Gupta 2002). For memories of anticipated reunions, see Carsten (ch. 4). For ideas about different family perspectives of the same memory, see Feuchtwang (ch. 7). Humphrey (1992) has noted that: “ ‘Embodiment’ as a type of enactment does not, of course, only occur in situations of oppression [such as the Soviet-dominated period in Mongolia], as can be seen from the political prominence of the reincarnations of Buddhist saints in Tibet and Mongolia in the past, but its more secular and grass-roots manifestations often run counter to more secular forms of the state (not only the socialist state)” (Humphrey 1992:383).

REFERENCES

Antze, Paul and Michael Lambek, eds., 1996 Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York and London: Routledge. Arnheim, Rudolf, 1974[1969] Visual Thinking. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Austin, J. L., 1975 How to do Things with Words. The William James lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. J. O. Urmson and M. Sbisa, eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Battaglia, Debbora, 1990 On the Bones of the Serpent: Person, Memory, and Mortality in Sabarl Island Society. London: University of Chicago Press. Bawden, C. R., 1985 Shamans, Lamas and Evangelicals: The English Missionaries in Siberia. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bloch, Maurice, 1998 How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy. Oxford: Westview Press. Bolles, Blair Edmund, 1988 Remembering and Forgetting: Inquiries into the Nature of Memory. New York: Walker and Co. Press. Carsten, Janet, 2000 “Knowing Where You’ve Come From”: Ruptures and Continuities of Time and Kinship in Narratives of Adoption Reunions. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6(4):687–703.

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Casey, Edward S., 2000[1987] Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cole, Michael and John Gay, 1972 Culture and Memory. American Anthropologist 74(5):1066–84. Connerton, Paul, 1989 How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Csordas, Thomas J., 1994 Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Empson, Rebecca, 2006 Separating and Containing People and Things in Mongolia. In Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. A. Henare, M. Holbraad, and S. Wastell, eds. London: Routledge. Gell, Alfred, 1998 Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gupta, Akhil, 2002 Reliving Childhood? The Temporality of Childhood and Narratives of Reincarnation. Ethnos 67(1):33–56. Halbwachs, Maurice, 1992 On Collective Memory. L. A. Coser, ed. and trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hallam, Elisabeth and Jenny Hockey, 2001 Death, Memory and Material Culture. Oxford: Berg. Hoskins, Janet, 1998 Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives. New York and London: Routledge. Humphrey, Caroline, 1992 The Moral Authority of the Past in Post-Socialist Mongolia, in Religion, State and Society 20(3 & 4):375–89. Humphrey, Caroline, 1995 Chiefly and Shamanist Landscapes in Mongolia. In The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon, eds. Pp. 135–62. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Humphrey, Caroline, 2002 Rituals of Death as a Context for Understanding Personal Property in Socialist Mongolia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, incorporating MAN, 8(1):65–87. Humphrey, Caroline, 2003 Stalin and the Blue Elephant: Paranoia and Complicity in Post-Communist Metahistories. In Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. H. G. West and T. Sanders, eds. Pp. 175–203. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Humphrey, Caroline with Urgunge Onon, 1996 Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge, and Power among the Daur Mongols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kaplonski, Christopher, 1999 Blame, Guilt and Avoidance: The Struggle to Control the Past in Post-Socialist Mongolia. History and Memory 11(2):94–114.

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Keane, Webb, 1999 The Materiality and Locality of Everyday Lives. Indonesia 68:178–86. Küchler, Susanne, 1987 Manangan: Art and Memory in a Melanesian Society. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, incorporating MAN, (N.S.) 22(2):238–55. Olick, K. Jeffery and Joyce Robbins, 1998 Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociologies of Mnemonic Practices. Annual Review of Sociology 24:105–40. Radley, Alan, 1997[1990] Artefacts, Memory and a Sense of the Past. In Collective Remembering. D. Middleton and D. Edwards, eds. Pp. 46–59. London: Sage. Said, Edward W., 2000 Invention, Memory, and Place. Critical Inquiry 26(2):175–92. Sperber, Dan, 1989[1985] Apparently Irrational Beliefs. In On Anthropological Knowledge: Three Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strathern, Marilyn, 1994 One-Legged Gender. In Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994. L. Taylor, ed. Pp. 242–51. New York and London: Routledge. Strathern, Marilyn, 2005 Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Telfer, Jon, 1999 Relationships with No Body? – “Adoption” Photographs, Intuition and Emotion. In Social Analysis: Subjectivities in Material Worlds (A. Meneley, ed.) 43(3):144–58. Yates, Frances A., 1974 The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

4 Connections and Disconnections of Memory and Kinship in Narratives of Adoption Reunions in Scotland 2 Janet Carsten 2

This chapter is a consideration of the intersections of memory and kinship in narratives of adoption reunions which I collected in Scotland at the end of the 1990s. Most of the interviews I conducted were with those who had as adults undertaken searches and subsequently met with birth kin from whom they had been separated in early infancy. As will become clear, the outcome of these searches was very mixed. In a few cases, those I interviewed had managed to establish good relations with the kin they met. In others, such relations proved more or less impossible – as if the weight of the past exerted an excessive force, encumbering relations which had a troubled existence in the present, and whose future seemed quite precarious. It is the uncertainty of these outcomes, which was forcibly voiced to me by many of those I interviewed, that I address here. As I was told on numerous occasions, you couldn’t know how things would turn out, just as you didn’t know in advance, when you embarked on a search, what kind of person or persons you would end up meeting. In a sense, what was most striking in the narratives I collected was the contingent and fragmentary nature of these experiences, and the manner in which they were constructed out of similar elements of material, which might yet lead to quite opposing or different trajectories and outcomes. But why address this contingency through the theme of kinship and memory when what is most striking about these particular kinship stories is that they suffer from an absence of memory? One might with

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some justification suggest that these stories of small meetings in stations, homes or cafes, of partial affinities, estrangements, and impossibilities represent, at most, a quite minor and insignificant sub-theme of kinship life in late twentieth-century Britain. And it is unclear that these narratives have much to say to a comparative anthropology of kinship, let alone the larger themes of the politics of memory, encompassing warfare, migration, colonialism, and political dislocation that have been addressed in the recent literature. I have been struck by the connections between an absence of memory and keeping memories alive, and by the myriad different ways in which memory and kinship may intersect, both in the narratives of experiences of adoption reunions to which I listened, and in the comparative literature on kinship. Some of the broader issues of the connections to be made between small, everyday inscriptions of kinship and the self, such as those I describe here, and the larger tales of polities and nations and their commemorative histories with their more obvious political and anthropological significance, remain, as I suggest in the Introduction to this volume, under-explored in the anthropological literature on kinship. This essay is a preliminary attempt to trace some of these connections and disconnections. If it seems partial, contingent, and fragmentary, then perhaps this can be read as in keeping with the stories that are related here.

Uncertain Outcomes I have already suggested that meetings with birth kin that I was told about had highly uncertain, and in many cases troubled, outcomes. In an earlier article (Carsten 2000), I attributed some of the difficulties for adoptees of creating viable relations with birth kin to the inherent problems in establishing temporal continuities to experiences of kinship that had been dislocated in the past, and for which there could be no recourse to a shared history of everyday acts of kinship work. Several of those I interviewed described what they saw as illegitimate demands being made by a birth mother. As one woman put it, “I already had a mum, she didn’t have that right.” Nevertheless, in going through interview transcripts after an interval of some time, I have been struck again by the seemingly arbitrary outcomes of meetings with birth kin. Some were deeply troubled and

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obviously problematic from the start, in the sense that what was related to me was how the sheer impossibility of making any kind of relationship had been graphically and traumatically made clear. A birth mother refused to have anything to do with her natural daughter, or she allowed one or two meetings but refused to divulge any information about a birth father, and thereby set in train a further “kinship blockage” for her adult daughter. Seemingly inevitably, these openings were finally cut off by one side or the other. Or the birth mother or father might be successfully identified but revealed to have died before any meeting had been set up. Here, once again, the discovery of birth kin seemed only to lead back to “discoveries of the self ” rather than setting in train new relationship possibilities. There were many kinds of blocked relation, death of course being the least negotiable. Several interviewees related how an initial meeting or few meetings had simply failed to materialize into a steady stream of occasions or kinship experiences that might open up new possibilities in the future. Here a door to the future might be left open in the form of the occasional meeting or the exchange of birthday or Christmas cards, but one had the sense of future possibilities diminishing rather than opening out, a door left ajar but not fully open. And then there were just a very few relationships that stood out as exuding a sense of excitement and possibility in directions that were as yet uncertain, but nevertheless held out positive expectations for the creation of ties based on a multiplicity of exchanges stretching into the future. What differentiated these stories from the others? Not as much as one might assume – although, strikingly, they usually arose in cases where relations with adoptive parents were spoken of in positive terms and with noticeable warmth. There could be no mistaking the conclusion that where relations with birth kin could be successfully established, this was in addition, rather than an alternative, to positive relations with adoptive kin. They tended also to involve ties of siblingship or half siblingship. And this suggests that, for adult adoptees, siblingship was much less freighted with the negative consequences of being given up by a birth mother than parental ties. In the central part of this essay I examine the way in which adult adoptees assert and create continuities of kinship out of disparate elements, which include locality, names, physical appearance, emotions, personal traits, talents, medical histories, photographs, documents, and other objects. In so doing, they necessarily, and simultaneously, also

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assert disjunctures of kinship – either with adoptive or with birth kin. It is this simultaneous process of connecting and disconnecting out of myriad disparate elements that gives a particularly provisional and uncertain quality to the results of searches and meetings with birth kin. One is left always with a sense of the “what ifness” of the outcomes. As one person I talked to commented about meeting a birth mother, “It could be anybody. It might not have been my mother, she could have sent somebody else. . . .” Equally, one might after all have been brought up by birth kin. Things could so easily have turned out differently. So, without trivializing these experiences, amongst other possible interpretations, they can be read as tangible and real experiments in the alternative possibilities, the might-have-beens, of upbringing and life circumstances.

Memory as Interpretive Labor If a heightened sense of awareness of the arbitrary and uncertain possibilities offered by searches for, and meetings with, birth kin was vividly expressed by those I interviewed, how is this linked to the work of memory? I suggest here that in asserting or recognizing certain kinds of continuities while simultaneously disclaiming others, adoptees were engaged in a kind of retrospective memory work of kinship – despite the apparent absence of shared memories of kinship. In looking to a recent literature on this theme, I have found a number of comparisons and contrasts helpful. The first and perhaps most obviously useful have been Michael Lambek and Paul Antze’s (1996) insights on the connections between memory and identity construction. In drawing our attention both to practices of memory – particularly in the conscious connections and continuities asserted in narratives about the past – and also to the simultaneous anchoring and destabilization that this kind of memory work affords, Lambek and Antze provide a fertile starting point for the analysis presented here. Noting the prominence of discourses of memory in the West, they observe how “The past is in one sense determinative of who we are” but it also “provides in another sense inversions of our present self ” (1996:xvi). These remarks are highly pertinent in the cases discussed here, precisely because, for adoptees, the past offers all too obvious inversions of the present.

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Lambek and Antze’s emphasis on the simultaneous way in which people draw on their experience to form coherent narratives about their lives, but also how, particularly for Europeans and North Americans, these narratives in turn inform or shape a sense of identity (1996: xviii), captures very accurately processes in which adoptees engaged when they looked back on and described to me their experiences of meeting birth kin. Here the sense of experiences, and their recounting in coherent narratives that had the power to reshape or make sense of their identity, was all too palpable. Indeed, when many of those I interviewed asserted that the reason they engaged in searches was “to find out who I am” or “to be complete,” one might say they were acknowledging precisely the perceived force of such coherent narratives to shape identity (see Hacking 1995). It was the feeling that the childhood experiences and the narratives they had grown up with had not quite made sense of who they were, or left a great deal unexplained, that in many cases first motivated adoptees to engage in searches (or at least this was how it was often presented to me in these retrospective accounts of their searches). Thus, as Lambek and Antze suggest, an uncertain sense of identity provokes individuals to search for hidden pasts, or “when memory is not in question, neither is identity” (1996:xxii). The connections, which Lambek and Antze draw between memory and identity lead them to two further points which I want to underline here. The first is about the links between the way individuals construct a narrative continuity to stabilize a sense of self, and the way nations or ethnic groups may construct a narrative continuity from the past into the present to legitimate their political claims. This suggests that smaller, more everyday, processes of individual self-creation may tell us something about the larger, overtly political, processes of collective identity formation. The second point is to note, as have many other writers (see Battaglia 1992; Carsten 1995; Cole 1998; Taylor 1993), the intrinsic place that forgetting holds in processes of memory. Memory work of the kind I am concerned with here is inherently selective – recalling some things necessarily involves placing other events or connections in the shadows. These two points are of course linked since the assertion of political claims through the recounting of an unbroken chain of events or associations highlights one set of continuities, and thereby obscures, erases, or delegitimates other possible chains of connection.

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Keeping these observations in mind, I want to reflect for a moment on how particular cultures and practices of kinship seem to have particular temporal dispositions more or less built into them, or at least incline themselves well to certain kinds of temporal elaboration. Speaking crudely, one might characterize an African unilineal system of the kind described by Fortes (1953) or Evans-Pritchard (1940) as inherently disposed to an elaboration of particular kinship connections in the past, going back over many generations. By contrast, Hildred and Clifford Geertz (1964) long ago characterized Balinese kinship as a “downwardlooking kinship system,” predicated on what they called “genealogical amnesia,” a forgetting of past kinship ties. In this kind of cognatic kinship, what matters is not so much past genealogy (unless of course you are of royal or aristocratic descent), but who you produce in front of you, and looking forward to numerous ties in successive generations in the future (see also Astuti 2000; Bloch 1996; Carsten 1995). In many ways, the Malay people I lived with in Langkawi in the early 1980s could be seen as in this respect similar to the Balinese described by Hildred and Clifford Geertz, since they were more concerned with producing kinship in the present and future than with remembering particular kinship ties in the past. And this was reflected in the kinds of kinship conversation one might have on an everyday basis. Whereas Jennifer Cole (1998) vividly describes how, for the Betsimisaraka people of Madagascar, “the dead move among and watch the living,” and “sentimental memories of ancestors, particularly parents, are a palpable presence in everyday life” (1998:610), there was no such sense of the ubiquitous presence of ancestors in Langkawi. The constant acts of remembrance in which Betsimisaraka people engage provide a stark contrast with the almost total absence of such recollection as a feature of everyday conversation amongst the Malay people with whom I lived (as well as with the apparent obliteration by the Betsimisaraka of their colonial past from most contexts of everyday life). The contrast afforded by the dispositions of these two kinds of kinship in time may be expressed in other more material ways too – whether by the prominence of large stone tombs (as is the case in many Malagasy societies), ancestral halls, photographs of ancestors, or other artefacts (see Empson, chapter 3), or by their noticeable absence, as in the Langkawi case. Elsewhere, I have suggested how a combination of environmental, political, and economic forces might historically have combined to

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foster the disposition towards present and future kinship that I found in Langkawi, and which seems to be quite widespread in other parts of Southeast Asia (Carsten 1995). But if we can associate certain kinds of kinship, in combination with a nexus of historical factors, with a propensity to particular kinds of temporal elaboration, how would we characterize the temporal dispositions of north European kinship of which the adoption stories I collected are part? The answer is of course complex, but I suggest that, for many people who are not of royal or aristocratic descent, kinship looks more like the Southeast Asian cognatic model than an African unilineal one. In other words, it tends to be oriented towards the present and future rather than the past. Of course there is an obvious contrast too. For most urban north European people, kinship apparently operates in a far more restricted field than it does for those I lived with in Langkawi. Whereas Malay people usually have an intricate and detailed knowledge of their close and more distant cousins on both sides, this tends not to be true in the European context. And whereas the Malay villagers I knew would create special bonds of intimacy on a basis of equality from among their kin and affines, in the UK friends tend to be marked off from kin. Contemporary Euro-American people are apparently also deeply preoccupied with the self in a way that I suspect would be quite peculiar to people in many other parts of the world. And here the past does matter. I have already suggested that one could view the stories of adoption reunions that I collected as part of a quest for knowledge about identity, and a search for a more stable sense of self. They can be viewed as part of a general vogue for genealogy and a search for roots that has more to do with the production of the self than with a disposition towards the past in kinship. If for most EuroAmericans, kinship is oriented towards the present and future, concomitantly, the search for roots is also, and perhaps paradoxically, firmly oriented towards what these roots are thought to produce in the present and future. In other words, what motivates genealogical searches in the popular culture of North America or Britain is what they may reveal about oneself in the present. If kinship here seems pertinent in a relatively narrow set of contexts, the self expands to fill the gap. Because kinship and memory are seen as intrinsic sources of identity and the self, dislocations of kinship, and of a shared history, may have a profound effect on a sense of self and, in the case of many

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of the adult adoptees I interviewed, lead to a sense of incompleteness and a desire to find out about birth kin. Here a search for kin is one way of patching over an absence of memory. Different kinds of kinship combine with particular historical and politico-economic circumstances to produce dispositions towards certain kinds of temporal elaboration, and particular kinds of memory (and forgetting) work. The chains of continuity that are elaborated and highlighted between kin can take many different forms, and these have a wider political resonance. Thus the funneling down of kinship, together with a concentrated gaze on the self, that are characteristic of European and North American societies is constitutive of, and reflects, an ideologically based, political separation between the world of family and intimate relations, and the world of overtly economic and political exchanges. Here a lack of knowledge of family connections in the past is thought to have direct effects on the self, but the political or economic circumstances in which such dislocations arise may be obscured by the narratives that describe their effects – psychoanalysis being an obvious example. In a quite different context of the Malagasy cases described by Jennifer Cole and Karen Middleton (2001), a continuous link to a chain of ancestors, supported by ritual work performed for them, connotes political and cultural autonomy. Conversely, those without ancestors are those who are thought to have surrendered their political control to others. Slavery is conceived as being lost to one’s ancestors, and being forced to serve the ancestors of others. Thus the colonial experience for the Karambola and Betsimisaraka is a form of enslavement. Here chains of continuity to ancestors, established by memory work in mortuary ritual, are directly linked to the political order. But such links may also be less directly expressed. In their thought-provoking discussion of the memories of former domestic servants in colonial Java, Ann Laura Stoler and Karen Strassler (2002) have criticized the uses to which memory has been put in colonial studies. They suggest that the subaltern studies school has tended either to over-privilege memory as a pristine domain of resistance against the colonial state, which miraculously survives the incursions of supposedly hegemonic colonizing projects, or to have reduced its effects to identity formation in the present. Their point is that neither “event-centered history” nor the advocates of “memory as identity” have got it totally wrong, but rather to focus not only on

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the content of memory but also on the “how” of remembering. In drawing attention to a contrast between the nostalgic and cosy memories of Dutch colonials who spoke of servants as being part of the families they served, and the marked lack of affect in the recollections of their former servants, Stoler and Strassler underline the importance of memory as “interpretive labor” (2002:170). Emotional registers, tones, styles, and sensory qualities emerge as significant aspects of remembering which “may cast a much longer shadow over people’s lives” than national events and violent struggles against the colonial state (2002:170). In the following section, I pursue the idea of memory as “interpretive labor” by suggesting it is not just the content of adoptees’ recollections of their childhoods or of their meetings with birth kin to which we should give analytic attention, but also the how of remembering. Sensory qualities, emotional registers, and styles have an important role in the connections and disconnections that constitute this form of memory work.

Connecting and Disconnecting In looking through interview transcripts, I have been struck by the many different modalities in which adoptees express their sense of connection or disconnection to particular categories of kin.1 One of the most frequent was physical appearance. Several interviewees described vividly their sense of themselves as looking quite unlike the families with whom they were brought up. One woman described how she was the only one in her family to have curly hair, and how she had always wondered where her curls had come from. Such disconnections might be seen as relatively minor or trivial, but they could also express a more profound sense of estrangement. A young man who described what it was like to grow up as the only black person in his family talked of how different he had felt – not just from the other members of his family but also in his neighborhood and school. In such cases, discovering birth kin with curly hair or similar skin color filled in some missing gaps of memory. In most interviews, there was some unprompted reference to appearances, but the immediate recognition afforded by meeting birth kin and finding out that one looked quite like them was often passed over

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quite quickly. It was as if this put a piece of the jigsaw in place but at the same time it was recognized that the physical connection was inherently limited to being just that – a matter of appearance only. Thus one woman described how, after a long effort, she had managed to meet her birth mother, and her sense of disappointment that all her mother could find to say was, “What’s happened to all your curls?” Similarities or contrasts in appearance might thus signal conjunctures or breaks in kinship in a predictable manner – as in the case of physical dissimilarity reflecting emotional distance from adoptive kin – but they could also be evoked to suggest something quite different. One woman related how her physical similarity to her adoptive mother had provided them both with a source of amusement while she was growing up and underlined their emotional closeness. When meetings with birth kin produced not an instant feeling of kinship, but rather its absence, then physical similarity came to underline this disconnection, as if by the power of exposing the contrast. Thus a woman who had discovered the origins of her particular features also commented that her birth mother was “a perfect stranger.” A similar sense of instant but transient recognition was afforded by discoveries on birth certificates. When adoptees described to me how they had felt when they had first acquired access to their original birth certificates (rather than those recording their connections to adoptive parents), one of the first things that many mentioned was their name. In some cases, they found that adoptive parents had kept the original name that they had been given by their birth mother. Usually it was a source of pleasure that a hidden connection was made visible in this way. In other cases, adoptees discovered that they had originally had a quite different name. In either case, the name seemed to offer a sense of immediate connection – either to birth parents or to adoptive ones. But it could of course also mark a sense of disconnection. If a different name was recorded on the birth certificate, and if relations with adoptive parents were distant or difficult, then the change of name could signify or underline that estrangement. The discovery of a different name was often related to me as being accompanied by an emotional response to that name, which itself revealed or reinforced a previous connection. For example, a woman discovered the name Elaine on her birth certificate, and described how she had really liked that name. A different name in this way heightened an already existing train of thought about a possible alternative identity or life course (see also

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Day, chapter 8). Names, like appearance, provided a flexible idiom for establishing or underlining continuities or discontinuities that already existed. Connections and disconnections could also be afforded by more material means. Objects like photographs, documents, or articles of babies’ clothing were sometimes used to materialize a chain of connection that perhaps provided a sense of a more objective reality than names or appearances. A series of letters and other documents kept on file visibly established connections to birth kin. But, equally, they might be produced during an interview to provide evidence of behavior that was felt to be illegitimate or which denied the possibility of relations of kinship. Written evidence of a birth mother who refused to reveal any information about a birth father while yet making demands or criticizing the behavior of a daughter she had not brought up established breaks in kinship rather than continuities. Likewise, photographs provided by birth kin could be pored over to establish physical similarities, the discovery that someone was “her father’s double,” but they could also underline disjunctures – of wealth, lifestyle, or appearance. Photographs might be offered to a birth mother but received by her with an apparent total lack of interest. The photograph of a baby that had been revealed to have been kept in her birth mother’s handbag over many years emphasized a connection that had not been emotionally severed. But the fact that this discovery came after the mother’s death, and before she had been reconnected to her adult daughter, underlined the poignant chances that created both connection and disconnection. Likewise, a baby’s dress kept hidden away for many years either by adoptive parents or by a birth mother could underline connections to birth kin. But when a grandmother revealed how she had made clothes for a baby that she knew would be given up for adoption while her pregnant daughter was resident in a home away from her kin, or when an adult adoptee described how she had discovered that she had been specially dressed by her birth mother but quickly redressed by others before being collected by her adoptive parents, I sensed that these material connections were equally expressive of the fragility of kinship. Medical histories too might be used to demonstrate discontinuities as much as continuities. The middle-aged woman who recounted to me her experience of being wheeled into a labor ward to give birth

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to her eldest child with a medical file with a large “A” on the front “for adopted” graphically conveyed the effects of a missing history on the continuity of kinship. For those whose efforts to meet birth kin led instead to discoveries of histories of fatal cancer or heart disease, medical continuities were a negative outcome to occupy the place of relationships that could not be established. In one unusual case, where positive relations had been forged by an adoptee with her birth mother, and also between the adoptive and birth families, I was told how the adoptive parents had expressed their relief that their rather precarious health might be compensated by a younger and more robust birth mother and her family. In another, where the attempt to establish relations with a birth mother had been difficult, and was in the end abandoned, the discovery of a medical history was given as a motivation for undergoing the search for birth kin in the first place. In these scenarios, then, medical history – like objects, names, or appearance – can simultaneously express, compensate for, or truncate continuities or discontinuities of kinship.

Chance, Coincidence, and Shadow Encounters So far, I have suggested how diverse elements can be used to create chains of continuity in kinship, and how they may equally come to signify breaks in continuity. In this kind of interpretive labor to establish connection through names, medical history, appearance, or objects, what matters is less the content of particular elements, and more their pattern of arrangement and the relations between them. Neither names, nor medical histories, nor particular objects have inherent meanings or significance. Rather, in the uncertain outcomes of these searches, they take on meanings that, with hindsight, and in the narratives I was told, seem at once arbitrary and, at the same time, heavily over-determined. I turn now to some other kinds of chains of connection that were related to me, and which appear to have an even more fragile and contingent existence. In their reflections on such matters as personalities, character traits, emotions, and talents, as well as the apparently more practical issues of residence and locality, chance and coincidence take their place beside more visible and material kinds of continuity in the narratives I collected. Finally, I look at shadow connections,

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and spiritual encounters, which offer an alternative, and perhaps less circumscribed, resource for tracing continuity. Several of those I interviewed related to me how in meeting birth kin, they had not only discovered people who looked like them, but they had also recognized gestures, a way of laughing, a quality of personal character – sociability or stubbornness for example – that they were familiar with in themselves, or that others immediately recognized. The shock of recognition that interviewees described might underline their sense of connection to birth kin and, simultaneously, it could serve to mark a perceived distance from adoptive parents. Thus one woman related to me how she had grown up in a house where relations were characterized by emotional distance, but how she had always cuddled her own children, and was emotionally expressive. When she eventually met her half siblings and when her deceased birth mother was described to her, she felt she understood where this difference in personal warmth had come from. A young man related how he had been artistically gifted but this seemed to have appeared out of the blue in his adoptive family and was unlike anyone else in the family he grew up with. The discovery of the identity of his birth father established a connection on the basis of this talent. At the same time, however, it seemed to underline the distance he had felt on meeting his birth mother who, as he put it, was “like a stranger.” In another case, a young woman described how she had not felt any “instant bond” with either her birth mother or her half siblings. Although there were some mannerisms in common, she clearly felt emotionally detached from her birth mother who, in her description, had failed to show any interest in making an emotional connection. And when the same woman described to me her first encounter with her birth father, although she had clearly rather liked him, and they had continued to meet on an occasional basis, what was conveyed was the shock of a contrast between her own somewhat genteel demeanor and the large, loudly dressed, expressive man with whom she was confronted, who seemed quite unlike herself in personality and character. Here one may suppose that class and upbringing played a role too. Several interviewees commented on the fact that their adoptive families had been able to give them advantages they would not have had if they had been brought up by their birth parents.

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These different life chances afforded by adoption could, of course, be viewed in both a positive and a negative light. While some accounts emphasized the benefits of financial or emotional security, others spoke more in terms of emotional distance or recounted their experience as one of estrangement, “like living in a house full of aliens.” Meetings with birth kin underlined the sense of alternative possibilities and the myriad chances that had contributed to the circumstances of their upbringing and how their lives had turned out. The outcome of searches might confirm adoptees’ sense of their having, on the whole, been lucky to have had the upbringing they had had and their connections to their adoptive parents, or it might underline a sense of loss or contingency. While all the people I spoke to vividly conveyed the importance of chance or coincidence in their lives, one idiom in which this frequently occurred was somewhat unexpected. Locality of residence often featured in interviewees’ accounts, not just as a matter of practicalities but as somehow expressing both the haphazard disconnections and the chance continuities of their kinship stories. It was an assumption of those I interviewed (and of mine) that when they searched for birth kin, they would discover relatives living in distant places. It was indeed the case that birth fathers, in particular, might turn out to have been passing strangers, or to have lived in a number of different places. But I was also struck by the number of times an adoptee discovered a relative close by. One interviewee described going to find her records: The only thing I knew was that my mother was a married woman . . . she lived in Glasgow. So, I see my birth certificate. My mother registered my birth and her address was in Livingston. I couldn’t believe it. It just changed everything. I thought, I could have walked past her in Princes Street. So all of a sudden I felt different.

Indeed, it was the fact that a birth mother turned out to be living close by, that might lead to a precipitous chain of events between the identification of a name, and an actual meeting – in the face of counselors’ advice to take things slowly, and always to contact relatives first by letter rather than confronting them without warning. Here the unlooked-for coincidence of proximity seemed to encourage a sense of events taking their own course.

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In another case, a woman described to me how once she had acquired her birth father’s name, she simply looked in the phone book “on the off chance” without even expecting to find him since she knew he was not from nearby. But finding his name in the phone book, she phoned up the number. Not only was the phone answered by the man she was looking for, but “they lived quite near me, that was the strange thing. I nearly bought a house about a street away. . . .” In this recital it is as if the unexpected connection of locality reflected the fact that a meeting was meant to happen. The paradoxical predestined quality of meetings that so vividly highlighted the chance contingencies of upbringing and circumstance might also be expressed in a more spiritual idiom. One woman told me of several spiritual and dream encounters that demonstrated her birth mother’s strong desire to be found by her daughter. Involving tarot cards, Ouija boards, and dreams, these spirit encounters established a chain of continuity to kinship relations that had been disrupted in the past. In the culmination of these encounters, towards the end of her search, Anna’s birth mother revealed to her in a dream where she was buried, and this location was subsequently confirmed when she talked to her birth mother’s relatives. Recounting this, Anna related her conversation with her birth mother’s widower: And I said to her husband “You’ll never believe it,” I said to him, “I dreamt that last night.” And he went, “Do you believe in the spirits?” And I said, “Yes,” and, “Oh Christ,” he says, “so did she.” He went on to say that, “If anyone was going to come back she was.” And that made me feel quite good actually. ’Cos I felt that was the only way she had of getting in contact with me. She had to tell me something that I could not otherwise know. . . . So that’s the only thing I’ve got. I just think I’ll meet her one day. It’s a daft wee story but it makes you feel better – that she was there.

The memories of spiritual encounters establish not just a chain of continuity into the past but also one that offers openings towards the future – albeit of a shadowy kind. Interestingly, even in the case of “shadow kinship” (Davidoff et al. 1999:221), the connections are grounded in a specific locality – though here, as in other cases documented in this volume, it is the location of the dead that reveals hidden connections, rather than that of the living.

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Reconnecting the Disconnected So far, I have underlined the chances and coincidences that are put into play in narratives of searches for and meetings with birth kin. But I have also shown how these chances can themselves become a means of demonstrating the inevitability of the outcomes that were achieved. It is as if the sheer accumulation of so much chance establishes a kind of chain of virtual memory, and the sense that meetings were meant to happen or, alternatively, that relations could never be established. Most of those I interviewed seemed in the end to have resigned themselves to the positive and negative outcomes of their searches. In their retrospective accounts of what they had discovered, they tended to reflect back on themselves. The completion of a sense of self rested on knowing about connections in the past, filling in the gaps of memory, more than on the achievement of actual relationships with birth kin in the present or future. So, knowing who one’s relatives were mattered more than being able to have continued exchanges with them. One interviewee attributed this to sheer “nosiness.” It was simple curiosity that had propelled her into a search for a birth mother with whom it seemed she would never establish much of a relationship – in contrast to her relations with her adoptive parents, which were depicted in very warm terms. But of course the kinds of connection of kinship and memory that these searches established were not just those with birth kin. I have already made clear that the process of discovering who one’s birth relatives were could reinforce either the positive or the negative qualities to relations with adoptive parents and siblings. Where relations with adoptive kin were good, they were often confirmed as the predominant source of kinship and identity; where they were difficult, this fragility became even more apparent. In this way, new pieces of knowledge became incorporated into pre-existing chains of kinship memory. There is of course another relevant domain of kinship relations besides that of the birth families and the adoptive families of those I interviewed. I have described elsewhere (Carsten 2000) how adoptees who recounted their experiences to me seemed on the whole to be strongly embedded in families that they had themselves established. Most had children, and this was often described as one factor that had

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precipitated a search for their own birth relatives. I was also struck by the fact that many of those I spoke to related how their partner had been an important source of support while they were looking for or meeting birth parents and half siblings. This was particularly the case when partners accompanied adoptees to meet a birth parent for the first time. Although several had not told their children about the existence of birth kin, the sharing of these experiences with a spouse or partner had often, in their view, contributed to their own ability to weather the considerable strains of these enterprises. Here we might see the partner or spouse as contributing by their presence to the creation of a kind of shared memory of kinship (see Das 1997). In witnessing these events, partners were ensuring that dislocations or estrangements of childhood, which had been experienced as essentially isolating and individual, would be transformed into shared memory. By being removed from the realm of the individual, these chains of connection were confirmed as belonging to a different domain – that of shared kinship memory – and thereby childhood experiences were transformed from passivity to agency (Das 1997:85). Conversely, it is perhaps not surprising that where partners registered their opposition to the process of searching, or were felt in some way to have been less than fully supportive, this was experienced as undermining, and the relationship itself was put at risk. There is one final form of connection that I want briefly to mention before returning to the matter of agency. On a number of occasions when listening to the narratives that I have described here, I was brought up short. Usually, this had to do with what seemed to me to be extraordinary chances and coincidences of kinship history: the birth mother who was revealed to have been living more or less round the corner for many years; another who had died just shortly before her daughter had established her identity and whereabouts. But most unexpected of all were two cases in which a search revealed that the birth mother had, after relinquishing her baby for adoption, later gone on to marry that child’s birth father. In one case this meant that a search for a birth mother had also brought to light a number of full siblings instead of the expected and hoped-for half siblings. In another, the birth parents had had no subsequent children. No doubt this sense of shock betrays in part my own rather naive failure to grasp the consequences of the legal context in which adoption occurs in the UK in

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contrast, for example, to the much more flexible fostering arrangements of Southeast Asia. But I think the surprise also reflected that of those I interviewed who, as I understood it, had certainly not expected this particular set of outcomes. The surprise of discovering that the birth parents whom one might have assumed to have had some kind of brief liaison in their teenage years before separating, had instead gone on to marry and live together, highlights the sense of quite unexpected outcomes which I have foregrounded in this chapter. Many of those who spoke to me recounted the worries that they had had before undertaking searches about what might be revealed in their past kinship. The possibility of violence or rape was mentioned by several. No one suggested to me that they were expecting to find their birth parents living as a happily established couple. What was equally striking was how, although this had clearly not been a pre-envisaged scenario, I did not detect any marked bitterness on the part of these particular adoptees, that they had somehow missed out, or been cheated of what was rightfully theirs. As far as I could ascertain, in fact, the relations that had been established with birth kin in both these cases were more positive than in many others, involving regular visits and exchanges and, in one case, insertion into a nexus of sibling relations. It is likely that these relationships were enabled through many complex factors, which included the particular personalities and histories of those involved. Nevertheless, it is striking that such relations were not precluded on either side by the fact that birth parents had eventually settled down together after relinquishing a baby for adoption.

Conclusion I have attempted to convey the highly uncertain sense of possibilities and alternative outcomes that is a prominent feature of these narratives of kinship history. Paradoxically, this awareness of contingency, coincidence, and possibility exists alongside its very opposite – a sense of the foreclosing of chance and the over-determination of a particular set of outcomes. No doubt the very nature of adoption, and the space it occupies in European cultures of kinship, highlight both the idea of the “fateful destiny,” and the unexpected contingencies of life. The weight of both in the narratives I have discussed seems all too palpable.

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In creating continuities of memory, adoptees are necessarily also simultaneously involved in emphasizing disjunctures – either with birth kin, or with adoptive kin, or sometimes with both. The same moves involving quite ordinary elements of memory and kinship (names, photographs, documents, perceived similarities or contrasts between kin) can be deployed to reinforce each other, or to achieve opposite ends. Two opposing trajectories of creating continuity or breaks in memory intertwine with each other as part of one project of completing identity through memory and kinship. In this way, remembering and forgetting are both part of the attempt to construct a coherent personal history and identity (see Cole 1998:627). One facet of the significance of these stories, I suggest, is that engaging in searches for birth kin, meeting with them, and making decisions about relationships, as well as sharing these experiences with a spouse or partner, are ways of inserting agency into events over which one had no control in the past. The interpretive labor to establish chains of connection in kinship and memory rests not so much on the content of particular elements of memory – whose meaning is, in any case, remarkably open. What establishes continuities and breaks in these stories is the manner in which they are inserted into pre-existing chains of connection. The fact that they may be shared by a spouse or partner or, in a more minor register, retold to the anthropologist, thereby creates and recreates kinship memories. It is in this respect, I think, that we can make a connection between these stories and the larger issues of the politics of kinship and memory that I raised at the beginning of this chapter. I return to Jennifer Cole and Karen Middleton’s (2001) depiction of the centrality for political autonomy of being able to carry out ritual work for the dead among the Betsimisaraka and the Karembola of Madagascar. The converse loss of social identity and political autonomy experienced by those without ancestors, with concomitant connotations of slavery, remind us of the potential political salience of being without past kinship. In contemporary Euro-American contexts, kinship history is generally perceived to have more importance for a politics of the self than for the wider political imaginary. Nevertheless, and as several other essays in this volume demonstrate, the significance of reinserting oneself into a past whose dislocations and gaps reflect a lack of autonomy is in the end political. The fact that it occurs in a context where kinship is experienced as a personal project, and where continuities of past

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kinship are seen as having the potential to complete a fractured sense of self, rather than expressing wider cultural autonomy, should not blind us to these parallels in the everyday politics of kinship. ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This research was funded by a Nuffield Foundation Social Science Research Fellowship. I am grateful to the Scottish NGO that helped me make contact with adoptees, and to Jennifer Speirs for her initial introduction. NOTE

1

I conducted thirteen interviews in 1997–8 with adults who had experience of searching for and meeting with birth kin in the recent past. Most of these interviews were with adult women adoptees in their mid-twenties to early sixties. Names of interviewees and of their relatives, and some other identifying information, have been changed. REFERENCES

Astuti, Rita, 2000 Kindreds and Descent Groups: New Perspectives from Madagascar. In Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Janet Carsten, ed. Pp. 90–103. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Battaglia, Deborah, 1992 The Body in the Gift: Memory and Forgetting in Sabarl Mortuary Exchange. American Ethnologist 19:3–18. Bloch, Maurice, 1996 Internal and External Memory: Different Ways of Being in History. In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds. Pp. 215–33. New York: Routledge. Carsten, Janet, 1995 The Politics of Forgetting: Migration, Kinship and Memory on the Periphery of the Southeast Asian State. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 1:317–35. Carsten, Janet, 2000 “Knowing where you’ve come from”: Ruptures and Continuities of Time and Kinship in Narratives of Adoption Reunions. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 6:687–703. Cole, Jennifer, 1998 The Work of Memory in Madagascar. American Ethnologist 25(4):610–33. Cole, Jennifer and Karen Middleton, 2001 Rethinking Ancestors and Colonial Power in Madagascar. Africa 71(1):1–37.

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Das, Veena, 1997 Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain. In Social Suffering. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds. Pp. 67–92. Berkeley: University of California Press. Davidoff, Leonore, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink, and Katherine Holden, 1999 The Family Story: Blood Contract and Intimacy, 1830–1960. London and New York: Longman. Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 1940 The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fortes, Meyer, 1953 The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups. American Anthropologist 55. Reprinted in Meyer Fortes, 1970, Time and Social Structure and Other Essays. London: Athlone Press. Geertz, Hildred and Clifford Geertz, 1964 Teknonymy in Bali: Parenthood, Age Grading and Genealogical Amnesia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 94:94–108. Hacking, Ian, 1995 Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lambek, Michael and Paul Antze, 1996 Introduction: Forecasting Memory. In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds. New York and London: Routledge. Stoler, Ann Laura with Karen Strassler, 2002 Memory Work in Java: A Cautionary Tale. In Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Ann Laura Stoler, ed. Pp. 162–204. Berkeley: University of California Press. Taylor, Anne Christine, 1993 Remembering to Forget: Identity, Mourning and Memory among the Jivaro. Man (N.S.) 28:653–78.

5 Memories of Movement and the Stillness of Place: Kinship Memory in the Polish Highlands 2 Frances Pine 2 Our forests are dark places, secretive, yet well-trodden. You perhaps would not realize their measure, given the prevailing notion of a country so planted with steel mills and coking plants and factories devoted to the manufacture of tanks and heavy machinery. The forests are, in fact, extensions, and their brooding, meditative gloom is so suggestive of isolation that it is not easy, in some of them, to imagine that a human foot has touched their layered leaves before. Of course, this is not true, for Poland is an old country in an old Europe. . . . There was always someone here, always some token, some footsteps left in the soft accumulation of seasons, in the generation of leaves and decay. In this empty, rustling, inviting stillness, always, there was someone here. (Charles T. Powers, In the Memory of the Forest1)

This chapter is about kinship and memory in the Podhale, the foothills and pastures of the Polish Tatra Mountains. It seems to me that it is impossible, in this region at least but I suspect anywhere, to imagine kinship without memory, although I think we can perhaps (and I am not sure even of this) imagine memory without kinship.2 Kinship is always relational, as is memory. And in the Podhale, kinship always seems almost inseparable from space and place. Thus, I am assuming kinship and memory to be interwoven so intricately that disentanglement is impossible, and I am arguing that for Górale, they are similarly entangled with place and concerned with space. If you take a walk though any urban space in Poland with a local inhabitant, you will be told not only what every building and every space is now, but also what it used to be, before the war, during the occupation, after the bombardments, during the communist times. It is overwhelmingly clear that the very streets and buildings, the built spaces and the empty or desolate spaces between them, hold memory.

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And the memory is complex; it is national memory, local memory, and received family and personal memory, all intertwined, rarely distinguished. In the forests and woods there are many war memorials. Some commemorate battles between partisans and occupying forces. Others mark the place of executions and massacres. On the eastern borders particularly, the horror of Nazi death camps still remains, in traces and whole camps, hidden in the forest. When they observe these places, people transform war memories into family memories, as in the recitation of the many incarnations of particular buildings, with direct reference to their own childhood and family past, but also with evocations of the Polish nation as the widest web of kinship and blood. As in other countries with long and complicated histories of partition, occupation, and opposing discourses of militant nationalism, Poland’s history is written on its land and its landscape, in all of its rather frightening complexity and contestation.

Memory and History What determines what people remember? How are different memories transmitted and reproduced, and how are they constructed and reconstructed as political and social contexts change over time? Clearly, people remember through learned bodily or habitual practices, through evocative smells and tastes, through sounds and images. In Poland during communism, memory was often located and reproduced in disguised form, through rituals hidden under the cloak of the house, kinship, or friendship, through family kitchen table conversations, through particular meanings ascribed to place and space, or to texts and sometimes monuments or buildings, which contested dominant memorial narratives. I would argue that because of the opposition that existed during communism between the public world of work and the private world of domestic kinship, and because of the extent to which the private world was the site of trust, what Assmann (1995) calls “everyday memory” was particularly elaborated.3 Thus, everyday highly personal types of memory become entangled with “bigger” memories of politics and history, so that in some circumstances one aspect dominates, and in others the other, but it is extremely difficult if not impossible to untangle them completely. As

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Lambek has argued, “it seems more interesting to take these ideal typical pictures of memory as poles and to focus on the movement between them, on how one goes from the one to the other and back, how private experience and public narrative mutually inform each other” (1996:241). When Nora (1989), Connerton (1989), and Assmann (1995) distinguish between commemorative and other types of memory, they emphasize monuments, buildings, and the rituals and public rites which surround these. I want to suggest something slightly different in relation to space and place: even in Nora’s sites of memory, deliberately manufactured as such, people still subvert these spaces, or claim them as something much closer to personal, everyday memory. Conversely, it seems to me that other kinds of places and more “everyday” spaces can become, if not sites of commemoration in quite the way that Connerton or Nora might mean, at least bearers of longterm and generalized political or historical meaning. For instance, in small villages with few if any commemorative monuments, it is often the landscape itself, the forest, the hills, that field or that stream, which is imbued with these “bigger” memories. In the Podhale, memories of place, both the presence of the land, the village, and the mountains and the absence (often more troubling and contested) entailed in movement and migration are also commentaries on certain moral practices of kinship (see Lambek 1996; Cole 2001).

Registers of Memory in the Mountains Because I have been conducting research in one Podhale village for a long time, there are certain complications to writing this chapter. To a greater extent, or perhaps only in a more intricate way, than if I were writing about one contained and recent piece of research, my own memories intertwine with this material, and I am aware that I am often jumping across time. I am writing here about remembered pasts as they are told to me now by villagers, and as they have been told to me in other years, about the past as I have read and studied it, and about the past which I myself remember and reconstruct from my own experiences and emotions. All represent different but equally problematic rates of change. And the villagers I am writing about

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similarly have their own different senses of time; they also experience in their lives the shifting perspectives that I have outlined above for my own, and they use different voices to tell different types of stories. Although as an ideology the house (as a grouping of people reproduced over time, as well as, and more important than, a physical building) is, as I have argued elsewhere (for example, Pine 1999), the core metaphor of kinship and belonging, and although in practice Górale tend to build and elaborate upon houses at every opportunity, personal or family memories rarely center on these built spaces, or even on things and possessions, in the sense of evoking their physical details or form. Memory rather attaches to the intangible, to songs and poems, dances and rituals, or to the most tangible and permanent, to the land itself. In fact, most often the former are evocations of the latter, as well as of the relationships between people themselves. In this sense, symbolic language and ritual, land and landscape, and kinship are woven into a complicated web which locates people in relation to each other, over space and time. More than anything else, I would argue, it is land – the named fields, pastures, and forests of the village and the slopes and peaks of the mountains beyond – which holds memory in this region. And it is through these memories of place, as well as through complex systems of work and exchange, and rituals of the house that are rooted in place, that people make and remake kinship. The history of Górale is one of movement and migration. As transhumant shepherds they traveled east across the Carpathians in the seventeenth century or earlier; in the Podhale by the nineteenth century most had become sedentary smallholders, but their periodic economic migration to other parts of Europe and the United States continues into the twenty-first century. This movement has generated a particular aesthetic of kinship memory, linked to stories and genealogies of people which are often articulated in relation to place, space, and land. While human lives are interrupted, disrupted, and often irrevocably changed by the shifting patterns of migration, the land is seen and experienced as a constant presence. As things become more complex in the market economy after socialism, land is of decreasing productive importance in the village; however, its ideological/aesthetic value seems to increase and solidify

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even as its economic importance diminishes. Property relations here are largely, although obviously not exclusively, mediated through and about kinship. Land is a powerful metaphor, and it is also a material thing. Until very recently, social relationships were articulated almost exclusively through space, place, and kinship, as people engaged with or against each other as neighbors, kin, workmates, or feuding enemies. Independent, individualistic relations are now increasingly important in the market-led, consumer-orientated world, but these other relationships still dominate certain aspects of social and economic life. People continue to make kinship/relations through land, through labor, and through various kinds of exchanges over place, sometimes involving movement and sometimes reflecting inwards into silence and stillness. It is these processes and relationships, and the ways they are both interwoven with larger processes in the wider world and unraveled by internal rupture and disjuncture, which continue to dominate people’s memory-accounts. It seems to me that in the mountains there is a very strong local social memory, which at times intersects with national memory and at times is quite separate from, and even opposed to, it. However, this local social memory also constantly intertwines with personal, individual memory, and with family memory. Each continually creates and builds the others, although I would argue, following Lass (1994) and others, that they are not exactly the same thing. In the pages that follow I look at memories of childhood, migration, and death, considering different events, or episodes, which highlight the relationship between everyday memory and wider kinds of recollections, or between kin memory and wider memorial constructs. In different ways, all of these are concerned with the movements of people, the spaces they occupy, and the stillness of place. People remember their kin, their marriages, and to a great extent the major and minor events of their lives, through memories of land and place. These may be explicit: this field is called Dziaba, and it came to me from my father, who inherited it from his mother who received it as part of her dowry when she married in from Sienawa (a neighboring village); the Soltyswa (the land associated with the hereditary soltys, or headman, family) has always been there, in the little valley by the stream, but it got much bigger when Katarzina Wrzaszczak from Klikoszowa (the village on the other side of the mountain) married Wojtek Czerwinski (the heir to the Soltyswa) and

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her posag (dowry) was so big that it took nine carts to carry it across the mountain, and she had cows and chickens, and that piece of land was hers, she brought it with her from her mother who was from here and it is bigger than the entire land that lots of families have, and her wesele (wedding) lasted for three days and was the greatest, richest wesele the village had ever seen. Or it may be implicit: Anka remembers when she was a little girl and one day a tinker came in a wagon to the village, and he drove down the road, over there, in front of the house where her parents live, and he had a little doll which she wanted but couldn’t buy (see below). In some memory formulations, people become fixed in the time and space of specific recollections. Mention of Wladek was for some reason always coupled with a mention of his brief trip to Chicago. A strikingly beautiful woman was rarely mentioned without passing reference, even decades after the event, to the fact that she had so captivated the local doctor that, when she became dangerously ill, he would cure her only if she agreed to marry him. This capturing and freezing of time and memory occurs most often, I think, in relation to things somewhat out of the ordinary. Wladek was an unusually unsuccessful economic migrant, while the story of the marriage of the beautiful woman and the doctor has an almost fairytale ring to it, although everyone agreed, introducing a tone of healthy skepticism, that she herself had not wanted the marriage, and that it had been a long but unhappy union. The category of the unusual also applies to my own family, so even now some people remember my mother visiting, and tell how she gave people medicine and helped them to recover from illness, and sang with them in church,4 neither of which is strictly true, although both are partly so. Stasiek and Janka still remember and speak of my daughter as a little girl, after she had fallen off a stack of wood on which the children were all playing and scraped her leg quite badly, flying to me across the fields to the place, some distance away where the cultivated land meets the forest, where I was planting potatoes. What was striking to them, what they remember and retell, is that she didn’t cry or complain, just ran, and that even as such a little girl she knew where to run, she knew the fields. They have other memories of her which they also recount – as a toddler, playing with their granddaughter of the same age, as a young girl going with us to market when Janka had sweaters to sell, or being taken everyday by their eldest granddaughter to the village school, later still as a bridesmaid at

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their neighbor’s wedding – but this one seems most fixed. I think this is because, although she is unusual as an outsider, it is the one that most fits with their idea of what a proper Góral child should be like, resilient and full of implicit local knowledge of place, of where their kin are in place, and of the land. In these memories of my mother and my daughter, then, what people are doing in a sense is making kinship, by emphasizing likeness and proper social relations rather than difference, and in so doing transforming potentially dangerous obcy (outside) things into things that are “ours,” inside.

Family Memories – Childhood At the time of my first fieldwork, in the late 1970s, the oldest villagers told stories from the past which nearly always revolved around a mosaic of family memories, memories of war and occupation (more often the Second World War but also the First, when some of the oldest men remembered their time in the Austrian army), memories of hunger and poverty, and memories of migration. In the telling of these stories, or the recounting of the memories, I would argue that they were making and reinforcing kinship, both their own place and position within a kindred, and the ties of emotion and interest that linked them to some families and kept them separate from others. So in some ways these stories and memories simultaneously create kinship and the person, describe the hierarchical and egalitarian relations between kin, and provide a commentary on proper and appropriate (as well as improper or inappropriate) behavior and relations between people. Some memories, such as those of poverty, are repeated over generations. My friend Anka, who was born in 1948, talked often about her childhood. In her stories, she always emphasized the warmth and care she received from her maternal grandmother and her fear and, I think, dislike of her cold and overly religious paternal grandmother. Anka’s parents married when she was 3 or 4, and until that time she and her mother lived with her maternal grandparents. She always refers to this period of her life in relation to place, beginning a story with “When I lived up in Kowale.” These very early memories are on the whole her most positive ones of childhood. She played with her mother’s youngest brother, who was her age mate, and together they ran in the

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forests, hid in the barn, and shared what she depicts as a happy and safe few years. When her parents married, she and her mother moved in with her father and paternal grandparents, and with the placing of her stories in another part of the village, further into the center and further from the woods, the mood of them becomes much bleaker. Her new companion was her father’s youngest brother, also her age (both her MB and her FB remain her closest male friends and confidantes today); her memories of this time are of the trouble they got into, and of their fear of punishment the grandparents would dole out. When Anka’s own daughter was grown, with a child of her own, we were talking about treatment of children and how it has changed. Anka’s mother commented that both Anka’s children and my daughter received so much. Anka immediately retorted with a story, which I had heard several times over the years. When she was a small girl, but had already moved to the paternal grandparents’ house, a traveling tinker came to the village with a basket full of wares (I think this must have been about 1953 or 1954). Among them was a small doll, and she fell in love with this doll and desperately wanted it for her own. The tinker told her he would give it to her for the price of one egg. She begged her mother for an egg, but was refused; all the eggs had to be sold at market, money was too short. This, concluded Anka, was why she gave her children everything she could. Her mother, to whom she is extremely close, laughed as she listened to her daughter’s story of thwarted desire, but commented, well, it was true, they had to sell all the eggs, she couldn’t imagine what her mother-in-law would have said if she had given one to a peddler for a doll. Again, there are subtexts to these memories which on the surface seem so mundane and everyday. The tension between the maternal and paternal houses is clear, rooted partly in their different status (the paternal house was higher-status with more land and political clout) but I think most strongly in the fact that there was a child before marriage, that the father had to be coerced into marriage, and that the marriage when it did take place was na firmak (sibling exchange). Anka’s mother’s elder brother married her father’s elder sister, so that in effect the houses exchanged daughters and the land stayed still. My own understanding of Anka’s acute distress, which was obvious even decades later when she recalled the incident of the doll, is that the event brought up for her an entire set of connected experiences, to do with the loss of her first home, where she was happy, and her

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move to the second; and with the low status accorded her mother, and perhaps by extension herself, by her paternal grandparents. In another conversation, at a different time, I commented to her that I thought that villagers were tolerant of what might elsewhere be seen as transgressions – premarital pregnancy and illegitimacy. She answered very softly, so I had to strain to hear, but with fierce conviction: “No, Frances, they seem to be, but they always remember. They never forget.” Zoska also remembered deprivation, but in her memories the division between the rich and the poor was much clearer. She would talk frequently about the poverty of her family and how, as children, she and her sister and brothers would be sent by their parents to steal out at night to gather wood from the forests belonging to wealthier villagers, and how they were beaten if caught. Again, this is a memory of close interaction within the family, of stratification between houses and families, and of place. Implicitly, in telling it, she is teaching her own children and later grandchildren that children obey their parents before the formal law, and that they act for the good of the house even if it gets them into trouble. She is commenting on the harshness of the rich, which allows them to beat small children, and the social distance that can exist between close neighbors. And as is so often the case, her stories are set against an intense evocation of place within the village, so vivid that the listeners can see clearly the late night flit across the fields, the exact points where the woods would then have begun, the paths through the forest. These stories of childhood, on the surface rather slight, interest me because on closer examination they appear to be concerned with much deeper issues: gender inequality, stratification between houses, the house versus the outside and movement between houses, the relentless poverty which until the mid-1950s affected even the higher-status village houses. They are also ways of talking, and transmitting ideas, about kinship, both in the sense of personal kinship, what my family, my mother, etc. were like, and of what kinship should be (as well as the constraints which sometimes prevent or circumscribe these ideals, or the contradictions and conflicts which, structurally and personally, are always part of kinship relations). Finally, through recalling childhood, people are also talking, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, about change – change in their own lives, and more general economic and social change. So kinship is both a given, something

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which is always there, and myriad practices and emotions which, personally and collectively, shift and alter continuously over time. In many even apparently slight stories, what is remembered and what is transmitted is not a sense of kinship as a warm and easy relationship, or of the domestic world as a safe and cosy place.5 In this sense, kinship is about big and complicated emotions, about exclusion and inclusion, about conflicting loyalties and loss and pain. So Anka’s memory of thwarted childhood desire portrays a world in which parents are estranged, grandparents are pitted against each other but joined in their endeavors to control their children’s fate, and the fear of a fierce mother-in-law is so intense that a young mother is unable to part with an egg for her daughter. A memory evoked of a child meeting a peddler, receiving an egg and buying the doll, and returning to play with it in the warmth of the kitchen is less likely to be told and retold. The memories which challenge the ideal of the safe, warm internal world of kinship are in many cases the ones which address most clearly moral precepts and contradictions, and as such they both evoke and retain the most powerful emotions, and carry the most force. In the mountains, people talk about kinship through memory most often and most directly in the contexts of place, work, and rituals of the house (which are of course rituals of kinship). Children join adults working in the fields from a very early age; at first they play while the adults work, but also join in from time to time, planting or picking potatoes, raking hay, weeding, and so forth. While they work, the adults gossip about village and family affairs, compare the current state of the crops and fields to ones in past years, and tell and show the children what to do. Often, adults talk about their own memories of working as children, of how their own grandfather first handed them the horse’s reins, of whom they worked with, who did what, of how a grandfather or grandmother had decided when to plant, of how they used to hide behind haystacks or run into the forest when the work seemed too grueling, of what a particular field is called and how it came to be in their family. As children take in this information, they are also learning more general kin “facts”: how the contiguousness of fields maps the kin relations between people and houses, perpetuated by land settlements through marriage and inheritance; with whom their house exchanges work during planting and harvest; who is feuding with whom over a field boundary or some work badly performed in

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the past, and so not part of the exchange circle. In these conversations, the past and the present mingle, constantly drawn together by the connecting thread of the land, and the arrangements of people through land. In the summer months, children accompany adults, often their grandparents, to the forest to pick wild berries and to hunt for mushrooms; sometimes they go with their mothers to the bacowka, the summer shepherds’ camp above the village, to buy osypki, the smoked cheese the shepherds make. In the winter, they may accompany a parent or grandparent to market, to sell sweaters or leather slippers, or some farm produce. On these expeditions, children learn, by watching, the dramatic art of marketing, and they listen to stories about the aunt who taught their mother to knit or the elder sister who first took her to sell her crafts in the market, or about how the market is so much bigger now, and when their grandfather was young and he went with his father to market, it was a different place altogether. Thus, Ujna, now in her eighties and the very active matriarch of a middle-sized farm and a closely knit extended family, teases her grandchildren about their easy lives, as they drive their cars into town and buy ready-made clothes and packaged convenience foods. She tells them that when she was much much younger than they are now, only a small child, she had to walk barefoot the nine kilometers to market, or even further, to Zakopane, carrying little baskets of wild strawberries or eggs to sell to the big houses. She remembers how tired she was at the end of the day, and how her mother allowed her only a stale roll, to eat on the way home. But she is equally likely to tell them about her latest trip by plane to Chicago, to visit her daughter and her grandchildren there, and of the astonishing devices her daughter has in her kitchen, or the clothes and houseware that can be bought in Chicago department stores. And she is the one who has taught them over the years how to work the land, and to understand the history and the peculiarities of each field, as well as how to plan and save and scheme to get a visa and air fare to Chicago to make as much money as possible, and then bring it home, to build up the farm and the house.

Ambiguities of Migration This continual layering and interlaying of past and present, of near and far places, produces a particular sense of kinship as, on the one hand,

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integrally connected to the house and the land in the village, and on the other, endlessly elastic and pliable, extendable to remote places and to people barely remembered or never met. In the late 1970s, stories of migration rooted in the memories of grandparents who traveled by foot to Budapest, as well as remembered tales of migrations to Chicago during the years of famine and plague in the late nineteenth century, were juxtaposed to the current reality of villagers’ struggles to obtain passports and visas (see Pine 1999). As the first decade of post-socialism drew to a close, new memories made their way into conversation, of the socialist period, of the years of shortage and hardship which turned people’s dreams and often their lives towards America, and these newer memories were held up as mirrors to reflect and compare to the current reality of economic confusion and of wider migration, after 1989, to Italy or Greece, France or Germany and, increasingly, the UK. When people talk about migration, it is nearly always as a process or action juxtaposed to stability and stillness of the village and the mountains. They give detailed accounts of arranging the visit, negotiating work abroad, working out transport, obtaining a visa if necessary. They talk about the pain of leaving, and the beauty of the mountains, the healthy air, the forests full of life, and the village sociality which means that people look after each other. It is of course obvious from their daily lives, as well as from other memories of different pasts, that the village is as conflicted and strife-ridden as anywhere else. Many villagers, now as in the past, leave because of economic hardship or lack of prospects but probably, for at least as many others, the momentum to emigrate comes from family strife, the refusal of a father to relinquish control of the land, the failure of a mother-in-law to empathise with dreams of a different life, an irresolvable incompatibility between spouses. These conflicts are clearly recalled and recounted in reference to particular families and individuals, by themselves as well as by others. But in the other rather formulaic accounts of migration, the village is a still place, constant and unchanging, which is longed for in absence. In this particular genre of memory-time, bad things come to the village and its landscape from the outside, in the form of dangerous outsiders or the intrusive state, as for instance in memories of the war (see Pine 2002) or of the worst years of the socialist period. Marta was born in 1947. She was married in 1966 to Tomek; the marriage was arranged by her mother, and she didn’t want it. She

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thought of running away, but didn’t know where to go, and so, in an agitated state, she went through with the marriage. She and Tomek had one daughter, and they all lived with his parents until she managed to obtain an American visa and a Polish passport and went to visit her married sister in Chicago. Officially, she was going for two months, and it was assumed by both sets of authorities that, as the mother of such a young child, she presented no risk in terms of overstaying, and that she would return home. Once she arrived in Chicago, she was very happily reunited with her sister. She got an illegal job in a restaurant, through her sister, and although she spoke no English, managed with help from other Poles. She got a second illegal job, working nights as an office cleaner, and regularly sent her money home to her mother and her husband. After about a year, when her husband and his parents had built a big new house, and had bought a tractor and other machinery and more livestock, they started to suggest she return. When she refused, Tomek went to America to fetch her, but she remained adamant, and he missed his farm and the village and the mountains too much to stay. He returned home, and their daughter continued to move between her two grandmothers. Finally, after almost five years, Marta’s mother went to Chicago herself to order her daughter home. Marta obeyed her mother. When I first met her she was working in the village bar, living with her parents-in-law and working on the farm, and quietly but deeply unhappy. When she talked to me, it was more often about her life in Chicago than about the village. She told me she had a friend there, and she missed him, and she talked about her work there, and her sister, and occasionally tried out a few words in English on me. At home, she transformed her house into a replica of American suburban style: she created for herself and Tomek the first separate bedroom I saw in the village, where sleeping space tends to be combined with living space, and is rarely individually designated. The bedroom had a mirrored dressing table and double bed with a pink satin quilt, and its whole style, like that in the living rooms she decorated, was based on her recollections of the houses she knew in Chicago. Her daughter continued to share a room, which served doubly as a sleeping and living room, with Tomek’s mother, and the kitchen remained more or less unaffected by her reconstruction, but otherwise she succeeded in creating an entirely non-village space within her village house.

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During this period, Marta was quite harshly criticized by other villagers, for neglecting her daughter and leaving her to the grandparents to bring up, for refusing to work with her mother-in-law, for not seeing that Tomek was exhausted from working so hard on the farm, for having become too American. She argued continually with her mother, and sometimes with her younger sister. At the same time, she continued to help her mother whenever possible; she arranged for her difficult younger sister to get a job in the bar; she was the godmother of one cousin’s child, and the starosczina at the wedding of another. Despite people’s harsh judgments, it was also clear that she was working very hard both in the bar and on the farm, as she had worked at her two jobs in Chicago. I have some photos of her in the village from this period: in one she is dressed in her waitress uniform, laughing and holding up a bottle of vodka behind the bar; in another she is dressed in elegant trousers and an American shirt, and leading a cow down the road through the mud. She is smiling self-consciously, half turning her head away, as if she realizes that the camera is catching her at the intersection of her two worlds and is embarrassed. Marta’s story is unusual in her desire to leave the mountains permanently, and in her final capitulation in returning with her mother. In effect, during this time she was caught between two overlapping worlds, both of which were structured around kinship relations, kinship obligations, and work but in rather different ways. In her personal, emotional interior, and in her own aesthetic, the mountains represented a backward and dirty place, the sociality of kinship and community was an oppressive, consuming and judgmental cage that trapped her, and local culture lacked style. In her constant return to her memories of Chicago, her creation of an American appearance for herself and, whenever possible, for her daughter, in her redesigning of her house space as she remembered American houses, she seemed to be reversing the usual and expected cultural narrative of migration, in which people go to Chicago, live with Górale kin in Górale neighborhoods and eat Górale food, all the time longing for the mountains and anticipating the day they can return. And at the end of the proper narrative, which is in fact a fairly accurate account of many villagers’ travels, return they do, with enough money to expand their house economy and keep going for a decade or more, and with endless recollections of both the wonders of American material life and the coldness, racism, and inequality of the culture. It is also true, however,

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that as long as villagers have been going to Chicago, from the 1880s onwards, some have stayed permanently, eventually signing their land over to siblings or offspring, or selling it. On the whole, they maintain contact with kin in the village, generation after generation. They also do in America, collectively, the reverse of what Marta did by herself in the village, on a much larger scale: they create a Górale space, based on their memories of mountain culture, in Chicago, which is then, in an even more complicated set of memory practices, reimported into the mountains as bigger and better forms of “remembered” music, traditional dress, wreaths and handicrafts, special masses and processions. The complexity of migration and movement, and the often painful and conflicting choices which are generated by moving between and living in different worlds, are highlighted in Marta’s story. I have included it here precisely because it reverses the classic Górale narrative (see Pine 1999). In this sense, it sheds a slightly different light on some of the fears and anxieties, and the sense of grief, associated with memories of migration, for it reveals the other side of memory and longing: the danger that the object of longing may become not the mountains but the other place, and that the memory of that other life may penetrate and damage life in the village.

Memories Evoked by Death Some of the images of place and movement, and the tensions between kinship loyalties and oppressive kinship, which recur in migration stories, are also encountered, not surprisingly, in memories of death and the dead. In the accounts which follow, the first, the death of an old man, shows memory as a conciliatory process, while the second, an untimely death, reveals the ways personal memories intertwine with wider political narratives. In 1979, when I had been living in the village for almost two years, old Jan, the grandfather of the house I lived in, died. He was a dominant figure, not only in his own family, which he ruled with a mixture of humor and cruelty, but also in the whole village; he had been the mayor during the war, and was a key member of a small tight circle of powerful old rogues who drank together on Sundays after Mass.

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Eighteen priests attended his funeral (his youngest son, from whom he had been estranged in life, was a priest) and it was a dramatic affair. His widow, who had left him and gone to live with another son after years of abuse, threw herself on his corpse, beseeching him not to leave her, and in the cemetery had to be pulled forcibly away from the open grave. After Jan’s funeral, I dreamed about him, and in the morning mentioned my dream to the family. Everyone stopped what they were doing and asked me detailed questions: what was he doing? . . . Standing around with a group of other old men, I said . . . Where was he, what was he wearing, how did he seem? . . . I replied that he seemed to be in the mountains, and that like the other old men in my dream, he was wearing traditional Góral clothing, the heavily embroidered white felt trousers, black hat, and sheepskin waistcoat he had worn in life, and he seemed fine. Everyone repeated my words as I said them, nodding and murmuring in approval. His granddaughter finally explained to me that when someone died, a family member usually dreamed about them, and that this was the way the dead let the living know how and where they were. They were surprised that Jan had come into my dreams, but apparently took this to mean that I was now part of the house. Most of all they were pleased to hear that he was well, in place with his friends, and looking like a proper Góral.

One striking thing here is the idea that the dead are away somewhere else, doing ordinary things. This seems to me to be in keeping with the more everyday reality of the movement of living people. Villagers leave the mountains regularly and continually, as migrant laborers. While they are away, their kin and friends talk about them, imagine their lives in another place, and grieve their absence. It is always assumed that they are sad and lonely, and that they miss the mountains and their proper lives. When migrants return, they similarly recall the grief of absence, and their sense of loss of place. People talk of migrants taking a handful of soil in their pockets when they leave, and of kneeling and kissing the earth when they return.6 In Jan’s case, death allows a construction of a positive memory, of a man properly mourned by his wife and sons, of a continuation of a proper sociality with other Górale and of a proper place in the mountains. And over the years this is the memory that has held fast. Years later, Jan is remembered by his children and grandchildren as a true Góral, wise and strong; the painful memories of violence and drunkenness and abuse are not brought up, and perhaps not often recalled. At

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times, however, when one of Jan’s sons has had a lot to drink, other memories, drawn from private domestic episodes rather than for public consumption, are brought out which provide glimpses into a far more bleak and harsh past, in which drunkenness, violence, and suicide are hinted at before a curtain is quickly drawn over these images. This son, now himself a great-grandfather, has in effect replaced his father as the humorous and abusive patriarch. In other stories, the state, or the wider political stage, is a background but necessary aspect of the narrative. This contextual interweaving of local, personal events with outside, national politics is typical of everyday remembering in the mountains. Jola remembers the declaration of martial law, of what was called the Stan Wojenny (state of war), in December 1981. She was 8 years old, and her life had just changed terribly and irrevocably with the unexpected death of her beloved father Jasiek. His untimely death – he was a sheepskin craftsman in his early forties – shattered the entire family, and his wife told me later that she had been completely mad with grief for at least a year after his death. In the years that followed, as Jola grew up, she and I often talked about her father, nearly always in the context of affectionate, often very funny, and very domestic memories. Her own emotional reaction to his death, and her memories of that specific time, however, we discussed only much later, when she was in her twenties. She described her father’s death as follows. In November 1981 her mother had gone to Krakow with her father, when he was taken to hospital, and then Jola remembered her coming home totally shocked and numb, and telling her that her father had died. In the days and weeks that followed, she watched her mother trying to behave normally, trying to go to work, to find the money and the time to buy food and school books, to make arrangements, to cook and work and keep things going. Jola knew that everything was wrong . . . there was a huge and deep ache and emptiness in all of them, where her father had been, and she felt lost herself, and cold, and watched her mother. She described a grey and bitter winter, with freezing snow and endless waits and queues and shortages. A bleak memory setting, accentuated in the context of the village by the isolating coldness of heavy snowfalls which made access to neighboring villages, let alone to town, almost impossible. On December 13, she was curled up with her mother and little brother – they were all asleep or trying to sleep – when there was a pounding on the door, followed

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by a furious ringing of the doorbell. Her mother pulled on her dressing gown and made her way wearily to the door. It was her father, Jola’s grandfather, who lives in the house across the road. He was wet from the snow, and came into the house like an angry storm, quite distraught, shouting at them that it was war, war had come, there were soldiers in Warsaw, our own Polish soldiers. Jola recalls feeling fear and confusion, and it is clear from her account that perhaps even then, right away, and certainly later in her continual re-picturing and revisiting of these scenes from that long winter, the events became so entangled that she was unable to separate the death of her father from the imposition of martial law, or her grandfather’s outrage and shock from her own pain and her mother’s devastating grief. In this very personal family memory, both politics and place make up parts of the total picture. The village, which is usually portrayed as a safe and beautiful place, made even more beautiful by winter snow, is transformed into a bleak and isolated space. The outside, Krakow, the site of the hospital where her father dies, and Warsaw, the site of the angry streets of martial law, merge together as dangerous and terrifying urban spaces. The image of the door to the house, of her mother coming through the door with news of her father’s death and later opening the door to her own father so that he too can bring in frightening news, this time of what seems like civil war, is a juxtaposition of inside and outside on another scale. These contrasts, between inside and outside, bad things from outside which threaten the safety of the village houses and streets, the permanence of the village in its mountain valley surrounded by forest and hills, recur when villagers talk about the past. It is in this sense that the village and its surroundings become like a commemorative site. In the early 1980s, there were still villagers alive who remembered the German occupation vividly, as part of their adult lives, and they talked often about the war, about their terrified treks with their cows to hide from Germans or partisans in the safety of the forest, the wheelings and dealings of some villagers, and the partisan activities of others, which brought the German soldiers into the village, making everyone afraid and sometimes resulting in violence and death (see Pine 2002). In these memories, specific points in the village landscape were identified and remembered – the place on the hill where the fortune teller was shot by the Germans, the clearing in the forest where some partisans were killed, the forest where people

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hid with their cows from both Germans and partisans. Over the years, these have become less definite spatial memories, attached to the forest and the hills generally rather than to clearly recognized places, but still held in the minds of those born long after 1945. The contemporary counterpart to these war memories are the memories of the socialist years; in these, the forest is again a place of refuge, where young men ran when the police came, or where rituals condemned by both Church and state were held. In these recollections the events in question are situated, and hence fixed, in place.

Making the Present through the Past Like others, I have been struck by the different kinds of voice, or perhaps “register” or even “genre” is a better word, which are used to express different kinds of memory. However, I want to argue against a rigid distinction between personal and collective memories, or between “societies” which remember, historicize, or I suppose ultimately “deconstruct.” What my material, and I think most anthropological work on these themes, shows is the very complex process by which personal memory and wider political, cultural, or social memory become entangled in discourses of kinship. While it is clear that each time an individual “remembers”, the memory of the memory of the event or emotion becomes progressively more layered, often transforms or changes, and perhaps in some ways becomes more remote and less personal, it is less obvious to me that there is in fact a clear distinction between everyday rememberings and cultural or social memories. On the one hand, kinship frames and creates memory and transmits it from generation to generation; on the other hand, memory is often phrased in terms of specific kinship events, balancing or even overshadowing something much bigger but less personal, which is then remembered always in that context. Jola remembers martial law as part of a long process of loss of, and mourning for, her father. When Ujna describes time spent queuing, the money for bribes, and the humiliation involved in applying for visas and passports under socialism, she is locating a personal memory, which also always relates to a series of kin memories, within the context of both the Cold War and “actually existing” Polish socialism.

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It seems to me that there are different kinds of remembering here. There are what could be thought of as encompassing or generalized memories: memories of hunger, of war, of work, of rituals, of communism. These are strangely impersonal, and speak to the past, to “what it was like before.” They may be recalled as general pictures or sketches of a space which is vaguely called the past, or they may form the background for more specific accounts of a particular event. In either case, they tend to be what I would call village stories; they are likely to be told by many villagers, in similar language and detail, as something that “everyone” remembers. Then there are very personal memories, of major life crises such as the death of a parent or child, marriage, or emigration. These two interweave as the generalized memories set a particular scene which may then be punctuated, or unsettled, by the more personal. So, in the Górale case, at least, we could talk about what Halbwachs and others would see as a collective or social memory, a shared and rather general narrative of a past to which all have access. To this we could add family memories, which pass from generation to generation, changing over time but maintaining a continuous sense of who “we,” as opposed to other families, were and are. Finally we could identify personal memory, individual memory, which is of course always relational but which is experienced and understood as something integral to the person, a way of looking, or seeing, through the individual body and experience. However, rather than distinguishing between these three forms in order to consider them separately it is also possible, and ultimately more true to the form of their presence in everyday life, to see them all as continually interacting, and forming and reforming each other as they do so.

NOTES

1 2

London: Anchor, pp. 11–12. That is, only as a purely biological fact (were such a thing possible) could kinship be “without” memory, and even then it could be argued that in biological substance, in genetic makeup and DNA, we also have a kind of physically embodied memory, a constitution of bodies possible only through the transmission of substance from parents and more distant kin.

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3

I do not want to discuss the rather lengthy literature on the public–private opposition here, but I think it can provide a useful frame for thinking about Polish politics, history, and kinship. What I do not want to suggest is a division between a heartless world and a warm and cosy haven. As I and others have argued, particularly in relation to gender relations though the argument holds for other aspects of kinship as well, the domestic domain during socialism (and now) was often anything but a safe and happy place. However, the opposition between an inside world of trust versus an outside world marked by a lack of trust as an emic model is, I think, a useful tool to think with, as long as it is remembered that trust in some matters, such as political or economic activities against or outside the state, can coincide with brutal or painful interpersonal relations. 4 My mother visited me in the village three times between 1978 and 1990, and met most of my friends. She is a doctor, and on her first visit, during the years of shortage when very few medicines were available and when the villagers’ distrust of the local clinic staff was marked, she examined, at the woman’s request, the twisted ankle of one villager and bound it for her, and gave aspirin and advice to another who was suffering from a severe cold. She went with me to Mass a few times, but she knows no Polish, and never sang. 5 This point is also made forcefully in chapters 8 and 9 in this volume by Sophie Day and by Veena Das and Lori Leonard. 6 When John Paul II kissed the ground on his return to Poland, villagers commented that he was like a Góral, grieving his land.

REFERENCES

Assmann, Jan, 1995 Collective Memory and Cultural Identity. New German Critique 65:125–33. Bloch, Maurice, 1998 How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory and Literacy. New York: Westview Press. Cole, Jennifer, 2001 Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar. Berkeley: University of California Press. Connerton, Paul, 1989 How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halbwachs, Maurice, 1992 On Collective Memory. L. A. Coser, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Lambek, Michael, 1996 The Past Imperfect: Remembering as Moral Practice. In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds. Pp. 235–54. New York and London: Routledge. Lass, Andrew, 1994 From Memory to History: The Events of November 17 Dis/remembered. In Memory, History and Opposition under State Socialism. Rubie Watson, ed. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Nora, Pierre, 1989 Between Memory and History. Les Lieux de Memoire. Representations 26:7–25. Pine, Frances, 1999 Incorporation and Exclusion in the Podhale. In Lilies of the Field: Marginal People who Live for the Moment. Sophie Day, Euvthemios Papataxiarchis, and Michael Stewart, eds. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Pine, Frances, 2002 The Village, the City and the Outside World: Integration and Exclusion in Two Regions of Poland. In Post-Socialist Peasant? Rural and Urban Constructions of Identity in Eastern Europe, East Asia and the Former Soviet Union. P. Leonard and D. Kaneff, eds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

6 Moving On? Generating Homes in the Future for Displaced Northern Muslims in Sri Lanka 2 Sharika Thiranagama 2

We were in Jaffna when they asked us to come to a meeting. Two people came from the LTTE . . . They said, “You have to go or we will shoot you, take whatever you can carry” . . . at every junction the LTTE took things from us. That time, my eldest son was not even one, they took even the milk packets that we had for my son. As they did, they told us, “If you ever talk about this, we will shoot you.” In the end, we had only the clothes we were wearing . . . We came here with bare pockets. That’s like everybody behind us. (Tareek)

Tareek is a Sri Lankan Muslim tailor from Jaffna. He and the other men I was interviewing in a refugee camp in Puttalam were retelling their memories of the hours that changed their life. There has been civil war in Sri Lanka for over twenty years, fought between the Tamil guerrilla group, the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), and the Sri Lankan state; the primary battlefields have been the Tamil and Muslim majority areas of the north and east. The conflict has centered on the relationship between the Sinhalese majority community and Sri Lankan Tamils, Sri Lanka’s largest Tamil-speaking minority. Representations of the ethnic conflict have often neglected the perspectives of Sri Lankan Muslims whose lives have also been indelibly marked by ongoing war. In this chapter I focus on the events of October 1990, when the LTTE expelled all the 75,000 to 80,000 Muslims from the five districts in the north under its control, Vavuniya, Mannar, Mullaithivu, Jaffna, and Kilinochchi. They were given twenty-four to

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forty-eight hours to leave. In Jaffna, the area on which I worked, Muslims were given only two hours to leave, roads were blocked, and a specific route allocated through LTTE checkpoints. At the checkpoints, Muslims’ possessions were further examined and appropriated. In some areas, local LTTE cadres were moved to other areas to carry out the eviction so that they would not protest at having to evict their neighbors. The order came from the highest ranks of the LTTE and no clear explanation was offered.1 It was a military operation without popular backing or participation. By November, there were no more Muslims in the north. This ethnic cleansing is known as “the Eviction” and the community of Muslims created by this act of mass expulsion are formally “IDPs” (Internally Displaced Persons), who refer to themselves as “Northern Muslims” and “ahathi” (refugees).2 Sixteen years on, the majority of Northern Muslims, 65,000 or so, live in refugee camps and settlements in the Puttalam district in the North-Central Province, curving under the disputed territories of the north that they still call home. Through two peace processes and ceasefires, the collective right of Northern Muslims to return, and an LTTE guarantee that they will not be evicted again has never been brokered. A few individual families have returned to the north but have faced harassment from the LTTE. The majority of Northern Muslims have not as yet returned. Sri Lankan Muslims are the second largest Tamil-speaking ethnic minority in Sri Lanka, comprising approximately 7–8 percent of the population. Ceylonese/Sri Lankan Muslims see themselves as both “indigenous” to Sri Lanka3 and of a different ethnicity to Sinhalese and Tamils. Muslims, though Tamil-speaking, are in Sri Lanka classified as an ethno-religious minority around the categories of religion and ethnicity, while Sri Lankan Tamils, both Christian and Hindu, are classed as an ethnic minority around language and ethnicity. Muslim identity formation as it emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth century has been profoundly affected by being the second minority sandwiched between two differently imagined “majority” communities, Sinhalese and Tamil (Ismail 1995). The regional dispersal of Muslim minority communities all across the island has also been significant (McGilvray 1998). The historically dominant Muslim elite are based in the southwest of Sri Lanka within Sinhalese majority areas. However, the strongest concentration of Sri Lankan Muslims is in Eastern Province, which has increasingly become the moral heart of

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twentieth-century Muslim politics (McGilvray 1998), most recently as a result of ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. The north and east of Sri Lanka are the basis for separatist claims to an ethnically Tamil homeland. Muslims form around a third of the population of the Eastern Province, and any devolution of the north and east depends upon Eastern Muslim consent, which is why the Eastern Muslim community has recently come under attack by the LTTE. Muslims from the north, in contrast to the politically and numerically strong East Coast Muslims and the historically dominant Southern Muslims, were politically and numerically a vulnerable community. This is both in relation to Northern Tamils, Muslims forming only 5 percent of the population of the north,4 and also to other Muslim communities, with Eastern and Southern concerns dominating Muslim political parties. The term “Northern Muslim” itself came into currency to describe the aftermath of the Eviction. Prior to the Eviction there were “Muslims from the north”: Mannar Muslims, Mullaithivu Muslims, Jaffna Muslims, and so on. The Eviction of Muslims from the north transformed person and place simultaneously; ethnicization of the north as “Tamil” was accomplished through the act of Eviction itself. There had been no recorded communal tension between Tamils and Muslims in the north, though there had been friction in the east. The Eviction order had no “legitimizing” history in the north. Stories of the Eviction refer to a sudden and unanticipated severance of the link between Muslims and their homes. Northern Muslims are a new demographic who were traumatically born and made through the Eviction itself. Eviction created a community of Muslims, a previously unknown set of political subjects who were all collectively displaced, with common origins in the north, and whose collective right to return had been severed. When I was there in 2003, the memories were still raw and recent and the refugees still on dry rations. In this chapter I explore how people, in the aftermath of an event like the Eviction, are “becoming” Northern Muslims, how they attempt to make new persons and places, and the ongoing contradictions and dilemmas produced by these struggles. I highlight the importance of ideas and stories about ur (the Tamil word for natal village/home) for Northern Muslims, and point to the ways in which these structure residence and ideas about proper sociality in displacement. If, as is the case, for Northern Muslims, different homes/ur are felt to produce different persons, then what happens when children

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and parents come from different homes? Finally, through an examination of the idea of “return,” I examine the possibilities of forgetting home/ur, as it is mapped onto internal structures within the family and different generations. I discuss how the question of return comes to divide generations, and how these generations are marked by different attempts to negotiate perceived disjunctures between modes of transmitting personhood. This essay is thus about the contradictory ways in which affiliations to kin and affiliations to place are the basis for making new persons, which produce their congruence, gaps, and ambivalences in constantly transforming circumstances. Throughout, I reflect upon specific ways of living in time and space, and thus internal displacement as creating new social and moral and physical landscapes. I follow Bakhtin’s (1992) exposition of the connectedness of space–time because for dislocated people, time and space, as indices of loss, are critical measurements of belonging. Loss itself provides historicity (a theme explored in the introduction to this volume).5 People continually discuss what five years, ten years, and thirteen years away from home means. Five years may not have meant the same thing in Jaffna as in Puttalam. Here space thickens time and gives it flesh (Bakhtin 1992). We accrete relations in places. Relationships accrued, denied, and allowed in Puttalam district for those who arrived as “people out of place” were seen as being of a completely different kind from past relationships in the north. Northern Muslims’ way of looking at the world is rooted in displacement and the experience of the Eviction. Thus in this essay I take displacement itself as an orientation, a way of inhabiting the world.

Identifying with a Former Ur/Home in Puttalam When we first came we couldn’t make our lives properly. Everyone lived side by side in camps with their sorrows . . . we thought of moving only with our people. Wherever you go people live together; Jaffna people, Mannar people. We can help each other. Mannar people live with Mannar people. Jaffna people with Jaffna people, side by side. (Nazleen)

In 1990, refugees were readily welcomed to Puttalam. Puttalam was relatively ethnically mixed, and large and noticeable Tamil and Muslim

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minorities were present in the areas that refugees settled. However, thirteen years after their arrival, when I was there in 2003, relationships between locals and refugees were far from warm. An influx of around 62,000–65,000 refugees had dramatically changed the political and social economy of what had been a historically underprivileged and economically stagnant area, albeit one which experienced a brief period of agricultural intensification after the IDPs’ arrival (Shanmugaratnam 2000). Locals soon began to resent the Muslims IDPs. These are classic conflicts that often emerge when refugee camps are set up in impoverished areas.6 There were clashes between the host community and the refugee settlements, some violent. Refugees complained of continual discrimination within the administrative and bureaucratic structures of Puttalam. Local government structures actively discriminated against refugee Muslims.7 In addition, despite the influx of a population of Tamil speakers, local bureaucracies remained stubbornly Sinhala speaking. Both locals and refugees continued to make social and moral distinctions between “local” and ahathi (refugee) Muslims. These distinctions were maintained through discrimination against refugees but were also equally made by refugees themselves. Refugees foregrounded separation between Puttalam locals, including Puttalam Muslims with whom they shared ethnicity and religion, and themselves on the basis of different regional origins, which they argued made different kinds of persons. Puttalam, for Northern Muslims, despite similarities in landscape, language, and religion with their former districts, was posited as a fundamentally different place. They spoke of the feeling that Puttalam was “like home” but “not home,” an uncanny landscape inhabited by those who looked like you, but who were different in some ineffable way. These differentiations were made on the basis of practices in which differences not apparent to outsiders seemed, to those inside, crucial and cataclysmic. These invoked former home/ur as the basis for ideal models of sociality and personhood. Wherever I went in the camps, I was introduced not only by my name but through my former home/ur in the north (Nallur/Jaffna). For the refugees, ur is an often used Tamil word. It evokes an everyday emotive language of expectation, love, and sentiment. For those I worked with, because one is a person, one has an ur, and because one has an ur, one must either love it or feel obligated to love it. The only comprehensive exposition of this concept of ur, to date, comes from

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Valentine Daniel’s (1984) ethnography of (South Indian) Tamil personhood, Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. Daniel explores the link between a person and her natal village (ur), a link concretely expressed in the shared substance of soil and body that comes from physical presence in the place of origin. As Daniel (1984:62) argues, One of the most important relationships to a Tamil is that which exists between a person and the soil of his ur . . . [“Ur” is defined to approximate to] a named territory that is (1) inhabited by human beings who are believed to share in the substance of the soil of that territory, and (2) a territory to which a Tamil cognitively orients himself at any given time.

People tell you that persons are formed by the particular ur in which they reside and have been nourished. This is, as Daniel points out, both through relationship to the imagined properties of such soil and those others who are assumed to share this with you, and are more like you than people from other ur. Further, ur are considered to be cognitively shifting and contextual spatial orientations which have to do with the person, not with an abstract collective (1984:68). This is in contrast to kiramam (village) and tecam (nation) which Daniel argues are “bounded, standard, universally accepted and constant spatial units” (1984:69).8 Ur are person-centric, mutable, and diffuse spaces that invoke emotion, nourishment, and sentiments of belonging, powerful and potent feelings. In addition, the common nourishment of people from the same ur means that referring to somebody’s ur is also an easy shortcut to discussing the nature of these persons themselves. Ur not only make person-centric places, they also make place-centric persons. These ur are known places located within dense social geographies, which territorially refer to villages, but conceptually to a neighborhood and residence, and are said to have different soils, different kunams (character traits), and thus produce different persons. Animated within a known social geography where very small distances index, not miles and metric measurements, but different forms of sociality, which different ur create, these are discourses which locate place and person simultaneously as constituting each other. One’s “home” in the north continued to be central to navigating sociality in Puttalam. This was evident through the correlation between

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past regional origin and present residence. Refugees lived in four different types of spaces: welfare centers, which I refer to, following Northern Muslims who sidestep the niceties of the UNHCR, as “refugee camps”; new housing settlements (involving voluntary relocation of families by purchasing housing land); relocated areas (camps on state land); and rented houses and houses of friends and relatives (Shanmugaratnam 2000:9). Camps, settlements, and relocated areas were clearly demarcated from Puttalam local residences, and were mostly filled with people from the same locality. Even when some settlements were a little more mixed than others, people were immediately able to navigate me around residences, effortlessly naming where people were originally from. I found it surprisingly easy, for example, to locate Jaffna Muslims, who often lived together, because differentiation between local and refugee on the basis of regional origin also worked to allow internal differentiation between Northern Muslims from different districts and villages. Further, the majority of Jaffna Muslims had lived within Jaffna town itself and thus came from the same area and clustered together, but Mannar and Mullaithivu Muslims were distributed among a number of different villages, and their settlements further reflected these smaller locales. Thus Shanmugaratnam (2000) relates how Alankuda village, prior to the Eviction, had been a Puttalam Muslim village with one mosque, and was seen by locals as one village. After IDPs moved into Alankuda and established settlements, the village changed radically. It became seen by the refugees who lived there as composed of twelve mosques and twelve clustered settlements. Each settlement and mosque was centered around different villages of origin in Mannar and Mullaithivu. Thus, all refugees were seen as similar to each other in sharing common origins in the north, and the discourse of home/ ur also provided a place- and person-specific set of emotions and relations, which articulated difference within the refugee community. Ideas of ur in displacement offered refugees a seemingly ordered way of viewing sociality in a disordered world. Hirschon (1989) observed of Asia Minor refugees in Greece that regional identification with former villages “provided a means of orientation and adjustment, a way of creating a familiar geography out of an unchartered expanse. . . . [and its] persistence into successive generations is impressive” (1989:23). Moreover, as with Asia Minor refugees, children in the settlements who had never seen Jaffna would grow up in “Jaffna”

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in Puttalam. Making identification and residence center on former ur in Puttalam posited the survival of such identification into the future. However, this identification with the future was both the basis and the focus of anxiety about belonging. Ur is a highly person-centered account of belonging: it varies from person to person, it invokes feelings and emotions within persons which are not easily quantified or enumerated. Displacement has also heightened anxieties about the plasticity of ur and belonging through residence. In the north, there is no injunction to marry within ur. The ur of the child and that of one of its parents, most often the father, was rarely the same: it was common to have different ur in one family. Marrying between areas in Northern Muslims’ former homes would also have been common. In the face of ethnic cleansing and more official accounts of belonging, ur became the claim to belonging. It became the refuge of emotion and the repository of emotional work towards a home which needed to be maintained in the absence of residence. Discontinuities within families became more problematic. Displacement brings the desire to fix that which becomes revealed in crisis to be fluid and yet deeply potent. Desire for identification with, and love of, ur in Puttalam, I argue, is tied to Northern Muslims’ specific experiences of past and present dislocation. Thus I emphasize, paraphrasing Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), the simultaneous persistence of ur and its historicity.

Loss of Ur and Local(e) and Remaking Belonging In recounting the Eviction, Muslims talked of “residence,” “the local,” and ur as something that could be taken away by the LTTE, but which still provided memories of a shared past and possible future renewal. Stories tell of being ripped from the social fabric of the village. It was to the common space of the village that Muslims were summoned, the doors of their own houses were forbidden, and their departure was visibly paraded in the streets of their former homes. Tamil neighbors are commonly represented in narratives as passive watchers, sometimes weeping but all standing by, also a potent comment on the failure of the solidarity of the “local.” Nonetheless, every story accuses the LTTE as primary perpetrators, and differentiates between Tamils and the LTTE, stressing former homes as shared common spaces which

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ordinary people shared. As a result, the local(e) is also often stressed as a potent symbol of defiance. Nachiya tells me that when the LTTE cadre came to evict her, standing at the door of her house with her children she asked them, Is this the house your father’s mother built? Is this the house the leader of the Tigers built? Have you come all this way to take from us, us who built this house, this threshold, who brought these things? Now if you want to go and catch a country, you do that. Take the country. Who would come and ask from people these things?

The “local” became embedded in many Eviction stories as the stage for LTTE action and the refuge that defied them. For Nachiya, “the country” and “the house,” “the LTTE” and “ordinary people” become counterposed. The evictors were LTTE cadres not neighbors. Former homes and neighborhoods were often represented as places of dense sociality united by neighborhood ties. Land was now designated only for Tamils, ethnically but not linguistically marked and shared. These designations were represented as imposed from the outside, by a macro-force, the LTTE. Everyday relations of sharing residence were put into question by nationalist decisions but also made to defy the potency of such decisions. It became very important, after displacement, for Northern Muslims to emphasize previous harmony and iron out any previous conflicts with the local. Stressing the rupture of the local from the outside by the LTTE provided the basis for the hope that one day, on the stage of neighborhood and home, relations could be social again. Furthermore, while relations with Tamils and the LTTE were now uncertain and uncomfortable and had to be asserted against a bewildering new reality, place could still be owned through residence and material practice. It could not in effect be erased. Thus place carried the potential to empower all social relations, including new ones. People reached out again and again to this narrative of home, a home located in the past and in space, where Tamils and Muslims had all lived together. Thus, stories of home, of the Eviction, were not just stories of the past. Told in spaces, settlements, and camps, that were structured around the assumed importance of former ur, they were injunctions to remember the past, remember difference, and thus were also stories of the future.

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Northern Muslims themselves are not unique among displaced people in settling with reference to their former localities. Tamil IDPs from the north and east also settle with people from their own ur in refugee camps. But, the significance of Northern Muslim invocations of ur, in contrast to those of Tamil IDPs, comes in a context where their “right of return” had been severed. While displacement is also foundational for Sri Lankan Tamils, where one in two Tamils has been displaced (Sriskandarajah 2004), their right to belong in the north and east has never been challenged. Northern Muslims’ “right to return” or their “right to stay” are not already present within the political structures in which they live. For Northern Muslims, ur also provides a kind of belonging that supersedes present political possibilities, providing ties that continue to exist despite the severing of their right to return and the ethnicization of the north. It was ur that Northern Muslims had lost, and it was ur that they clung to as an inalienable belonging that could not be taken away from them. The way in which this belonging is affectively fashioned and remade in Puttalam and Northern Muslims’ ways of inhabiting, of seeing, smelling, and remembering ur is conditioned specifically by being internally displaced and by their continuing physical proximity to their former homes. This is very different from the experiences of externally displaced Tamils whom I interviewed in Toronto, Canada, and even from Tamils whom I interviewed in Colombo. I realized this through an encounter in one of the major Jaffna refugee camps. The camp leader met Farook and me at the entrance of the camp. He asked me what my sonta ur (ancestral home) was. On hearing my ur, he gazed at me and then turned me to face outwards from the camp with him. There in the distance was a black palmyra tree splitting the sky open. The palmyra tree is the famed symbol of the Jaffna peninsula, a familiar sight to anyone who has grown up there and the symbol most often used to represent it. He pointed at it and told me, “They call this S— B camp, we call it the one palmyra tree camp. Every morning we wake up and look at it and we remember our homes and we remember what we have lost.” We looked at it together in silence, lost in our own thoughts; I myself had only been home to Jaffna for a visit for the first time in twelve years the past December. Loss for him was made to reside in the very everyday. I began to understand how internally displaced people relate to the environments in which they find themselves. There was – and the

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palmyra tree was the symbol of this – no absolute separation from the object of their memory. They lived in the peripheries of landscapes they once knew and still knew. Puttalam and Kalpitiya in the NorthWestern Province were not so dissimilar in physical appearance from the northern districts with which they are contiguous. The palmyra tree was a distinct reminder of how close home was, and yet how different Puttalam was, even though it shared much of the same landscape. The uncanny unfamiliarity of the seemingly familiar physical landscape thus also mapped an alienated social and interior landscape. For those who have left the country, “home” can remain in a static time left at the point of departure. Now abroad, their former homes can be tantalizing scents, memories, smells of another landscape markedly different from the one they inhabit. In The Architecture of Memory, Bahloul (1996) discusses her maternal family, the Sennoussis, and their memories of Dar Refayil, their former home shared between Jews and Muslims in colonial Algeria. She points out how the geographical and temporal estrangement of the Senoussis from Algeria means that remembered quotidian practices, while constantly evoked in family gatherings, have become symbolic in the move to France. Remembrance and the object of remembrance have been irreversibly separated and “The past urban landscape has completely disappeared from sensory experience . . . Memory has taken over the space left empty in sensory experience. It is a distant and intangible relation to the past” (Bahloul 1996:132-3). In contrast, Northern Muslims’ geographical proximity meant that their past landscape had not disappeared from sensory experience but remained just on the horizon. Further, whenever they could, during ceasefires, they visited their homes and saw them decay over time. They lived close enough to their homes to note the work of time in them, and also too far in time and space to be politically welcomed back into those homes. Both place and people were engaged in simultaneous processes of transforming and becoming, both not entirely of their own volition.

Returning Home? Those times . . . we can’t tell about that kind of life. Now when I think about it I have to laugh. When I think of it I feel frightened. That’s

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why we have to guard our lives carefully. It should never happen again. It won’t happen again and it should never happen again. They say it won’t happen again . . .

Nazleen trails off. She resumes: These thoughts will always come again and again. Some things you can forget, some things you can never forget. We think about Tamil people still and their difficulties back home. We were used to them, we all lived together. Only after the eviction did we think about that.

Nazleen was only one of many who spoke of the Eviction as something that should never happen again. She articulated this together with the uncertainty that indeed perhaps it could happen again, and that the Eviction could never be forgotten and had altered the basic frames of certainty and life itself. It is hard to express the density of stories of the Eviction in Puttalam. The Eviction is an event that has clustered around it dense physical, economic, social, and symbolic consequences. The Eviction is the reason, as refugees point out, that they became refugees and all their savings, property, homes, and livelihoods were taken away from them. They told me that, if Northern Muslims did not tell these stories, no one else would. While there was undoubtedly reticence on the part of parents to express fully their feelings to their children and me, I found that there was not a house where the larger story of the Eviction as personal and social loss was not narrated. Children who were too young to have been part of the Eviction would tell me that their family arrived in Puttalam as a result of being evicted by the LTTE. For example, Amina, who was in her late teens, was ambivalent towards return, saw Puttalam as her new home, and did not remember her former home though she remembered the Eviction journey. She told me of her mother’s desire to return to Chavakachcheri and her own desire to stay in Puttalam. However, she thought of herself as a Northern Muslim. She took me to her home so that her mother and aunt could talk to me and when they faltered she prompted them with questions, showing her own detailed knowledge of these stories of her family. I found both a larger commitment to retelling the Eviction in families, and also that those who were too young to have been part of the Eviction identified themselves primarily as Northern Muslims.

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However, this larger picture conceals the deep disjunctures between generations, firstly, in relation to the question of “return” to the north, and secondly, to different experiences and identifications to home in the north and Puttalam, and thus in memorial practices and possibilities. As time passed, the possibility of forgetting home, if not the Eviction, and the impossibility of returning home became more apparent. The dilemmas surrounding return also indexed refugees’ conversations about family, social differentiation, the relationship of the past to the future, the passage of years, and becoming Northern Muslim itself. People talked of the consequences of making new kin, marriages, and households in Puttalam and thus potentially making kin with Puttalam, the place. Given that sociality and difference were created by holding on to the stories about former homes, and if residence, sharing and nourishment made ur, was Puttalam a potential ur? In the following section I examine the ways in which the question of “return” opened up the impossibility of making a future in which the consequences of the Eviction could be erased, in which different generations occupied different emotional landscapes.

Becoming Sontam with Land Owning land, which was for refugees a way of becoming sontam (kin) with new land, was viewed as loosening ties to homes in the past. This was quite clear when one contrasted ideas of home and return between different kinds of locales, the refugee camp, and the refugee settlement. Almost all refugees had passed through refugee camps, and many still lived in camps. However, after the 1995 peace process failed and refugees saw that return north had once again become difficult, many of them took the opportunity offered by the 1995 government of limited funds to buy land in Puttalam and live in settlements. Ownership of land, as opposed to the seeming transience of camp life, provided different possibilities for continuity in the future and I observed that those who went to the settlements often had very different ideas about return from those in refugee camps. Thus different social and geographical locations shaped different ideas of home and return (Malkki 1999).9 Refugee settlements and camps were similar in demarcating themselves from local Puttalam residences. However, camps and settlements offered very different

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possibilities for the future. The most immediate difference between refugee camps and settlements was the appearance of fences and the ownership of land. Refugee camps were open tracts of land with fences tracing the boundaries of camps and, within camps, people complained of uncontrolled mixing and sexual intimacy. Settlements had neatly fenced houses and clearly separated spaces, and bore the marks of active human labor upon the environment, transforming open tracts of land into neighborhoods. Camp refugees represented the provisionality of their existence as the continuation of their journey in the Eviction, of belonging neither to Puttalam nor to their former homes. Rajeeb told me, to accompanying nods from the ten other men sitting near the entrance of the camp, “We’ve lived here for thirteen years with nothing to prove it. We have no deeds; we don’t own the land we live on.” Unemployment among refugee men is endemic in Puttalam, and, he says, “They told us we can’t take work away from the host community. We mainly do coolie work.” When Rajeeb returned to Jaffna to find work after the ceasefire was announced, he found that they were unable to work there because of the LTTE: We went there. My work is tailoring. But I cannot do that there, they [the LTTE] have taken away everything that was in my shop, the scissors, the machine . . . Only the shop remains and they have given it to somebody else . . . they [the LTTE] ask for tax. We give our profits straight to them. For every 10 rupees, we give one rupee . . . we go there because there are no jobs in Puttalam. There it is the same situation. Now I have come back. In Puttalam there is only two days of work for me. The rest of the days I just sit around like this.

He concluded, “When you look at us, they won’t say we are Jaffna people.” While remaining in refugee camps was most often a reflection of the inability of residents to buy land in the area, at times it was also a choice. For many, this transience enabled the possibility of another journey – the one home. Camp refugees felt a stronger pull to reside in Jaffna than those in the settlements who had made arrangements to own land and recreate Jaffna neighborhoods in Puttalam. For those who lived in settlements, making the choice to buy land or settle was about realizing that one could not wait to return home any longer.

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Buying land in Puttalam seemed to offer some future against the provisionality of the camp. This did not extinguish longing for home, but made return more problematic. When we arrived we put up a hut in a school grounds. There were about a hundred other families in the grounds. We waited to return home. Ten years passed just like that. Then we gave up and built a house, and now they say we can go back. How were we to know? It’s not that we don’t want to go back, but we’ve built a house, people have married and settled here. You can’t just get up, just like that, and go home. But believe me it’s not because we don’t want to. But it’s not that easy. (Shafiqa) To go back now, it is difficult. This is our own [sonta] place. We gave money and built this. We can’t just leave it now. We can’t tell how the situation will change, maybe who knows. It’s only now there is peace. In Jaffna, the people who went saw that everything is destroyed. The Muslim area is completely gone. If you see it, the desire to go back dies in your mind . . . Maybe things will change in the future, but right now . . . how can anyone go? (Nazleen)

Ownership was double-edged: as refugees reinvested in home in the present, the home in the past began to recede along with the possibility of return.

Generation and Kin in the Future If becoming kin with land posed problems for return, an even more prominent issue surrounding memory, home, and the possibility of return centered on people’s anxieties about their children and new generations growing up as refugees. Relationships to former ur were direct for the older generation who indeed had been nourished in their former homes but, people asked, what of their children? Were these children children of this ur? And if so, did that make them different persons from their parents even though they were kin? Could these children ever be at home in their parents’ ur? Sometimes people even wondered if their children had an ur. These were the questions that I heard in narrative after narrative. Anxieties about return were referred to discussions of children born or brought up in the camps and family

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obligations of love and duty, and also mapped evident emergent discontinuities of experience between generations and their relationships to ur and memory. Fourteen years was long enough to create three distinct generations with different imaginings of the promise of return. These generations can be loosely mapped onto age: the elderly, the young, and those “in-between,” as people themselves defined them. Significantly, they thus mapped onto people’s relation to the home as “memory of place,” or the “memory of the eviction story.”

The Elderly For the older generation, thirteen years was a relatively small segment of time in their biographies, albeit a segment that had assumed cataclysmic proportions. The Eviction marked a turning point and rupture, but memories of home always overwhelmed them: life as it became recreated in Puttalam was always contingent, always a pale shadow of what they had once lived, and which they assumed was characterforming. Neighbors, schooling, marriage, employment, those crucial material and affective relations that one builds up in life, had been primarily conducted in their former ur. Living in Puttalam was an aftermath; it was a struggle to survive that intimately recalled loss in every possible way. Strategies of person-making here were not for them: it was their former home that had made them into persons; rather, such strategies were for their children and grandchildren. Returning home was strongly desired by this generation. Of those who did not desire to return, it was the pain of having to be evicted again which was given as a reason not to return. They too, as older people, had memories of homes in peacetime and before the war proper had begun.

The Young For the younger generation, their understanding of being “from the north” was through their experience of growing up as displaced people in Puttalam. Many could not recollect ur clearly, but they could recollect or tell me stories of the Eviction. It was the Eviction itself that had become the genitive point of their identity, and their relationship

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to home was through the Eviction. In Puttalam, stories of former ur and displacement were about orienting their relationships within Puttalam, about differentiation from locals and how life was lived there. It was they who were made Northern Muslims; their identity is fueled by expulsion, and by Puttalam as an ur and their position as refugees there. For many Northern Muslims, children are their kin through sharing of houses, marriage, and birth. However, children are different persons from them, for their children’s imagination of social relations springs entirely from Puttalam. Often for the young, home is an absence that is related solely through the memory of the Eviction and through memory of their home that their parents must pass on to them. Thus, for many young people, the promise of return is an immanent story written into the Eviction story, but the actuality of return is not a constitutive part of their identities. For those who remembered their former ur, generally those in their early twenties, ur was impossible to return to, either because their marriages were made in Puttalam, or because the memory of their former homes as battlefields made the memories too painful. They had incorporated the journey to Puttalam as part of their life stories, as opposed to the older generation for whom the Eviction was the rupture that negated their life stories. Without direct memories of former homes, they are pulled towards the future, and towards performing ur and belonging in radically different ways from their parents. They see ur as an unknown past and a potentially deferred future, whereas for their parents ur was a real place that is now lost.

In-Between Between these two generations were those who either came and married in the camps, or came with young children. They were often represented as being torn between their parents and their children with different ways of relating to home. For this middle generation, memories of home and the eviction were double-edged. They remembered ur, not Eviction, as the genitive point in their life stories. Memories of home were constantly emplotted as ideal ways of living. However, they also felt that their obligations lay with their children, who increasingly were marrying and settling in Puttalam. Home was remembered strongly but also written through the Eviction, through fear and

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uncertainty about the future. Life stories stressed survival and growth in the aftermath of a devastating event. They stressed regrowth, marrying, having children, sending their children to school, and working for dowry for their daughters as ways in which they have survived and carry on. These stories of growth and survival also recall loss because they are often used to represent the provisionality of return now that their children have settled in Puttalam. Both materially and emotionally, many use their children as the figures that make it impossible for them to return home. The languages of home, of movement, and of kinship mirrored and were interwoven with each other as the children came to stand between a place that was receding and the place that was assuming reality. I choose Yusuf’s story out of many similar conversations to illustrate the complex way in which children are made to figure in relation to the structures in which Northern Muslims are enmeshed. He told me: Think about this, three of them marry here, each have two children. The UNHCR and the government will give us 25,000 rupees10 to go back but only as one family. But what about the children? Think about this situation. Are these people to leave their children here? Are these children a citizen of this home? If 5,000 people left there is only money for 5,000 people to go back. So what do my children do? . . . They’re saying, go to Jaffna we will give you rations there. How are we to go? There is no space for us to even put up a hut. We have to clear it before we can do anything. So where are we going to go? Where can we live?

The money offered by aid agencies and the government to IDPs as resettlement money does not account for children, and is not enough for the children to return home too. We have to think about the children that we have here and what situation we will give them. They live here. Now my daughter’s son, his birth certificate is in Sinhala. Will the LTTE tolerate this? Now you take this man in our camp: his daughter was born there, her birth certificate is in Tamil, even her name is written in Tamil. The birth certificates there are in Tamil, here they are in Sinhalese. And in the “Place of Birth” section, they write “S— B camp, Puttalam.” Our children are born in refugee camps.

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Now this man here, he said his son was going to get married in two years. Now that child who comes out of that marriage will be from here. And that child’s child will be a citizen of this home. The birth certificate you get in this home, will it be enough for there?

For many IDPs, like Yusuf, whose children were born in Puttalam, birth certificates encapsulated practical and symbolic issues. The children’s birth certificates in Sinhala display two things, their nonnorthern place of birth, and their displacement in Puttalam. Even if they had acquired spoken Sinhala, most IDPs could not read it. Some wanted the place of birth to be entered, not as Puttalam, but as Jaffna, or Mannar, the place that they ought to belong to, something that might give their children in the future a claim to lost property, history, and home. Often, many IDPs found that their children’s birth certificate was not even inscribed just “Puttalam,” but “S— B camp.” The children within Puttalam are born into the Sri Lankan state as displaced people: as one man told me, “My child will be a refugee for ever.” It is not just that children might, by acquiring new ur, forget that they came from elsewhere, but the frightening possibility was that perhaps the children didn’t even have ur. They might have lost what they never had. Thus the desire to maintain a former home is also tinged with the understanding that the children will have only an identity as “displaced.” In their parent’s ur, they may be displaced too on return, for they have none of the markers to show that they have been raised there. Yusuf’s final question to me – “The birth certificate you get in this home, will it be enough for there?” – refers finally to the shadow that underlies all conversation about the Eviction and “return.” It is not only children settling in Puttalam that could prevent return. The authority that could prevent Northern Muslims from being at home in the north is the LTTE. He rhetorically asks me whether the LTTE would tolerate a child’s birth certificate being written in Sinhala. Children, then, come to figure as the means by which home can recede, but accompanying and shaping these anxieties about settlement in Puttalam is also the fact that the LTTE has refused to give a guarantee that it will not evict Muslims again if they were to return. In addition, many talk of how, like people, places too age and transform. Some villages in the North, especially in Mannar, no longer exist. In others, houses and shops are occupied by other displaced people. Homes,

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when abandoned, die. Thus to “return” is to return to something new. Yusuf points out how going home, and living in refugee camps rather than their own houses, means not emplacement, but that Northern Muslims would be once again displaced and dependent on relief. Unless their rights are acknowledged as refugees in Puttalam as part of the local, or in their former homes as politically protected, there are no places where the Northern Muslims would not be displaced. These are new worlds that need to be made. Becoming Northern Muslim is to embark on a journey that unfolds into the future; the past can never meet the future entirely through return. It is only the future that can ensure the past; the past can no longer ensure the future. Return to home as it existed in 1990 may for many be a return in memory alone, and memory itself cannot make home livable in again.

Conclusion: To Keep Return Open In this chapter I have examined Northern Muslim stories about how people have tried to survive in their new homes, and simultaneously remember their old homes, pointing to how their former homes/ur form the basis for remaking life in Puttalam. Yet as they make and remake kin and ur within Puttalam, memory itself becomes displaced in their children. Discourses of “kinship” and “place” came to represent at their heart both loss and regrowth, stories of having loved and lost, transforming and growing towards the future. I end with the question of return, because it was around the issues surrounding return that discontinuities between generations emerged, and became expressed in divergent experiences and practices. These stories of “return” themselves took different forms; the actual possibility of return and the promise/expectation of return are couched in different modalities and invoke different spatio-temporal futures. At times they come together, and at other times they cannot answer each other. The promise of return stresses that the wounds of the Eviction and Tamil–Muslim relations can be healed only when future return repairs the past. The impossibility of return indicates the inability of this future and the past to be reconciled, the inability to return to a time before the Eviction. I heard the interplay of these in many houses and in many stories, in relation to children, to land, to Tamil

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neighbors, and to me. I make this distinction between the return as promise and the return as practical possibility because the symbolism of return is a story about belonging that is written into the making of Northern Muslim communities. Whether Muslims can physically return or not, and as time goes on this becomes more and more difficult, the emotional landscape of possible “return” remains central. Even for the young, who do not intend to return, identities are also rooted in displacement and the story of a terrible injustice. Retelling their stories necessitates opening up the emotional landscape of the past to be healed, and injustice righted, through the political legitimacy of return. These conversations themselves always gestured beyond the immediate to a larger “super-addressee” (Bakhtin 1992) who is not within the conversation. Both this “super-addressee,” and the attempt to make speech recognized and listened to, take many forms. The promise of return and the actual possibility of return address themselves to different listeners. The actual possibility of return is addressed to specific listeners: the LTTE, the Sri Lankan government, UNHCR, etc. These are the frames in which Northern Muslims are enmeshed and in which they negotiate and are transformed as ahathi, locals, IDPs, Northern Muslims, and citizens (or not). These are the agencies which have immediate worldly power over people’s lives and with which, despite appeals to justice and provision, negotiations are often attended by feelings of compromise and disappointment.11 Bakhtin stresses, however, that, while we are always seen and enacted in the space–time of the other, there is always the ability to imagine, in Holquist’s words, what “any space and . . . the time [would] be like, in which I might define myself against an otherness that is other from that which has been ‘given’ to me” (1990:38). In other words, people hope that “outside the tyranny of the present there is a possible addressee who will understand them” (Holquist 1990:38). For Bakhtin, all dialogue is undertaken in our faith that some day, somehow, we will be understood by somebody. Otherwise, he argues, we would not speak at all. Thus, there is hope that, outside of the immediate circumstance, there will be another other in whose space– time we can enact ourselves, and who indeed may understand us differently. If we believe that somewhere, someone will listen to us, then Northern Muslims address themselves to such a space–time where they will belong.

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The promise of return is often addressed to larger entities, idealized listeners beyond the present, who are seen to perceive injustice outside the frames that are presently available: Allah, referred to as the only one who knows people’s troubles; future generations of Northern Muslims; the Tamil community in the present and past; and always an idea of ur which does not forget the people who remember it. I make the last point because, if home has become the most potent story of belonging, then ur is also the listener and the basis for relationships that cannot be extinguished in time and space.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful for a Postgraduate Studentship from the ESRC, which enabled me to carry out fieldwork in Sri Lanka between 2002–2003. Thanks to all the participants in the kinship and memory workshop for their questions and comments, especially Sophie Day and Stephan Feuchtwang. Thanks also to Veena Das, Naveeda Khan, Vasuki Walker, Maithreyi Rajeshkumar, Thomas Blom Hansen, and especially Janet Carsten who generously commented to various drafts of this paper. Of course the greatest debt I owe is to those in Puttalam who so generously gave their time and opened their houses to me. Thanks to my informants and also Jeweria, Farwhin and Sharmila.

NOTES

1

One possible explanation is that the LTTE evicted the more vulnerable Muslims from the north as a warning to the Muslims from the east. 2 While Northern Muslims are classed by UNHCR as IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons), as they have not crossed an internationally recognized border, they name themselves refugees and ahathi. I use their own terms for themselves when speaking of issues of identity, and IDP in reference to official contexts. 3 Officially there are five different Muslim groups who were differentiated on the basis of “racial origin” in the colonial period: Ceylon/Sri Lankan Moors, Indian/Coast Moors, Malays, Borahs, and Memons (McGilvray 1998). 4 The only exception was in Mannar where there were some majority Muslim-only villages.

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5 6

I am grateful to Sophie Day for suggesting this. Shanmugaratnam’s 2000 paper “Forced Migration and Changing Local Political Economies: A Study from North-western Sri Lanka” is an excellent guide to this issue. 7 Brun (2003) discusses the humanitarian and governmental structures that refugee Muslims were enmeshed within. 8 Daniel glosses ur as the English “home,” and I use this and also the English word “village” at times because in the Sri Lankan context, this is how ordinary people translate the Tamil ur and the Sinhala gama. The sense of “village” found in translating kiramam is, I agree with Daniel through my own fieldwork, used for abstract administrative and political boundaries, to which the person by using kiramam ascribes distance or objectification. 9 Lisa Malkki’s work among Burundian refugees in townships and refugee camps illustrates this very well. Her examination of Burundian refugees contrasts township refugees who celebrate “cosmopolitan impurity” and camp refugees who celebrate moral purity (1999: 71). However, Malkki’s highly symbolic analysis and, as a consequence, employment of categorical boundaries often ignores everyday practical and political issues, such as the ownership of land or divergent generational experiences, as the basis for different understandings of home. 10 Sri Lankan rupees. 11 I am grateful to Stephen Feuchtwang for suggesting this elaboration of the distinction and his notion of these agencies as “appellate agencies” who can right wrongs but from whom disappointment also is learnt.

REFERENCES

Bahloul, Joelle, 1996 The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937–1962. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1992 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, trans. M. Holquist, ed. Austin: University of Texas. Bourdieu, Pierre and Loic J. D. Wacquant, 1992 An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Oxford: Polity Press. Brun, Cathrine, 2003 Local Citizens or Internally Displaced Persons? Dilemmas of Long Term Displacement in Sri Lanka. Journal of Refugee Studies 16(4):376–97. Daniel, E. Valentine, 1984 Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Hirschon, Renee, 1989 Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Holquist, Michael, 1990 Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. London: Routledge. Ismail, Qadri, 1995 Unmooring Identity: The Antinomies of Elite Muslim Self-Representation in Modern Sri Lanka. In Unmaking the Nation: The Politics of Identity and History in Modern Sri Lanka. Q. Ismail and P. Jeganathan, eds. Pp. 55–105. Colombo: Social Scientists Association. McGilvray, Dennis, 1998 Arabs, Moors, and Muslims: Sri Lankan Muslim Ethnicity in Regional Perspective. Contributions to Indian Sociology 32(2):433–83. Malkki, H. Lisa, 1999 “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees.” In Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. A. Gupta and J. Ferguson, eds. London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shanmugaratnam, Nadarajah, 2000 Forced Migration and Changing Local Political Economies: A Study from North-western Sri Lanka. Noragric Working Papers, Noragric /Agricultural University of Norway. Sriskandarajah, Dhananjayan, 2004 Sri Lanka research guide. Forced Migration Online (accessed November 2004).

7 Belonging to What? Jewish Mixed Kinship and Historical Disruption in Twentieth-Century Europe 2 Stephan Feuchtwang 2

“Belonging to what?” is a question that I and the other subjects I will introduce pose to ourselves. All of us are in families that mix Jewish with non-Jewish traditions. Two Jewish imperatives demand our attention. One is the famous principle of inheritance of Jewish identity through the mother. Equally famously, leaders of Jewish communities worry about dilution by Jews marrying out and assimilating to nonJewish objects and senses of belonging. So, the question of belonging carries a force of interpellation: “To what am I obliged to maintain some kind of loyalty?” I am including myself in this research, not just as the researcher but because I am implicated as a subject more directly than usual as far as my research experience goes. Usually I am concerned with China and Taiwan in my research and I have only close personal relations but no family of kinship in either place, while here I am concerned with Jews in Berlin and in mixed marriages. I was born in Berlin to a Jewish father and a problematically Jewish mother who was the child of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. She became Jewish by a ceremonial bath in order to marry my father. But shortly after my birth they had to flee Germany and eventually arrived in England as refugees a few months before the outbreak of war. I am married to an English woman of Anglican birth. We have not brought up our children in any religious tradition. We wanted to bring up our children as moral beings without religious sanctions (positive or negative). At the time (the 1960s and 1970s) in an unthought way we treated ourselves and

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them as new beginnings. I particularly did not wish to acknowledge my debts to my parents. But I have come around to doing so in later life, after watching and helping our own children grow to adulthood and have their children to care for and enjoy. The research I shall present is a way of approaching through others the question of how to acknowledge debts and see the direction they take you in.

Kinship, Personal History, and Nationality Kinship here is not given. It is neither blood nor law, both of which trace a large and abstract set. Rather, I shall be describing a peculiar mix of selection and obligation, fateful events and procedures of, on the one hand, denial and, on the other, selective amplification in the tracing of kinship. Above all, I will be exploring the ways in which these mixed-Jewish families have negotiated devastating acts of state violence, including in particular the Nazi-led war of European conquest. Carsten (2004:158–9) notes the ideological and in particular the nationalist uses of the parental metaphor, most intensely in war crises. But I shall not explore kinship as metaphor. Instead, I shall give examples of how the histories of nations have affected family stories, in particular the creation of family around disruption of expectations of continuity and location, of expected dependency and dependability, and their reconstruction in disrupted circumstances. The stories commemorate and secure loyalties of belonging across disruptions and across borders. I am therefore concerned with history understood in two senses. One refers to the event of irreversible and disruptive change. The second refers to the manners and institutions of relocation in a new state and the reference from there to locations in other states as envisaged in personal archives, intergenerational transmission, and personal contributions to a more public domain of record and narration. I think it is true of everyone, anywhere and in any circumstance, that we are curious about and bothered by our immediate prehistory – the time when our parents met and lived together and then conceived us. The long process of becoming adult starts from accepting that they had lives without us. It goes on to taking responsibility for the world we inherit from them, in the distance from our parents that

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we make or that is made by external events, simultaneously or eventually confirmed by their deaths. The historical disruptions that disturb and inform my subjects’ kinship are particularly dramatic accentuations of this normal process. Great catastrophes, such as war and genocide, suffered by our parents accentuate our immediate prehistories, giving them an importance greater than our own lives. Unlike so many others, we may have been fortunate enough to have had the chance to indulge a fascination and enjoyment of stories our parents told us of their own childhoods and early adulthoods and have gone on to finding ways to escape from the constraints of our dependence on them. But to an extent for us, and for many others to a far greater extent, historical disruptions have cut curiosity and fascination short, destroyed the records of their early lives, and turned them into refugees. The historical significance of the disruptive event makes more of the loss that any ordinary migrant experiences. It cuts them and us off from the extended family that kept memories, and imposes its own accentuation on the normal distance we would have sought. It makes the loss more important, turning our prehistory into an overshadowing object of search, or research.1 In becoming adult, we select significant others – not necessarily our parents. We select, to some extent, what we inherit, including a prehistory of the persona that we consider to be our own. We accept them as an external constraint of what we have become, either negatively of what we have had to avoid, or positively of what we have to follow. The dynamic of this selective kinship is acknowledgment of debt and therefore of obligation. It has a reverse side in refusal to acknowledge debt, or a refusal to respond to a demand for loyalty and obedience, the wish to be free from enforced dependence that can be threatening. Our acknowledgments are voices heard within us. Acknowledgment of debt and obligation is the result of my having invited (or permitted) voices to speak (and be heard) in my imagination and self-definition. They include not only parents or other senior kin but also spouse and children, plus influential figures like mentors, or the even more imaginary figures of forebears and God or gods and heroes. The darker, less idealized side of this selection (or invitation) is oppressive identification of significant otherness, marginalized or externalized in the masquerade of my self. The singular first person distinguishes several such internal selves and also contains them, even if it does so inconsistently and uneasily. I shall infer from our

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interviews what some of these voices, positive and negative, must have been. But I cannot have come anywhere close to the full cast of voices that any one of us had as their dramatis personae. On the issue of Jewishness, each of the families and their main protagonists that I will introduce offers a different strategy of selective acknowledgment to deal with mixed marriage and mixed parenthood and the question of native belonging. I seek here to avoid the twin terms “ethnicity” and “nationality” in order to observe without too many assumed connotations the particular identifications that we, my subjects and I, have mixed. In any case, it is always “national” even though always more than one. For each of us, one identification is also “Jewish,” which is a notoriously resolute identification that refuses to be reduced to any one of the three categories that it suggests in social science: ethnicity, religion, and nationality. For all but one of us another, national and historical, identification is “German,” variously felt and defined. Another, for the families of Baruch and Yosiv, is “Russian” in the broadest sense of ex-Soviet Union. For me it is “English” or “British.” The exception is a German Jew, whom I will call Daniel, and his family. These identifications, by others as well as by us, are impelled by political histories of revolution, war, and genocide. How each of us made and kept a family, engaging with the institutions of school, work, profession, and religion is also informed by our less formal identifications with more than one collective entity, shared with others through a landscape, a cityscape, with music and other arts and writings, food, language, and much more, and only through that to a state and its territory. Most crucial for this inquiry into kinship as selective identification is the fact that our parents or grandparents suffered, to the point of exclusion or death, from others’ identifications with their countries of belonging. I shall be writing primarily about strategies in creating a family and acknowledging lines of kinship across different histories and identifications. The number of case studies I shall present is small enough to provide personal detail and at the same time large enough to indicate a range of responses to similar circumstances. From the four families I will introduce from my research, I have picked out four men: Baruch (born 1944), Yosiv (born 1942), Daniel (born 1958), and Stephan (born 1937).2 So that I have another German Jew to compare and contrast with Daniel, I will add Berthold (born 1954) and his brothers Ronnie (born 1955) and Gabriel (born 1969), portrayed in Bodemann

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(2005), whose last interviews for his book about their extended family were conducted in 2001, the year before our interviews in Berlin. The perspectives of the wives of all these men would be different, but since many of the decisive choices were made jointly, or in agreement with their husbands, it would not be that different, as we shall see. Besides, one of the points that I seek to make is that certain shared stories and their transmission are ways of creating and maintaining a shared history, of being a family and of creating a family as a social being.3 My research colleague, Tsypylma Darieva, conducted most of the interviews upon which this chapter is based in 2002 in Berlin.4 She is fluent in Russian as well as German. Some interviews we shared, in German. I have also benefited from her previous research with some of the same people and from her observations about them throughout. But what I have written here are my own workings out of what they told her and us. Over several iterations, from transcripts to chronologies to comprehensive family stories, putting together the information and their own comments in different ways to see how they hang together, it is I who have selected from what they told us the themes that for me run through them all. I acknowledge without apology that I am informed by, or claim insight from, reflections on my own family.

Russian/German/Jewish I Baruch’s father, Israel, was swept into the Russian Revolution. His own father, a mathematical scholar and a very religious Jew, thought Israel had become unworthy of the Jewish covenant with God when he joined the Red Army in the Civil War.5 Although Israel changed his name and went to save Jews from the White Terror, Baruch’s grandfather said that no worthy member of his family would fight, and withheld his blessing. Israel deserted after being ordered to lead his squad to sack a village, and returned home to work as a dock porter, while studying political economy in the evenings. He eventually became a professional economist, but kept a Jewish life at home, passing on the family history as his father had told it to him. Baruch studied mathematics and now feels that he has been conversing with his grandfather. But he recalls that while he lived in Moscow he was not consciously Jewish. “I had no clear relationship with God.”

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God was “only on the level of feelings.” Now he stresses a rationality of conscious decisions and measures himself against the most demanding standard, the responsibility to comprehend God and in particular the first covenant, of Noah with God (Genesis ch. 9), which included the whole of humanity, before the covenant through Moses with a chosen people, the Jews. This and much else of my information on Baruch’s Russian past comes from a family history that he wrote when he was seriously ill in Germany towards the end of the 1990s. He wrote it in German, encouraged by his two older children, Russian-born but educated in Germany. Writing it came after a number of other acts that amount to a strategy in which Baruch, after deciding to emigrate, repositioned himself in Germany, and as a Jew. He told me that he had decided to be Jewish. But first he had “to make a decision to make this decision,” as he put it, out of the negative definition of Jewishness with which he was labeled in the Soviet Union. “Jewish” was a nationality of the USSR, inherited through either father or mother, and nationality was entered on every person’s internal passport and identity papers. “After emigration [to Germany in 1975] it became a conscious work. I came to an insight that I must define myself religiously to become a Mensch [a decent human being].” So in Germany he began a retrieval of his sense of himself and his Jewishness, reversing the direction he had been going in Moscow. In the Soviet Union, unlike any of his forebears, he had formed a relationship with a non-Jewish woman and they had a daughter together. Then he fell in love with a visiting German postgraduate student of Russian and she became pregnant with their son. They married and the son was born in Moscow. Baruch had already applied to emigrate to Israel, but now he changed the destination to Germany and he named his son Solomon after his father’s father. His reasons for emigrating were negatively to do with being labeled Jewish as a national identity and partly out of general intellectual dissidence. But leaving Russia and beginning a new family was a step in the formation of a new strategy of remembrance and generation. Baruch’s son says of his father’s family history: “It is not easy to hold on to this kind of information these days when we are overwhelmed with different kinds of information. There was a large family archive in Leningrad but it was annihilated (vernichtet) during the war. So my father took a major step.”

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What Baruch has written replaces the seven volumes of family history written by his grandfather, “annihilated” with the rest of the archive. What Baruch in his turn has written for his own archive comes from what he had been told by his father, Israel. The new archive is in Germany and centers on his life with Julia, the German postgraduate whom he married. Baruch credits Julia with having brought him out of his Soviet confusion and helping him to make his decision to decide to be Jewish. Baruch married her when he thought she was a non-Jew. But they decided to bring up their son as a Jew as soon as he was born. This set in train an amplification of a gradual process of maternal identification that she says had already begun for her before she went to Moscow. Julia was born in what she calls pure Nazi country in East Prussia. Her mother is a baptized Christian, but she despised Hitler. She had longer foresight of the Nazi defeat than her neighbors and, before the Soviet advance into East Prussia, she brought Julia and her sister to the west. In western Germany, they became members of a Christengemeinschaft (a Community of Christians). The school the girls went to was Protestant. When Julia began school, nothing was said about the Holocaust and Jews. She was a witness, as she put it, of how her teachers slowly became aware of the Holocaust. In the 1950s they showed the film Night and Fog, a French documentary about the Holocaust that was shown in all schools (Alain Resnais 1955). “Our class was deeply shocked,” she says with hindsight, “and from then onwards there was more and more.” Exceptionally, in 1960 this Protestant school organized ten girls to join ten girls from a French school to go on a trip to Israel. She was one of the ten. It was, she says, the first German school trip to Israel. “For me this was the moment when I understood what it is to be Jewish and when I asked precisely [about my ancestry].” She was curious to find out more about her mother’s line. Her mother’s mother, Petra, had stayed in East Prussia until the end of the war but managed to join her daughter, Julia’s mother, some years after. Julia’s mother looked after Petra until she went to live in an old people’s home, where Julia visited her regularly. Eventually, Petra told her that she was Jewish, that her mother was the child of a Jewish administrator of a sugar refinery who was emancipated enough to send his daughter to an ordinary school, a Gymnasium. The owner of a large estate nearby saw her, and was attracted to her; they began an affair,

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and when she fell pregnant, he brought her into his Christian household as his housekeeper and had their daughter, Petra, baptized. As a child Petra was teased by other children for being a Jew. She did not understand, until the house servants told her why. Her father gave her a generous dowry, married her to a Christian businessman, and together Petra and her husband bought their own landed estate in East Prussia. Julia’s mother and elder sister deny their Jewish ancestry and consider Julia’s affirmation of it defamatory. Instead they have added to their adherence to a Christian Community a further adherence to the anthroposophic movement and organization. They have made it their primary loyalty. As inheritors of Petra, including the Prussian estate but also Petra’s effects, they destroyed the diary in which Petra had written the details of her Jewish ancestry. For her part, Julia, a schoolteacher, firmly rejects anthroposophy and with it Rudolf Steiner’s pedagogy and mysticism with its antisemitic overtones. Julia’s choice of Baruch in Moscow, their having a son and deciding to bring the child up as a Jew, was a major step in the long process of her separation from her mother and sister, of finding and acknowledging her mixture, as they denied theirs. This story of secret Jewish ancestry is a common thread in the history of Jewish assimilation in Germany. Secrecy and its harder version, denial, is a strong, politicized version of the selectivity that happens in any reckoning of kinship. Following emancipation, Jewish– Christian mixture or simply abandoning Jewish religious observance became common. Even so, when it was known to non-Jewish Germans it was often stigmatized. This gradually decreased, without ever ceasing, during the extraordinary spread of Jews into urban cultural, professional, and commercial German life. But then antisemitic stigmatization hardened again into the threat of annihilation. (The story is well told by Amos Elon (2002) ). The separation of Julia from her sister and mother is how the event of the Nazi annihilation of Jews worked itself out in her mixed family. It was a long process but, for Baruch and his son Solomon, the story of Julia’s discovery of her being Jewish by matrilineal descent, which is to say by birth, has become simplified into a much shorter tale. After unification of the two Germanies, in 1990, when she had for some years known of her Jewish ancestry, Julia and Baruch went to visit the cemetery where her maternal great-grandmother was buried. Finding

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the gravestone is, in the way Baruch and Solomon tell the story, the turning point of their (the family’s) discovery of Julia’s Jewish identity. In fact, Julia had twelve years earlier become officially Jewish as the last step in her decision to bring up her son as a Jew, after consulting the rabbi who had overseen Solomon’s circumcision and being told that the lack of documentation of her Jewish matriline meant she would have to convert. Nevertheless, for the family story, her greatgrandmother’s grave is a point on the map that coordinates their orientation. As a family, their finding it has become the key to bringing her Jewishness out of shameful secrecy. In this story, Julia’s mother and sister are bad ghosts. Another graveyard, in the town in Byelorussia where Baruch’s patrifamily lived for many generations, is another coordinating point. Baruch visited it for the first time two years after his visit to the grave of Julia’s maternal great-grandmother. There he found not only twentyeight graves of his family, but also the mass grave in which Jews slaughtered by the Nazi invaders had been dumped, now marked by a memorial stone that had been vandalized. Among the bones in the mass grave were those of two other relatives about whom his father, Israel, had told him when he, Baruch, was a teenager. His father had had a child with another woman, before meeting Baruch’s mother. Both had chosen to live in his family home in Byelorussia, from whence Israel and his father had moved to St Petersburg. When urged by Israel to leave, they had chosen to remain because they thought the invading Germans would liberate them from the Soviet regime. Baruch spoke about this with far more hesitation than the other stories he told Tsypylma. It is a part of his family story that was itself hidden, because his mother had forbidden any mention of it, and it is omitted from his written family history. The dishonor of a mass grave seems to compound the darkness that shades the great light of an illustrious history of a covenant with God that Baruch celebrates in writing. The third grave that coordinates the family’s orientation is in Israel. Not long after Baruch left for Germany, his father died. Baruch had great difficulty obtaining his remains, but through persistence managed to retrieve his ashes and in Israel persuaded the burial society and a rabbi to allow rites of burial after cremation. Fifteen very difficult years later, he had established himself in Germany and could finance a return to Israel, where he found his father’s grave in upheaval, caused by the

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roots of the cypress he and a friend had planted. Above ground, the tree had been struck by lightning. They repaired the grave and left the scarred cypress “as a memorial” to Baruch’s recovery. Graves not only locate, they register when found or cared for (in their upheaval, their dishonor, their blessings, their being vandalized) major events in the vicissitudes of fate, which include historical events but only as they affect the lives that give graves their meaning. They form an important part of a family archive and its history of location and dislocation. Baruch and Julia’s partnership extends from these coordinates into Jewish and German public life. She is now retired as a schoolteacher and his work in scientific consultancy is not very engaging. Together they are profoundly interested in pedagogy and write philosophical policy statements on the humanistic Judaism that they wish to promote in Jewish schools and further education. They have also published a program on cognitive scientific humanism, which they want to be used in schools more generally. They are elaborations on what it is to be a Mensch. For Baruch they are his undertaking of the family responsibility that he has inherited, the task of understanding heathen elements in the history of Judaism. In my view, they are one of many departures from the defensive, almost shame-faced, Judaism that the protective semi-governmental Unified Communities of Jews have promoted in the main cities of Germany.

An Exchange with Solomon on Heritage Solomon, Baruch’s son, like me, and like his father before he knew otherwise, married a non-Jew. His wife Rachel is the daughter of a non-Jewish mother and a Jewish, but not religious, father who is also Baruch’s closest Moscow friend. She was born shortly before Baruch left Moscow and their parents had wondered over their infant children whether Solomon and Rachel would marry. As she approached adulthood, Rachel decided to continue to stand by her Jewish identity but also to attend Catholic church, not Russian Orthodox. To cut another famous family story short, Baruch engineered a meeting between her and Solomon in Berlin and, predestined to fall in love, they married and she was soon pregnant. Just as had happened with Julia, she agreed with Solomon to bring up their child as a Jew, and this was quickly

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followed by her giving up her Catholicism and converting to Judaism. I asked Solomon about his Judaism. But he turned my questioning around and asked me about my heritage. He observed that, while I could claim a Jewish heritage, the main turning point for people like me was whether I married a Jew or not. By marrying a non-Jew and not deciding to bring up my children as Jewish (nor asking my wife to convert to Judaism) I had, he pointed out in a challenging way, denied my children the choice to be Jewish, or at least made it difficult for them to choose to be Jewish. They would have to convert. He had already spoken, as his father had, about making a choice out of all religions, and I think you need to add to this rationality the fact that both he and his father had started from a family “feeling” of God to make the decision to be Jewish. I had also, until my Bar Mitzvah (the Jewish coming-of-age rite), been brought up, at home in boarding school holidays, with the Friday family meal and kiddush at the beginning of the sabbath, but I had not done this with our children. Solomon called this moral irresponsibility. I said I would think about what he had said and he asked me to e-mail my response to him. I never did, but here is my response. My wife is a non-Jew more completely than either Solomon’s mother or wife. My mother is Jewish only through her father and had to convert in order to marry my father. But this is less relevant than what I feel about the way Baruch and Solomon seek explicitly to answer the philosophical question “How should I live?” by a doctrine of rational choice. When Solomon asked me this question in a more aggressive form (“What is your purpose in life?”), my answer was a reflection on the few moments when I had made a choice that directed my life, and to wonder what had brought me to them. He was far more definitive: his purpose in life is procreation and the advancing of reason. The voices of Solomon and his father remind me of a demanding authority that I hear within my father’s loving voice and beyond it a sense of immense power and authority that is not necessarily interested in our lives. Another authoritative internal voice is more passionate and stylish but egoistic, from my mother. In earlier life I tried, quite successfully, to escape from both. Now I am proud of both, though not without conflicting emotions. If I were to idealize a voice, as Baruch does those of his patriline, and as Solomon does his father, I would move away from the superego of Judaic demands

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toward the splendidly cosmopolitan Berlin mother of my mother who named all five of her daughters with an Aryan and a biblical name, ran an art gallery, was a pacifist during both world wars, and passed much of that spirit to my mother. From her I inherit the cosmopolitan task of holding together Jew and non-Jew without resort to religious commitment or conversion. I choose to acknowledge a heritage full of highly ambivalent memories of both my mother and my father. But I am plagued by a sense of obligation to my Jewish heritage, which is how Solomon’s goading got to me. The research that brought me to him is a search that opened me to his challenge. As the defensive Communities of Jews in Germany keep their rituals to themselves, I too have kept my memories of Jewish ritual to myself, and until recently felt something like exposure when Jewish rituals were displayed in public, for instance in the film Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg 1993). In this research I am vicariously looking for openings from that defensive privacy.

Russian/German/Jewish II Another Russian Jewish family in Germany, the family of Yosiv, is more like me in having a much more private association with Jewish identity than Baruch and Julia.6 Yosiv’s family came to Germany more than fifteen years after Baruch, in 1991, in the great wave of emigration from Russia when the unified German government agreed to continue the policy that the East German government (the DDR) had very recently adopted, of allowing as a gesture of reparation a high quota of Russian Jews to come and settle permanently. Baruch’s family had kept away from the synagogue in Moscow because its rabbi was a KGB (secret police) informer but they were overtly Jewish. By contrast, Yosiv in Moscow had avoided all Jewish ceremonies because he did not want people to ascribe Jewish identity to him. In his own words “I always had this latent unwillingness to say I am a Jew. Not a fear, but also not a will and no interest”; “to identify yourself with the Jewish people as a nation or a group is almost dangerous.” Unlike Baruch, he does not observe any Jewish religious practices. But he takes an enthusiastic interest in and plays an organizing role in Jewish cultural activities. He too speaks German fluently, but he is strongly critical of the leadership of the Jewish Community

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insisting on German and Hebrew to the exclusion of the language (Russian) spoken by most of the members of the Jewish community in Berlin. Unlike his father and his brother, in Moscow Yosiv married a nonJewish Russian. This fact gives rise to a key story that reflects the marginality but also the residual importance of his Jewishness. It is one that all three – father, mother, and son – repeated independently in their interviews with Tsypylma. It is from a time when the son was aged 7 and at primary school in Moscow. In preparation for what should be entered on their internal passports, he had thought of identifying himself as “mixed” on his school card. This was to state the truth without secrecy. According to Yosiv, the primary school was quite pro-Jewish. They all – parents, child, and the school – wanted the boy to go on from there to a prestigious high school that included music studies. But the head of the primary school advised them that the high school was prejudiced against Jews. If the boy wanted to gain entry he stood a better chance if his name was Russian, with the usual “v” (or for a girl “-va”) ending, not a name which stood out like Yosiv’s family name, which is Germanic. To get a Russian family name, the boy should exchange it for his mother’s surname. Yosiv hesitated a while because it meant that he would not be passing on his father’s name, since they had no other children. But they decided to do as the director advised. It had the desired effect, their son entered the music high school. In fact, he retains the surname in Berlin which makes him stand out as Russian. Yosiv comforts himself that “nothing has changed in his personality, he still loves his Jewish relatives,” and then adds, “Moreover he looks very like me.” Yosiv and his wife were, like Baruch, members of the Soviet intelligentsia, university-educated scientists with strong inclinations to the great traditions of European (including Russian) literature and, for both Yosiv and his wife, theater. They did not know each other, but both families were in the privileged class from which nearly all dissidents came, enjoying a certain but danger-strewn freedom of expression and circulation of ideas and creative work. In addition, they had all experienced antisemitism, but treated it as peripheral. When Tsypylma asked Yosiv’s wife Maria what she knew about the Nazi annihilation of Jews, she gave a brief version of the big defining moment for his family. The story draws her into his more extended family. It is a story of Yosiv’s mother and aunt, retold by every other

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member of the family. The sisters had to flee their home city of Minsk as it was bombed by the advancing German army, leaving behind Yosiv’s maternal grandmother. They later learned of her death in the Nazi slaughter of the Minsk Jewish community. Yosiv had told her about it before they were married. Such stories are omitted in Soviet schoolbooks. According to Maria, those she used as a teacher contained “just one or two sentences about the Holocaust.” But because the school was one for adult education, there was more discussion among the students. She remembered particularly that some of them were Russian Germans fed up with their names being taken to be Jewish. In this antisemitic atmosphere, as Yosiv commented twice to Tsypylma, the singling out of Jews by Nazis for slaughter was a taboo subject in the Soviet Union. “I could never believe and tried to forget such rumors.” In Germany, the story of the flight from Minsk by Yosiv’s mother and aunt became more pronounced as they learned more about the Nazi annihilation and the reparations and memorials for Jews in Germany. As Yosiv’s son said, “Several times I heard about how they fled from Minsk to Kazan. It is significant for our family story. We never forget it.” But it did not make them more openly Jewish. He too insists on his private and personal sense of a relationship with God. Unlike Baruch, Yosiv’s public life is entirely outside Jewish religion. He is a writer and broadcaster in Russian and a voluntary organizer for the Jewish Community of cultural events involving artists who are Jewish by birth. Their son is a sound engineer with a preference for the music of his cosmopolitan Berlin colleagues and friends, whom he listed as Arabic, Egyptian, and Turkish.

Survivor German I Turning now to Jewish families that have been in Germany far longer than either Baruch’s or Yosiv’s, I select the three sons of Albert in a family described by Bodemann (2005). For them, what is now commemorated as the Holocaust is right at the center of their story, whereas for the two Russian families of Baruch and Yosiv it is not, though their stories are certainly touched by it. Albert and his two brothers are among the families of survivors of the annihilation and

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labor camps who stayed in Germany. Most of them had been transported to the camps from Poland and the other countries of what became the Soviet bloc, as well as Russia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia in the USSR, and were then placed in displaced persons camps, usually in Germany. Their remaining in Germany rather than going to Israel is a cause of anxious explanation, particularly to members of the same family who live in Israel. At the same time, remaining in Germany is colored by another defensive anxiety, similar to that expressed by other German Jewish families reported to me by a Berlin therapist counseling survivors and their children. She told me that they say they are the reminding thorn (schtichel), showing that Hitler did not succeed in his project of annihilation. Albert used a more Yiddish word, daffka (defiance) (Bodemann 2005:19). The story that binds the extended family together is about what happened after survival. As the family he founded with his Swiss Jewish wife, Eva, grew, so did the household furnishings business that Albert founded with his brothers. He was the managing director and made sure it provided not only for his children’s welfare but also for his brothers and their families. To Albert, family was everything. As one of his sons, Ronnie, said, it felt like “everything outside was bad” and that it was “us against the world” (Bodemann 2005:109). But Albert’s brothers became increasingly fractious and fell out. The business collapsed soon after Albert’s death. Having fallen out, they do not deny each other’s existence, but they each stand as negatives to the other. Members of each brother’s family refer to the others as a contrasting character, such that the family remains a character repertoire for them (Bodemann 2005:23, 33). Beyond the stories of the business and blame for its collapse, all the family retell tales of the three brothers’ successful survival, their triumphs of mutual support and of occasional acts by SS guards that saved their lives. But on his deathbed, Albert coming out of a coma and seeing his son Berthold at his bedside, said, “We have to get out of here, because the SS is coming” (Bodemann 2005:69). Let us now see the different ways Albert’s three sons found of being German and Jewish. Berthold is the eldest. He tried to keep the family business going after his father died, until it collapsed. Like Baruch’s father, Albert wanted to be buried in Israel. In order to arrange this, Berthold had to acquire the help of the nearest German Jewish Burial Society and found that it charged an exorbitant fee. This just

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confirmed for him a distrust of the Jewish Community inherited from his father, who had refused to join the Jewish Administration of the Polish ghetto in which he was confined, and then found that he was on the first list of deportees that the Administration drew up.7 Berthold’s partner (they are not married) is not Jewish, but he says they will bring up as Jewish the children they plan to have. He will personally determine what kind of “Jewish.” “As far as I am concerned, Jewishness and a certain humaneness belong together. Where that basic premise does not exist, those people [in the organized Community] will not tell me what is Jewish and what is not” (Bodemann 2005:87). Berthold follows his own sense of being both Jewish and German within a private family base, coming out of a family trajectory of distrust but not out of a fear of antisemitism and not from a camp survivor’s fear of the Nazi SS that had lived on in his father. Ronnie, the next of the three sons of Albert, breaks out of the defensive family confinement by overtly enjoying life, saying that the petty conflicts between his father and his uncles destroyed the great gift of life that they had achieved by their survival (Bodemann 2005:115). He hates the continued profession of the victim role by German Jewish organizations and concludes that he is German and “never felt very Jewish” (Bodemann 2005:118). Gabriel, the youngest of Albert’s sons, has a much more public way of being both German and Jewish and of having fun. He is a successful young entrepreneur who runs a radio station and an advertising agency. The greatest fun for him is as producer of a daily radio show, in which he can clown around. One weekly show featured a couple of Turks telling Turkish jokes against themselves using Turkish-accented German. Another show, partly in Yiddish, featured himself (speaking little) doing the same with a Jewish Yiddish-speaking co-worker. The more politically correct among his audience, including both the German Catholic Church and the Jewish Community, objected (Bodemann 2005:171). He had done it as a celebration of the heritage of Jewish humor. As Bodemann comments, Gabriel is bold and subversive. “If all goes well between Germans and Jews in the next decades, then Gabriel’s interesting approach, informed by his optimism, might exemplify a possible future path for German–Jewish existence” (Bodemann 2005:20–1). He brings out into the open the Jewishness of his heritage and makes it possible for everyone to know

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about and enjoy it, much as many other Jewish comedians have done elsewhere.

Survivor German II Last, I come to Daniel’s entirely German mixed Jewishness, in which the Jewish element is both personal, like Yosiv’s and Berthold’s, and public, like Baruch’s, in the writing of books and broadcasts. But where Baruch’s writing is pedagogic and grounded in his interpretation of Jewish scripture, Daniel’s books and broadcasts have been interviews concerned with the Shoa (the Holocaust) and have no reference to scripture. Daniel is the child of a half-Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother and he is married to a non-Jew. He recalls his father’s death in 2000 with a story much like the one Berthold told of his father, Albert. During an operation on his back, Daniel’s father was infected by a hospital virus and put into an isolation room where Daniel and his wife visited him in masks and gowns. In the dim light, with windows shuttered, his father eventually recognized his son by his eyes and spoke: “Daniel, pay heed, there are doctors here, some are Nazi doctors, some are Jewish doctors and the Jewish doctors are on our side, the Nazi doctors want to kill us.” Typically, Daniel put this in historical context: “Everyone who has been able to has said in my interviews that victims of the Shoa do this on their deathbeds. I knew this as a journalist, but now it was happening to me.” Daniel’s father was the son of a non-Jewish mother and a Jewish father with a German name, Franz. Franz was a proud Prussian jurist, lover of German culture, part of the great assimilation of emancipated Jews in Germany, but Daniel’s father had then experienced the intense humiliation and isolation that teachers made even mixed Jewish schoolchildren feel under the Nazi regime. In 1944, Daniel’s father’s quarterJewishness became lethal when it was decided that mixed Jews (Mischling) like him should be rounded up and deported to annihilation camps. He went into hiding. He was one of a surprisingly large number of so-called U-boats, who managed to survive by their wits and with the help of some of their fellow Berliners.8 He described to his children how he survived in cellars and lofts until May 1945, when he was hiding in a one-person bunker in possession of a can of fish

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and a radio and under the crossfire between Russian troops and Hitler Youth children. He recalled the sunshine, blue skies and singing birds on May 8 when firing ceased and he climbed out of his bunker. But as with Albert’s stories of survival, this one is accompanied by “traumas,” as Daniel called them. They are vignettes of horror, of his father witnessing the deaths of comrades. For instance he saw a close friend strung up and hanged from a lamppost. In the American zone of Berlin his father then trained as an architect and married a fellow student architect, daughter of an unapologetic Nazi who was trying to live down her father’s now stigmatized past. They had two sons, of whom Daniel is the younger. According to Daniel, what their father passed on to them was an unceasing, compulsively repeated lament about Auschwitz and the horrors he witnessed: “My father had a terrible feeling of guilt that he had survived and had seen people of his age being taken to be killed in concentration camps.” The counterpoint of these traumas was an equally repeated idolization of his father’s father, Franz: “I grew up with the sentiment ‘Daddy was always kind, always fair’.” Daniel called this and his father’s other stories “transfigured anecdotes” and “stereotypical stories.” He says it has taken his removal, in the next generation, to be able to face and find a more factual and documented story. Daniel’s father had told a story of his own father dying of a heart attack in 1937. But Daniel has found a document in the remaining archives of the Central Court that on April 24, 1933 Franz was suspended from his employment for being a non-Aryan. From an aunt he has learned that, after spending years going to a favorite coffee house instead of to work, and reading the newspapers with increasing dread, Franz died not of a heart attack but by taking poison and hoping by his death to protect his children from annihilation. The more factual story is no less tragic or dramatic. In fact it is more heroic, and it is the one Daniel passes on to his own children. Like Baruch, Daniel has written a family history that in his case includes an album of photographs and documents. In addition, in the public sphere, Daniel has been preccupied with recording, broadcasting, and publishing interviews with well-known survivors of the concentration camps and their children. He describes what he has written as “leading to and from Auschwitz.” “The Cold War is unthinkable without Auschwitz,” he claims. He placed this peculiarly German, and perhaps also peculiarly Jewish, version of world history under the

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authority of one of his interviewees who he supposes to have said that “The division of Germany, and so also the Cold War, is in the end something that began in 1937.” Checking this against Daniel’s book, I found that there is no mention of 1937 by his interlocutor. Daniel seems to have latched on to it in our interview for no other reason than it being the year of his grandfather’s suicide. Baruch chose, as he put it, to make his destiny (Schicksal ) a positive Judaism. By contrast, Daniel is German first, but Jewish by his inheritance of the negative legacy, the destiny of Nazi antisemitism: “I belong to my destiny community (Schicksalsgemeinschaft). I belong to my land, I am German. I know all the ups and downs of German history.” His family history and his researched knowledge of the camps are at his children’s disposal. “My elder daughter [aged 11] has started to learn something [about the concentration and annihilation camps at school]. But most information she receives comes from me and my wife, not from school.” In passing on his knowledge, he tells her a little at a time as appropriate, taking care not to repeat his own experience: “My father never kept silence, rather he told me everything . . . Instead of therapists he used his boys, especially my brother.” His elder brother had not been able to bear the burden. He joined the student movement in the 1960s, not in order to demand answers from his parents as many of his student comrades did, but on the contrary to get away from them. Daniel’s family, like that of the family of Baruch’s wife Julia, has split over their mixture. His brother inherited his mother’s fair hair and blue eyes, Daniel his father’s dark hair and brown eyes. In 1977, his brother could bear living in Germany no longer and, with their mother, went to live in Italy. Daniel has kept on trying to make his German destiny and its Jewish content a public work. “My whole book, through which you [Tsypylma] and I were introduced to each other, is surely built, so to speak, for completion as my father lay dying. I had to work myself around that, so to speak. During the process of his death I arranged to have the interviews published. I think that is my way of getting through the death process. It really released in me the wish to finish the book.” Like Yosiv, Daniel keeps God to himself: “I have my individual notion of God, but I am not a member of any religious community. Because I think that it is not right for me personally with such a family

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history to belong to a religious community. I have my individual connection with my God.”

In Sum: Strategies for a Present and Future Location In Jewish traditional law, halachah, if the mother is not Jewish, the decision to bring up the children with Jewish family rituals presses, if not requires, the mother to convert to Judaism through a course of religious teaching followed by ritual bathing. But some of us – Yosiv, Daniel, and probably Berthold – chose to bring up children with the knowledge that they are partly Jewish, but without Jewish family rituals and without conversion. In either case, all families that include a Jewish line have also to negotiate the negative of being Jewish. Each has worked out personal strategies that play out historical events and in turn make history, in the sense of marking out ways of being Jewish in post-genocide Germany or in avowal or disavowal of also being German. The range of responses these families demonstrate goes well beyond those of the people who lead their lives within the institutions of the Unified Communities of Jews in Germany: a restricted, Jewish, and accusatory public life. Baruch and Julia, through the story of Baruch’s patriline and the discovery of Julia’s Jewish matriline, pursue a humanistic Judaism that hopes to open the Jewish Community to a greater, German public life. Yosiv, Maria, and their son, through the story of the flight from Minsk and memories of being part of an intelligentsia, pursue a culturally but not religiously Jewish public life, absorbed into a Berlin-based cosmopolitanism. Daniel, through the history of his assimilated and part-Jewish father and father’s father’s suffering Nazi antisemitism, pursues a public life in which stories of “Auschwitz” are at the center of political and cultural postwar Germany. Of the three sons of the camp survivor Albert, Berthold restricts his Jewish life to his family, Ronnie is hardly Jewish at all, but Gabriel openly enjoins the public to celebrate Jewish humor and culture. I, on the other hand, have not passed on a family Jewish life but have entered this research as part of a public resource stemming from my attempt to come to terms with a positive as well as a negative Jewish identification that I share with the others: our pressing parental prehistory.

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Temporal disruption and relocation must be taken together in describing the families’ strategies. Each makes a different space of belonging within, but not constrained by, a national territory or a single national history. From their bases in the united Germany of the European Union, temporal disruption is filled with stories that put the former life behind them. The series of befores is long for Baruch. It is much shorter for the three children of Albert, but they know that their cousin, second son of their father’s youngest brother, took his parents to visit not only Auschwitz but also the Polish towns from which they had come (Bodemann 2005:277). The stories they tell mark and are material parts of their strategies to establish family being and lines of kinship, but not continuity. They are better described as strategies establishing a series of pasts. They mark a continuity of kinship as a series of disruptions. All of them reserve a personal and familial from a public domain, each with its own dimensions. All tell a family story that refers to and is authorized by reference to larger national stories of disruption and to publications and documents in the public domain. And many of them make interventions in the public domain, creating or interpreting a more public history. Instead of the substances of blood, milk, and bone, I contend that their substances are voices or images in their lived selves. The materials of kinship are archives (graves, documents of marriage, conversion, birth, dismissal from a job, a destroyed diary, photographs). Their code is the selection of a line of identification and a sense of direction through stories that make family, and orient belonging.

NOTES

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2 3

For the centrality of becoming adult to any account of kinship and for stimulating these reflections I am in debt to her delightful inaugural lecture as Professor of Anthropology, March 2005, whose text Janet Carsten kindly sent me. Except for mine, I have disguised names and left out identifying facts. I understand “social being” along the lines suggested by Pierre Bourdieu (2000) to be a practical and temporal learning through experience of a hierarchy of the chances of social recognition and of aspiration to social existence.

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Tsypylma Darieva received her PhD from the Humboldt University of Berlin and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology before taking her current position as postdoctoral research fellow and teacher at the Department for European Ethnology, Humboldt University. She has conducted fieldwork in Germany, Great Britain, and Kazakhstan focusing on migration, media, and social memory. Her works include Russkij Berlin: Migranten und Medien in Berlin und London (Münster, 2004). As a marker of monotheism and out of respect for the religious, I capitalize the initial letter of God throughout. I have written another account of Yosiv’s family (Feuchtwang 2005). Albert’s younger brother, sharing the same memory, points out that, since this was a deportation to a labor camp, it actually saved Albert’s life (Bodemann 2005:140–1). “One thousand four hundred and sixteen Berlin Jews had survived the war as ‘illegals’ in hiding,” according to a 1947 count cited by Michael Brenner (1997:42).

REFERENCES

Bodemann, Y. Michal, 2005 A Jewish Family in Germany Today: An Intimate Portrait. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, 2000 Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brenner, Michael, 1997 After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish lives in Postwar Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Carsten, Janet, 2004 After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elon, Amos, 2002 The Pity of It All: A History of Jews in Germany 1743– 1933. New York: Metropolitan Books. Feuchtwang, Stephan, 2005 Mythical Moments in National and Other Family Histories. History Workshop Journal 59:179–93.

8 Threading Time in the Biographies of London Sex Workers 2 Sophie Day 2

Introduction Kinship and memory are so thoroughly co-implicated that it is hard to avoid circularity or tautology in addressing either. Biographies, however, provide a frame in which to explore those memories that are currently resonant, including different forms of kinship, and including too a sense of belonging that is divorced from, or opposed to, normative kinship idioms. There are a good many different ways of presenting and understanding these. Thus, a life cycle idiom has been rejected largely because it presented individuals passing through certain key stages as they developed and matured. It has been replaced by an idea of the life course that, despite its many different forms, accords memories a much more central role in understanding the relationships that an individual makes over time. Age, for example, is synchronized with developments in the household and wider historical changes by reference to social convoys or cohorts who experience the passing of time collectively and often through “routine memory work”, poring over photographs, recollecting the past, or scanning the obituary pages. Social markers such as marriage or divorce, retirement or leaving school, are not seen as stages but transitions or turning points according to the way they are interpreted (Hareven 1978). The cycles of individuals or households in earlier models are replaced by a fundamentally historical approach, in which different historical, household, and personal times are interwoven through a linear framework. Note, for

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example, the riverine imagery that Hareven introduced over and beyond the term “course” in her analogy between members of a family and a shoal of fish, moving in and out of the group, and establishing or reforming similar groups over time (1978:5; see also 1982). Yet, this interest in the interplay between different processes, for example, between home and work – often probed through questions about the timing of transitions – may distort the subject matter. Memories and kinship practices are not just reflected in biographies but also constitute them, and they may make times that are uneven and discontinuous. I submit that the metaphors of rivers or courses, along with this emphasis on timing and the social recognition of significant transitions, unwittingly import dominant views of what biographies should be alongside a more neutral view of the passage of time, rooted perhaps in chronology or biological processes of aging. What is it that is integrated or synchronized? What vision of continuity is assumed? I shall refer to two biographies in order to highlight differences between the kinship frames that organize biographies at different points in time, looking prospectively rather than adopting the more common approach that focuses on older people reflecting retrospectively on their lives. These biographies derive from research about sex work in London that I conducted at the end of the 1980s, which led into a series of further projects with my colleague, Helen Ward.1 These stories raise questions about the metaphors of continuity and integration that are so prominent in biographical idioms and yet so clearly untrue to life. Biographical disruption is a term often applied to lives momentarily or chronically caught by illness or trauma. Sex work might be presented in similar terms, at least from the perspective of efforts today and in the past to “reintegrate” prostitutes. Certainly, many sex workers aspired to a success and respectability through which their present occupation would disappear from view. The women I discuss were ambivalent about the attractions of that mainstream, but they still sought to integrate and reintegrate their past, present, and future lives. They became more rather than less ambivalent about a sense of time passing, neutrally, and more rather than less skeptical of any sense of continuity that they could take for granted in their lives. Related arguments have been made in explorations of a range of largely subaltern life stories, and I hope that the following illustrations may contribute to “histories in person” along the lines put forward,

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for example, by Dorothy Holland and Jean Lave (2001), who argued that a practice approach could illuminate the interplay between “larger” and “smaller” histories. Teleologies of progress, productivity, redemption, and so forth have been discussed so extensively in relation to larger histories that it would be invidious to single out any particular example. But I want to note the questions these women asked about their own lives in this broader context. Continuity and integration, I suspect, are recognized more in retrospect and in narratives promising some kind of resolution than they are in prospect or in much everyday practice. I am concerned that we might enlarge the purchase of dominant ideologies on reality by reproducing only certain narratives of kinship, memory, and biography.

Sex Work in London: The Traffic in Names There is such a caesura between sex work and other jobs or activities that it is not possible to cross readily from one context to another. Women who joined our research in the late 1980s said that they enjoyed talking to us about their lives for, mostly, they had to lie about their work to those outside the industry whilst, inside the industry, they rarely had the chance to reflect on the job. To the extent that we registered these comments, they simply fueled our concerns about confidentiality. When we met again in the late 1990s, I was thrilled to see some people after a gap of years, and uncomfortable with others. I failed to recognize one while another thought I was someone else, and we were often awkward about acknowledging an event or some prior confidence. In general, however, we mutually acknowledged that we had shared the time that had elapsed in some way, and I realized that our research activities had created an unusual sense of common knowledge which was not distributed across other relationships. In the milieu of sex work, women joined a world with no past and no future, and no ascribed ties. Women often made friends with their colleagues and, in theory at least, distanced managers and customers through idioms of exploitation – these were the people who wanted to take their money. Laws (largely fixed in the UK by the Wolfenden Committee in the mid twentieth century), policies to control prostitution, and the general stigma associated with the industry mandate

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secrets that will be hidden from most people, but which have to be shared inside the industry. Through this process of sharing information and knowledge, women constituted social networks, relationships, and friendships based on varying degrees of trust, reciprocity, and continuity. In anthropological accounts of informal and illegal economic activities, trust is largely accommodated to the economics of incomplete knowledge about market demand and pricing; it substitutes for “imperfect” market conditions and also “grows” with use (Hirschman 1984). Among sex workers, these relationships also have to be considered in terms of general prejudice and prostitution control. Trust and shared information, hidden from other people, create a sense of community akin to other secret societies, constituted in general opposition to a mainstream based on unequal relationships, and in particular to state rules that enjoin women not to work together but to operate as isolated individuals.2 Women share information about policing, market conditions, clients, and much else as they move through the sex industry and, often, from one sector of the industry and from one town or country to another. They share information informally with colleagues and many other associates such that the money earned in sex work is perhaps less adequately represented as congealed labor power than as information (Hart 2000). From the perspective of sex workers themselves, the industry is virtually constituted by exchanges of information among small, informal, rapidly changing personal networks. The links between one worker and another, between sex workers, customers, agents, “employees” (carders, maids, and so forth) and “service providers” (such as accountants, retailers, doctors, and lawyers) make it possible to live the anomaly of working invisibly whilst simultaneously constituting a “public” market. It is this process that makes work viable.3 Sex workers learned to conceal and distribute information as they joined the milieu. Some information was simply hidden from parties such as the state but some could be shared with or sold to other parties as a precious resource. Nested within this restricted information is what I describe as secret or hidden knowledge such as “names,” “identities,” or “biographies.” I borrow this distinction between information and knowledge from Marilyn Strathern, who argued with reference to adoption in the UK, “Whether what one discovers is the basis for deciding never to see

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someone again, or for cutting off ties or welcoming them into the home, the information is already, so to speak, knowledge, that is, already embedded in the way one acts towards others and perceives the world” (1999:77–8). Strathern emphasizes that you cannot ignore this knowledge about adoption and, I would add, sex work; it is not merely information. A form of reciprocal collusion might recognize discretion, tacit knowledge, or the refusal to tell and hear secrets (Strathern 1999:77–8; see also Simmel 1950:321–9), as among sex workers and many of their family and friends from the past. Without this reciprocal collusion, relationships cannot be managed and mistrust cannot be contained or domesticated (see also Sharma 2001). Sex workers thus learned to manage biographical knowledge alongside restricted economic information. They shared their knowledge in the same relationships as the everyday business of sex work but these names and personal stories elicited great care and thought among interlocutors. Over time in the industry, women tended to acquire many identities, some of which were invested in activities that were both public and private or, alternatively, first one and then the other. Names connected activities, including different places of work. For example, one woman explained, for everywhere that I have used in the past for advertising, I have used a different name. So as soon as they call up and ask for Martha I know exactly where they are calling from. . . . Just by that first hello, my brain starts ticking and I know how much, roughly how long ago it was, because I might have changed names a few times since then. (Research participant, 2001)

She made this comment during a conversation with three other sex workers arranged for our research. As these four women spoke of the necessary subterfuge, “Martha” complained, In so many ways we have to duck and dive because we are not supposed to exist. Because we’re not supposed to be doing what we are doing, so we have to lie low in so many respects. The thing that really annoys me now that I am older and so much more experienced at it – I just admit it and I don’t give a damn what people say – but . . . you walk into a pub, you get on an aeroplane whatever, and the first thing someone asks you is, what’s your name and what do you do?

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4

I mean you two can stand up proud and say I’m a – whatever. I have to look at this person and think, “Oh my god, are they going to shout and scream and say, Oh my god, not a hooker?” And then everyone knows. Or are they going to think, “Oh good, we can get a freebie [sex for free] here or what?” Or, if it’s a woman, is she going to think, “She’s obviously after my husband.” You know, in that split second, you have to look at that person and judge can they handle it? And that’s wrong. I am quite proud of what I do.

Ducking and diving is an apt metaphor for the issues that women face when they invent new working identities but, then, have to process them in some way or another. Martha explained that she changed her name regularly so that she could place calls in terms of her advertising and manage the related biographies as well as prices. Such names5 are therefore narrative devices, organizing the past in terms of what happened and when. For example, “I didn’t go back to the agency. I was called Susanne . . .” Susanne had worked as an escort but she was lost to view as this woman moved to working on her own behalf. She was not entirely lost, however, but recollected in the story she told me, and also familiar to a few close colleagues and friends, including her flatmate who also worked in the sex industry. Women adopted new names and biographies partly because it was difficult to alter records of old names. But some names lasted and carried histories and relationships forward in time. This brought business in the way Martha noted, but it also enabled state officials and health workers such as ourselves to inscribe an identity of “public woman” (prostitute). Even when women were able to segregate a working identity or a series of identities, they experienced problems in using their earnings and contacts outside. In the conversation about “ducking and diving,” the four women talked at length about problems with banking, mortgages, and difficulties with accountants, and after some discussion one woman reflected on what had been said: “Do you find that a lot of women in this business are very resourceful? In the way you make your life fit together? And the strategies you come up with and the details you have to remember to tell people. To tell your story right. There’s just so much going on in this job.” Names were claimed in different ways, ranging from a fleeting client contact to permanent, official records, and long-term friendships. It

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was difficult to remember some of these names and the associated attributes, to “tell stories right.” It was difficult to use names appropriately and attach them to situations that changed over time. Sex workers paid careful attention to social cues before using a name or introducing an alternative, waiting, for example, until an interlocutor offered some clue. Names had the capacity to bring different identities together into the same space and the incorrect use of a name could make a working or personal identity manifest in the wrong place such as a court or clinic. When the wrong name was used among friends and colleagues, interconnections were made unwittingly or intentionally between one biography and another. A woman I knew never registered a serious assault of rape on the streets because she could not change the name in her records with the police or in the clinic; it seemed that these records were in a name that she used outside work. Later, in a police cell, her pills were taken away because they had a different name written on the bottle. On the other hand, a letter from the clinic reached her and her neighbors; it may have led to her broken jaw a week later. At times, colleagues or friends deliberately revealed secrets, and stories circulated continuously about the amounts of money an insider had won for revealing secrets to the media. More commonly, however, privileged and restricted knowledge was revealed by mistake. It seemed that associates sometimes forgot who they were talking to when a family member telephoned, and they forgot who had quarreled with whom. Secrets tended to proliferate. Everyday experiences of the state promoted varied identities that were routinely associated with extensive divisions of life, which changed continually. We never knew for sure who knew whom at the Project6 and gradually realized that it could be equally difficult for women themselves to negotiate their wider networks. Some women had but one or few working names, which had been associated with relatively stable milieux. Others, however, met at international sites, including the airports and hotels that Augé described as non-places (1995), where they often pretended a mutual ignorance. They had to remember new names for each other and recognize new appearances and histories for, previously, they might have been escorting different clients, “wearing” different looks, and telling different stories. In a working flat, on the other hand, women who worked shifts on the telephone would forget the name and descriptions they had used both for themselves and for

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their colleagues. Phone work was hard; you could keep a regular client only if you stayed “sweet,” and also remembered the appropriate names, dimensions, and tastes you had appropriated. But women often lost their temper with callers whom they could not recognize and who would probably not turn up at the door. If they did, would you remember the man when you looked through the spy hole in the door? Was he the one who liked a “domestic bedroom,” or was it the other one? Augé implies that some inner, authentic sociality has been lost in these places. Certainly, some sex workers complained about inhuman and alienating work conditions but they were just as likely to revel in the luxury of international circuits. Although many described a constant struggle to remember their own and others’ names and biographies, tastes, and attributes, they also described the excitement of being “out of time” and “out of place.”

Out of Time and Place Snapshots from a particular point in time introduce my two illustrations. Caroline loathed her work on the streets when I met her in the 1980s. Her family, she said, knew nothing of her work in London – she was supposedly an assistant at a jeweller’s. Work, including “sex” with clients, was definitively non-relational, in contrast to life with her boyfriend and her family back home. It was by means of these relationships that Caroline continued to bound sex work to the short term, which would soon be edited out of her biography. I met Maureen during the same period; she worked alone in a flat but passed her time sociably with all the other women working in neighboring flats. She was not particularly troubled by the stigma of her job for she considered it appropriate to her position as a single mother suffering health problems that made other jobs impossible. But she was concerned to bracket sex work to the short term for fear it would spoil her life. For example, she was outraged when a man who distributed her advertisements managed successfully to instigate a prosecution in which Maureen was convicted of keeping a disorderly house although she had always considered that she worked legally. She acknowledged a conspiracy of silence amongst her close friends and family, complaining on one occasion about a demand for yet more money from one of her sisters, to

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which she replied, “You have just as much of a goldmine down there as I do!” Both women hated most of what they did but considered sex work as good a job as others they had known, and one that might yield the wherewithal rapidly to get on with their lives. Caroline wanted money to set up a business and she was desperate for children. Maureen wanted some security to settle down at home with her family and, as she left the sex industry at the end of the decade, she planned to marry a long-time client, a man who had recently presented her with a ring, which she had thrown away with the comment, “Cheapskate.” He apparently returned the next day with a more appropriate pledge. Both women seemed to yearn for some wider meaning to their lives, and spoke especially about threading a sense of continuity across the rupture that divided their present occupation from the rest of their lives, including their sense of the past and the future. We closed our initial research with this cohort of sex workers in 1993. It included 354 women whom we had seen more than once and interviewed, and who had consented to ongoing research. From 1997 to 2000, we tried to contact these 354 women and managed to follow up 130 (37 percent) in some way, through meetings, routine records, and third parties, primarily colleagues. In this later research, I interviewed Caroline and Maureen again at some length. I had not met Maureen at all during the 1990s but was still in touch with Caroline. Neither was in the sex industry at this later date, having left after five to seven years.7 Subsequent snapshots illustrate how readings of family or, more accurately, a sense of belonging, had changed, how the past continued to feature as a resource for the future, how both women continued to thread biographical time and integrate their sense of self, and how, too, they had abandoned what they saw as the standard biographical quest.

Sharing Time: Contemporaries and Consociates I have implied that the passage of time promoted a sense of mutual entanglement in our lives as we grew older and shared significant life events, as well as privileged research knowledge, but I have also expressed some anxiety about the connotations of this shared time. What in fact had we shared and how widely distributed was it? Fabian,

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of course, famously criticized the conventional anthropological trope of distance, and advocated that we situate ourselves in the same “coeval” moment (Fabian 1983). Contemplating the research and the sharing of names and biographies and asking who was involved with whom over the longer term, I was forced to interrogate these concepts of sharing, and turned to Schutz’s distinctions among social relationships, also widely cited by anthropologists, in order to probe how time had yet again been rendered so homogeneous, neutral, and natural through this notion of the coeval. In The Problem of Social Reality, Schutz (1967:15–16) distinguished various biographical situations along two axes. First, there is the generational axis, “ ‘predecessors,’ upon whom I cannot act, but whose past actions and their outcome are open to my interpretation and may influence my own actions; and ‘successors,’ of whom no experience is possible but towards whom I may orient my actions in a more or less empty anticipation.” The world of successors is completely indeterminate and indeterminable, by contrast with a completely fixed and determined world of predecessors; all we can do is contemplate the future. Then, there is the quality of times shared that distinguish between consociates and contemporaries, as they grow older alongside each other. Consociates are mutually implicated in each other’s personal histories as well as political and economic changes. They share, and indeed make “genuine,” time together, synchronized and simultaneous (Schutz 1976[1932]:165). Contemporaries, by contrast, are merely related in a more “constructed” or “objective” time that passes (Schutz 1976:180). This characterization serves equally to describe a kinship universe through genealogical and family histories on the one hand (predecessors and successors), and through relational practices on the other (consociates and contemporaries). As I have suggested, the particular times that we might have shared in the research process or might presume were not necessarily distributed across other settings. Participants were our contemporaries who had negotiated the complex asymmetries of research, the clinic, and powerful stereotypes about prostitution. Equally, however, they were contemporaries with colleagues, friends, and family because they did not share their lives in ways that are thought to characterize intimate relationships (Giddens 1991). Women working for agencies, madams, or privately knew each other from bookings across the world where they met in pairs or threes

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and fours at clubs, restaurants, and hotels. Most built up extensive circles that included clients as well as sex workers and agents, through whom they found work. Some of these relationships among nonpersons in non-places were “inauthentic,” to use Augé’s term, or mere contemporaries to use Schutz’s, but others became critical to career development and a sense of “kinship” among consociates. Trust enabled mutual naming relationships, knowledge rather than simply information, to continue, and the use of these names established connections across domains. Over time across many work sectors, both the reciprocal use of given names and common knowledge of a range of associated names described an “inner circle,” comparable to the “chosen families” described by Weston (1991) and others. In these naming relationships, stories and memories about the past and secret world of sex work were also shared, often long after women had left the occupation. I provide further snapshots from Caroline’s and Maureen’s histories in order to indicate the complex practices of sharing that took shape over the period we knew each other. Caroline entered the sex industry young, straight from school, and idealized her family during the 1980s, when I knew her as a sex worker. She had left home, I gathered, over a fight about her boyfriend. She was desperate to have the children that would mark the start of a different life. But, when she became pregnant, she changed her mind. Initially, she was adamant that she would keep the child. As her parents would not help, she decided to stay with her grandmother and duly went home. On her return to London six months later, she explained that her parents had put so much pressure on her, threatening to cut her off, that she agreed to have a termination, which had proved extremely upsetting. As she settled back into her London work, she found a new boyfriend and became pregnant again; once more, she wanted the baby but, this time, it was her boyfriend who was vehemently opposed. Moving in with her partner, she found ordinary life too much of a shock to tolerate. With a full-time relationship in a “prison” of a flat, miles away, with her partner at work all hours, and with the ironing, shopping, and cooking to do, Caroline could not cope. It was not him; it was “the stereotype, you know, the live-in girlfriend, the wife.” When she was working during the week, she could, “adjust to a little bit of ordinary life, and then go back to my work for five days” but she could not manage “the idea that someone else is paying your

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rent and food . . . I feel like a stereotype, you know. You know, bumming through college and, at the end of it, she’ll get a job and settle down and get married and have kids. And, you know, a lovely little mum.” She concluded that she was better off living on her own, returned to the sex industry, agreed to another termination, and was persuaded to take oral contraceptives despite her misgivings. Although she still idealized her past family life, which provided a model for her own future, I had a sense that respectability was all very well so long as it remained a goal that had no concrete shape. As family life came into view, Caroline talked more about the freedom, excitement, and money in sex work. She deferred the future, imagined largely in terms of a family, and left her boyfriend for the game of sex work. Some months later, she began to leave sex work once more and, again, she came to value her diminishing freedom intensely. She wrote to us the following year from the same flat where she was living with her boyfriend; she was retraining and still without children. By 1999, when we last met, Caroline still had no children, still lived with the same man, now her husband, and had left sex work. Family and the sex industry remained interlocked as polar opposites, and yet they had almost totally changed places. Sex work stood for freedom and provided a model for some better life in the future; family stood for all the difficulties that she and other women faced. Some ten to fifteen years previously, Caroline had worked simply to get by and accumulate some capital. The relationships she had with her natal family and a series of boyfriends were hermetically sealed from the world of work, it seemed. Any relationship worth having with a boyfriend would naturally culminate in a home of her own, built around children. This was what she was working for, and saving her money towards. And yet, with experience in the industry, some of the very sharp contrasts Caroline described softened. She left prostitution as she had always intended for a more respectable future and, like other women, found herself moving into a dismal home rather than a sociable partnership and satisfying domesticity. She became agoraphobic, and scarcely left the house. She did not know how to make friends and was estranged from the family on both sides. Eventually, she took on a small job so as “to try and learn to be normal,” and settled bit by bit into a life that was not only different to any she had known but to any that she had imagined.

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Caroline found domesticity so oppressive that she left her husband three times in the early years. She also suffered the stigma attached to sex work as she attempted to build a career and “come out” to family members. She never “fitted in” as other people did. Apparently, her boyfriend had delivered an ultimatum after she returned to sex work, “Either stop and move in with me, or carry on.” Caroline said she had been working sensibly in a flat for the first time, and was saving her money. She tried to persuade her partner that she should work until the end of her lease, another couple of months: “He wasn’t having it,” largely, it seemed, in reaction to the termination. So, she said, she moved in with him reluctantly, bringing a total of only £3,000–4,000 after all that sex work. She remembered the freedom of her work, and talked of the past with nostalgia. She spoke of going into all the best hotels and how, “I loved being wined and dined, the excitement, the determination to get into the hotels, the not knowing what would happen, the intense friendships and co-operation with other women.” It was less the money than the freedom of the work that she had loved; “it was the money and also the independence. The confidence I had towards the end of my spell in prostitution. I am only just now recovering it.” We spoke of her troubles in a subsequent much loved job, where a police check would have revealed her past, and the reactions of her husband’s family when she “came out.” Caroline had left the job she liked so much, obtained a degree, and recently decided against studying for a higher degree because her experiences contradicted so much of what she had been taught. She was earning fairly well in a central London firm but did not enjoy the work. She told how her husband had admired her for walking into all those hotels as if she owned them, and how that was never a problem, and of going on the streets not knowing what would happen but having the confidence to deal with it. She had not been working as a prostitute for nearly a decade, and she said she would not work again but she missed the sort of person she had been then: “I hate to be dependent on others, I suppose I’m a feminist.” She did eventually marry her boyfriend; they had recently bought the other half of their house, which was yielding an income in the form of rent, and were contemplating children once more. Helen Ward and I recollected a different past. We remembered Caroline’s determination to make money and move out of sex work,

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her overwhelming desire for children and a “normal,” “straight” relationship. We recalled how Caroline had talked of prostitution as a form of abuse, and remembered how she had felt trapped in a series of unequal relationships. If prostitution had now been sedimented in the past, to which she was unlikely to return, it also evoked a different life, still in the future, that would deliver comparable freedom. She and her husband followed what was in some senses an alternative lifestyle: they lived as naturally as possible, anticipating a future smallholding with enough land to grow their own food and for their children. Domesticity and respectability had provided neither subjective satisfaction nor reintegration – that term applied to life histories disrupted by illness and other events, and also classically applied to programs designed to stop prostitutes working. A decade earlier, it was her past home life that had provided this kind of resource. Then, she had talked of building a domestic tranquillity that she associated with her own childhood. It was only as she came to leave sex work over a period of two or three years, and settle down with her partner, that she also came to reimagine or remember that past home in terms of inequalities and difficulties. She began to describe difficulties with her mother, and how her sibling was banned from visiting. All in all, home now and in the past were rife with trouble in the same way as work. She could not return, but only settle where she found herself, or perhaps remain forever a stranger to the world around. I am interested in how a sense of family evokes the past as a resource for the future, and constructs a sense of belonging that serves to isolate a disagreeable period in sex work to the short term, apart from the flow of life, but then fails to deliver its promise. Close up, rather than far away, this family often loses all appeal, and is reconfigured in terms of “work” and all those other difficult relationships that were precisely what had led women to leave home in the first place. The term “snapshot” suggests a distance for, close up, this family could never evoke such nostalgia or longing. Such a family never had existed, nor could it exist but, in the hugely segregated environment of sex work, pictures of past domesticity and intimacy were significant in orienting women towards a future that would be very different from the constraints of the present. Contrasting and more egalitarian relationships among peers, including men such as Caroline’s husband, originally a taxi driver for her

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agency, had been considered mere contemporaries to be held at a secure distance. As time passed, however, they became true consociates with whom and among whom women could grasp in a vivid present the other’s thoughts as they are built up step by step. They may thus share one another’s anticipations of the future as plans, or hopes or anxieties. In brief, consociates are mutually involved in one another’s biography; they are growing older together; they live, as we may call it, in a pure We-relationship. (Schutz 1967:16)

The use of names indicates the complexities of living multiple biographies. Sex workers became consociates and contemporaries, sometimes substituting for family and sometimes virtual strangers. It was never altogether obvious to any of us what it might mean to “share time.” None of us could mark the passage of time in any obvious way as “routine memory work” of the kind considered so characteristic of kin relations (Morgan 1996:142–5; Finch and Mason 2000:14), and social continuity. Most women had fled their family roots and reconstructed conditional links only through motherhood, fearful of the hierarchies and dependencies associated with their families as in most “straight” life. Shared times among consociates could not be counted upon any more to create a common world or sense of intimacy, since they too could readily tip into exploitation or betrayal. Both fields attracted ambivalence; both straddled a sense of intimacy and oppression. Caroline’s natal family had perhaps provided a resource through which to imagine and realize her own but, in practice, she came to value sex work more and more. All those times and places shared with her colleagues and her husband had created, I imagine, that “vivid” present through which a subjective sense of time and relationship was embodied. To abandon that present-past would exact a high price as Irena, protagonist of Kundera’s Ignorance, explained. Irena contemplated a Great Return to her homeland from exile in France but realized, I could go back and live with them, but there’d be a condition: I’d have to lay my whole life with you, with all of you, with the French, solemnly on the altar of the homeland and set fire to it. Twenty years of my life spent abroad would go up in smoke, in a sacrificial ceremony. . . . That’s the price I’d have to pay to be pardoned. To be accepted. To become one of them again. (Kundera 2002:45)

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Caroline, it seemed, was not prepared to erase her sex work career from her biography in this way, associated as it was with intense relationships and friendships that had acquired their own past and future over the period she had spent in the sex industry.

Biographical Conventions Biographical idioms speak to a sense of time passing, to the ways in which a series of contingent events have been imbued with meaning as they are woven into the life course with its marked transitions and developments. However, that history was always also pre-scripted, not least by a sense of difference between family and work. In this way, progress in life is rooted in a spatial metaphor of stepping forward, slowly advancing in a definite and desirable direction, most likely indefinitely (Boyarin 1994, citing Bury 1932:5). As Gellner put it in his inimitable way, writing of high Victorian histories and biographies, The period of the belief in progress was also, notoriously, a bourgeois period. A middle-class life is, essentially, a career. Its education already tends to be long and marked by a self-conscious series of upward steps, and its subsequent pattern is equally, or is intended to be, a continuous ascension, whether in wealth or along the rungs of some hierarchy, or both. If an individual life is validated in such a manner, what could be more natural than that the life of mankind as a whole, or indeed the life of a cosmos, should have a similarly gratifying pattern? And both history and biology appeared to confirm such an expectation. (Gellner 1964:13)

As we acquire more and more “roles,” we progress through steps or stages of life and rearrange them into an integrated series, if only in retrospect: The competent self is one who can maintain a range of performances, who understands what is the appropriate performance in a range of situations and who, in other words, deploys an increasing repertoire of bodily controls and displays. To be in control of one’s body in the multiple transitions between the public and the private (or, rather, between publics and privates) is to be in control of one’s self. To be

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able to make such multiple performances coherent, as part of a consistent evolving autobiography, is to engage in the successful construction of a self. (Morgan 1996:119)

As many other people have noted, although primarily with reference to larger histories, time is not neutral because improvement is both anticipated and required. Although sex workers drew on general biographical conventions, including concepts of the future as an outcome of the past and of the present as a staging post, most ended up ignoring or bypassing these idioms too. Many women I knew came to question idioms of development in their own lives; they grew highly suspicious of norms suggesting a developmental logic, a sense of progress, or a telos of integration. Instead, they continued to differentiate aspects of kinship just as they did other aspects of their lives, locating sex in relationships that straddled conventional distinctions between family and work, private and public life. The particular difficulties in sex work of achieving a biography at all, insofar as this points to a continuous, integrated life story, make the conventional “plot” abundantly clear, as I show through my second example. Maureen stopped working, as planned, with some savings. We did not meet again for some ten years, when I managed to contact her through our new research project in 1999. It was lucky, Maureen told me, that she had not bought the number of shares advised by a particular client, for she had lost that money but kept what she had put into a building society. Her income was increased by disability benefits. She had the same partner as when I last knew her and had recently obtained residency in another country where she hoped to set up a small business. Maureen spent several months a year there. During the 1990s, she had also gone to college not, she explained, because of her problems reading and writing – which I had not known about – but because of her stutter. I expressed some surprise for I had not been aware of Maureen’s stutter either. It became clear that Maureen continued to distribute her biography through two different lives. I was told that Maureen, this woman’s old working name, had not had a stutter but Amanda (referring to another name she had used) had. It was much easier, she said, when she lived two lives: the stutter never affected Maureen, only Amanda, and it sounded as though it had been bad. Indeed, I began to detect a slight

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stutter as we talked (of course, I had come to see Maureen). I became fascinated by the two images of biography. On the one hand, Maureen had left sex work “to get on” with her life. She described the long painful process of learning to read and write, and she contemplated an autobiography, extending almost literally what I have glossed in terms of a process of biographical progress and development. At the same time, she had by no means left the double identity of sex work behind. “Maureen” did not agree that she had a split or double identity, for Maureen had disappeared from view; nonetheless, she explained how her sense of self varied: she was healthy in the Caribbean but sick in London, she had sex there but not here in London. She agreed that it was odd to have two boyfriends with virtually the same name. In our conversation, I heard Amanda’s stutter for the first time, as I was told how Maureen had been relegated to the past and edited out of her evolving biography. Little was left of Maureen, an identity of some fifteen years’ standing, “only my sister,” I was told, whose name she had borrowed. Yet, traces of Maureen, it seems to me, had been carried forward outside sex work into Amanda’s new life, distributed across two countries, where she was sick in one and healthy in the other, sexually active in one but not the other. I do not want to put too many words into the mouths of participants. While I read these biographies as critiques of the very idea of progress, the women I have cited did not, or at least not systematically. Maureen, for example, left sex work, as she had planned, within the short term. Nonetheless, dominant idioms of integration and reintegration, in which family life, past and present, organizes biographies in the form of a beacon towards some future resolution, or story that can be told, had much less of a purchase than I had assumed. Visions of the family promoted the sense of contrast and differentiation that I have described between belonging in a family and the alienation of work, between past family life and a new kinship among consociates. These different frames were not necessarily capable of reconciliation any more than the many kinship frames we all employ. They figured in these prospective biographies in many ways, defining a sense of belonging and of alienation, of continuity and disruption, connoting both a sense of roots and that unquestioned refuge, and also an area of extreme ambivalence, through which you might have to sacrifice all that mattered in life.

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Conclusion In responding to my initial question about the largely positive senses we attribute to kinship as a source of history and continuity in our lives, I wonder how far these attributes might not have been imported, in fact, from widespread biographical idioms that have not generally been considered part of the study of kinship per se. I have attempted to document multiple senses of the times that were shared and simply passed between 1986 and 2000 in order to demonstrate that it was difficult, if not impossible, to link times past, present, and future in sex work by reference either to some primordial sense of roots and of links that existed “beforehand” or to a contrasting sense of relations that were made in the manner of chosen families through practices of sharing. In a context in which it is impossible “to tell your story right,” or to tell it at all, it becomes possible to see how biographical conventions privilege memories of continuity over time that lead us to look back retrospectively on the integration we have achieved. Robert Nisbet (1970:352) wrote: Nowhere is knowledge of metaphor and of its ambience more important than with respect to the ways in which we seek to deal with change, events, cause, time, growth, development . . . with those elements of our milieu that we call the past, those we call the present, and those we regard as anticipations of the future.

Nisbet elaborated with reference to two important metaphors concerning genealogy and growth. On the former, he suggests, “Rob the mind, especially the Western mind, of its substratum of belief in the appositeness to time, place, and circumstance, of the metaphors of genealogy and generation, and we should be bereft indeed” (1970:352). We live in metaphors where events “give birth” to events, changes to changes, and actions to actions. And, of course, causal ascription is built into the genealogical framework that is applied to “kinship” or “memory” as much as “history” or “biography.” He asks of his second metaphor, How can we resist references to growth, maturation, decline, and decay on the part of an organism? Again, this view applies as much to the structures of the individual or kinship as to histories of civilizations and empires: “Some may emphasise the seed itself, the ‘origin’; others the upswing, that is, ‘progress’ or ‘development’; still others the

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downswing of the cycle, that is, ‘decay,’ ‘degeneration’; and everybody, of course, is interested in the ‘end’ or ‘purpose’ ” (1971:358). Nisbet concluded with a caution against the premise of continuity embedded in both these metaphors: “maybe historians [using genealogical metaphors] and social scientists [using metaphors of growth] will abandon worship at the altar of cumulative continuity that has, above anything I can think of, made difficult the useful understanding of past and present” (1971:362) in favor of “full attention to time, place, and circumstance” (1971:363). Dorothy Holland and Jean Lave (2001) suggested that a practice perspective would contribute to a history in which the person was historicized alongside other practices so as to avoid an ahistorical, asocial, essentialist perspective on identity. Stories, autobiographies, and kinship practices can be accorded the same historical attention as group membership and chronologies of events. Attending to what Holland and Lave (2001) describe as the innermost, generative, formative aspects of subjects as much as other historical events and processes, I find it hard to differentiate kinship and memory practices from the external and largely humiliating material environment surrounding sex workers. But I find it just as hard to differentiate them from other histories involving similar metaphors of continuity, and all their associated teleologies.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Praed Street Project participants and to the many collaborators who have contributed to this work over the years, particularly my long-term colleague, Helen Ward. My research was supported by the Wellcome Trust (grant number 053592) and earlier AVERT, North West Thames Regional Health Authority, and the Jefferiss Research Trust. Thanks also to participants at the Kinship and Memory workshop in Edinburgh 2004 for their comments, and to my colleagues, Rebecca Cassidy, Mao Mollona, and Frances Pine for useful references.

NOTES

1

I refer especially to our study of changes in the London sex industry, supported by the Wellcome Trust, 1997–2000, to which Kate Cooper

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and Anna Green contributed. My argument draws on sections of my monograph (Day 2007). In the UK, it is illegal to sell sexual services in any kind of association and so you cannot work legally with colleagues, through an agent, pay employees, or advertise. The majority of the workers we knew from the 1980s saw themselves as small-scale freelance entrepreneurs but they can equally be seen as disguised wage laborers. Thanks to Anna Green and Kate Cooper who facilitated this discussion, to which I refer in more detail in Day 2004. Pseudonyms are used several times over in this account. We set up the Praed Street Project to provide services to women’s workplaces and to house a drop-in; the service was officially supported by the National Health Service from the end of 1991. Although it was attached to the clinic, it is considered an outreach service. More than half of the group of 130 we followed up were, however, still in the sex industry working as prostitutes, maids, managers, and also “supported” by “regulars” known as sugar daddies.

REFERENCES

Augé, Marc, 1995 Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. J. Howe, trans. London: Verso. Boyarin, Jonathan, 1994 Space, Time and the Politics of Memory (Introduction). In Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace. J. Boyarin, ed. Pp. 1–24. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Day, Sophie, 2004 Secret Enterprise: Market Activities in London Sex Workers. In Workers and Narratives of Survival in Europe: The Management of Precariousness at the End of the Twentieth Century. A. Procoli, ed. Pp. 31–56. New York: SUNY Press. Day, Sophie, 2007 On the Game: Sex Work in London 1986–2000. London: Pluto Press. Fabian, Johannes, 1983 Time and the Other. New York: Colombia University Press. Finch, Janet and Jennifer Mason, 2000 Passing On: Kinship and Inheritance in England. London: Routledge. Gellner, Ernest, 1964 Thought and Change. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Giddens, Anthony, 1991 Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Hareven, Tamara K., ed., 1978 Transitions: The Family Life Course in Historical Perspective. New York: Academic Press. Hareven, Tamara K., 1982 Family Time and Industrial Time: The Relationship between the Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hart, K., 2000 The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal world. London: Profile Books. Hirschman, A. O., 1984 Against Parsimony: Three Easy Ways of Complicating Some Categories of Economic Discourse. The American Economic Review 74(2):89–96. Holland, Dorothy and Jean Lave, 2001 History in Person: An Introduction. In History in Person: Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities. Dorothy Holland and Jean Lave, eds. Pp. 3–33. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press; Oxford: James Currey. Kundera, Milan, 2002 Ignorance. L. Asher, trans. London: Faber & Faber. Morgan, David H. J., 1996 Family Connections: An Introduction to Family Studies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Nisbet, Robert, 1970 Genealogy, Growth, and Other Metaphors. New Literary History 1(3):351–63. Schutz, Alfred, 1967 Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality. M. Natanson ed. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Schutz, Alfred, 1976[1932] The Phenomenology of the Social World. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert, trans. London: Heinemann Educational Books. Sharma, Ursula, 2001 Trust, Privacy, Deceit. In An Anthropology of Indirect Communication. J. Hendry and C. W. Watson, eds. Pp. 115–27. London: Routledge (ASA Monographs 37). Simmel, Georg, 1950 The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Kurt H. Wolff, trans., ed. Glencoe: Free Press. Strathern, Marilyn, ed., 1999 Refusing Information. In Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. Pp. 64–86. London: Athlone Press. Weston, Kath, 1991 Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.

9 Kinship, Memory, and Time in the Lives of HIV/AIDS Patients in a North American City 2 Veena Das and Lori Leonard 2

There is a deceptive simplicity in the opening remarks of Janet Carsten’s book After Kinship in which she says that her book is at least as much about what has happened to the anthropological study of kinship in recent years as it is about what has happened to our everyday experience of kinship. We call attention to this deceptive simplicity because so much contentious debate in the field of kinship is precisely on the question of who is the “our” in the notions of “our everyday experience of kinship” (2004:8), and we take it that juxtaposing the question of kinship with that of memory might also be read as a way of opening this question. It is puzzling to us that even a radical reconceptualization of kinship such as that offered by David Schneider (1980) on American kinship managed to keep any trace of the political debates on the pathologization of certain forms of family and of sexuality outside the domain of theorizing. Yet, as Saidiya Hartman’s (1997) work shows, slavery might be seen as the ghost in the machine of kinship in the North American context. So in juxtaposing the terms kinship and memory, we take it that Carsten is also inviting us to rethink the aporias that have come to define the authoritative study of kinship. In the context of recent debates on gay kinship and marriage, critical disability studies, and domestic citizenship there is recognition that one can think of various kinds of assemblages made up of biological and non-biological relations, humans and non-humans, agents and objects that can be called kinship relations and that exceed the reach of current

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juridical conceptions of what constitutes kinship (Borneman 1996; Butler 2002; Das and Addlakha 2001; Rapp and Ginsburg 2001; Feeley-Harnik 2001; Weston 1991). Thus there is an interesting tension between the demand for state legitimization, on the one hand, and experimentation with relationships that do not have legitimacy as the ultimate form of reference on the other. We are interested in the latter as a possibility for locating the emergence of kinship in a context in which the dialectic between sovereign individual and social bondage is played out in the context of patients with HIV or AIDS. We argue that it is not simply the experience of illness in general, but the ways in which the institutional management of HIV functions in a specific local context that is important for understanding the relation between kinship and memory.

The Ethnographic Context Since March 2003 we have been interviewing adolescent girls1 who are HIV-positive and are receiving care in adolescent medicine clinics in four American cities. This work is part of a larger, five-city study seeking to understand HIV-positive adolescent girls’ engagement with health care services, and how clinical services might be structured to respond to the needs of adolescent patients. The larger study focuses on the connections between substance use, mental illness, and the use of care; however, these connections are of interest not just as they operate in the lives of individual, adolescent patients, but rather in the context of the young women’s extended networks of friends, family, and caretakers. A total of 186 young women between the ages of 16 and 24 have participated in the larger study, in addition to 100 parents or guardians and 211 peers or friends. All of the young women acquired HIV through sexual transmission rather than from their mothers at birth. It is easy to see that HIV/AIDS has already configured itself into two different kinds of diseases. Where antiretroviral drugs are available, HIV infection can be treated as a chronic disease requiring proper medical management, whereas in the absence of these drugs it can lead to repeated opportunistic infections and early death. The implementation of national treatment plans in places such as Brazil and the countries of southern Africa means that this distinction does not map neatly

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onto geographic regions or correspond to levels of resource availability. Yet, as João Biehl (2004) has shown in the case of Brazil, the free distribution of antiretrovirals has produced its own structures of differentiation within which both of these configurations persist. Despite a policy of free antiretroviral distribution, the practices of local states, the medical profession, and communities result in a sorting of subjects such that some can experience HIV as a chronic but medically manageable condition while others are left to die. Even when antiretroviral drugs do become available, however, it is imperative that these are taken with regularity because of the risks of viral mutations and the emergence of drug-resistant strains. Drug resistance, viral replication, and lowered immune function result from missing even a small proportion of the scheduled regimen.2 The young women enrolled in this study are part of one of the first adolescent cohorts that are being followed to see if the use of antiretroviral therapies and a reduction in risky sexual practices could result in HIV being experienced as a chronic, but manageable, condition. The debates on this hook into ongoing debates about the ability of adolescents to follow demanding therapeutic regimens and to change their sexual practices so as to avoid acquiring additional infections or transmitting HIV to their partners or children.3 Particularly with regard to the transmission of sexually transmitted infections, we and others have argued for the importance of expanding etiological models to include local ecologies and neighborhood characteristics, rather than focusing only on individuals’ sexual practices as sources of risk (Cohen et al. 2000, 2003; Cook et al. 1999; Fichtenberg and Ellen 2003; Jennings et al. 2004, 2005; Meyers et al. 2004; Wallace 1990). In the case of HIV infection there is the added imperative that the long-term consequences for the adolescent patient of adherence or non-adherence to antiretroviral therapies are not known either for the individual or for the population, so that the clinic is a space for both therapy and research. In this paper, we focus on the adolescent medicine clinic in a city located in the southern part of the United States, where we interviewed ten of forty-two young women enrolled in the larger study.4 We also interviewed friends and family members of all but one of the ten young women. Over the last two years we conducted a total of forty-five formal, audiotaped interviews, in addition to spending time with the young women, their friends, and family members outside the

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clinic. We met them in restaurants where we talked over meals or celebrated birthdays, at their homes, and at public events, such as when Magic Johnson came to town to speak about living with HIV. One of us attended the funeral that we describe later in the paper. We also held discussions with clinic staff, including nurses, social workers, and the physician who directs the clinic. In our initial interviews we used an interview guide that asked the young women to talk about their life histories and any specific events they thought were relevant for their experience with HIV, the clinic, social services, or relations with friends and family but questions in the interview guide were used simply as prompts if conversation stopped. In general, we followed the leads provided by the girls themselves, using interview techniques that encouraged them to amplify their observations in any direction they wished. When we met with their friends, family members, and other caretakers we did not bring up the topic of HIV, and did not speak about it unless someone else initiated discussion of the topic. Thus the research strategy we pursued was not geared towards eliciting a straightforward linear narrative but rather in seeing how the girls took an autobiographical voice in narrating the texture of their relationships and their disease. As much philosophical work on autobiographical modes of telling recognizes, the first-person pronoun stands as one among other philosophically troubled words such as knowledge, being, object, property, and name. The first-person pronoun does not have an easy referent such as “selfhood” – it is a profoundly contextual term. We argue that not only can we not imagine a stable context for the autobiographical voice here, for the disease and the institutional framing of it reveal the instability of kinship terms such as father or mother, boyfriend or child; we also need to reckon with the fact that the disease as an actant shapes memory in entirely unexpected ways.

The Institutional Commitment to Kinship of a Certain Sort The figure of the adolescent in the public health literature, especially in the context of sexually transmitted diseases, often focuses on the question of risky sexual behavior and a partner typology that classifies adolescents at risk in terms of their propensity to form non-enduring relationships or multiple partnerships (Durbin et al. 1993; Howard and

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Wang 2004; Santelli et al. 1998). Though this is not overtly stated, the discussion is embedded in ongoing policy debates in the North American political culture and policy world on “pathological” forms of family that since the Moynihan Report (US Department of Labor 1965) have singled out the black family as a site of pathology. In her compelling critique of the concept of culture in the public health research on AIDS, Nina Glick Schiller (1992:238) gives the following vignette to show how notions of culture are deployed to itemize factors of behavioral risk at the cost of the context that would make these understandable. The setting of the second vignette is a more formal meeting. A group of social scientists from various disciplines sit around a polished wood conference table at the National Institute of Mental Health. An anthropologist is presenting a study of an African American household that he conducted as part of his work with intravenous drug users. The anthropologist describes the behavior of a young African American man who is HIV-positive. The young man lives with his grandmother and brings people back to her apartment to shoot up in the bathroom. His grandmother charges a fee for each needle user who comes to shoot up in the apartment. The anthropologist carefully specifies the context of these actions. The young man cannot find a job. The grandmother has to support her grandson, herself, her teenage granddaughter who just had a baby. The teenage mother cannot apply for social service assistance since she can find no other housing and is not supposed to live in her grandmother’s public housing. But the assembled social scientists do not address the housing shortage, unemployment or racisms in their subsequent discussion of the presentation. Instead what concerns them is what they call the “dysfunctional black family.” And they call for more studies of the cultures of high-risk groups.

Our concern here is less with the critique of the hegemonic construction of culture – though obviously there is much merit to thinking this through – and more with how such conceptions translate into actions in clinical or research settings. Most of the HIV-positive patients in the adolescent clinic in our study do in fact come from minority groups because the clinic serves mostly low-income populations covered by Medicaid. The population dependent on such clinics in this locality is predominantly African American, Hispanic (especially

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immigrants from Cuba), and Haitian immigrants, with only a few poor Caucasian Americans. Of the ten young women we interviewed, five are children of Haitian immigrants who were born in this country; one has Puerto Rican parents and was also born in the US; one emigrated from Jamaica as a child; two are African American; and one is Cuban American.5 These spatial identifications of place of origin take on importance or not according to a set of contingent circumstances that might either generate connection or puncture it. The task for the clinic is to see how the patient can be made into a sovereign, autonomous individual who, over time, can learn to take responsibility for the management of the complex medical regimen and thus become a compliant patient. Becoming a compliant patient means not only that the adolescent learns to take medicines regularly and keep medical appointments, but also that she must learn to be “truthful” about her sexuality and her HIV status. This means that patients must be supported to reach a point in their lives when they can “reveal” their positive status to a sexual partner, avoid casual sex and multiple partners, and, use condoms in sexual intercourse without exception. Working with the idea that the adolescent personality is “immature,” the clinic constructs itself as a transitional space. The aspiration is that when patients are ready to “graduate” to the adult clinic they would have acquired all the characteristics needed to make them responsible, sovereign adults in relation to their illness. In accordance with the idea that the adolescent personality is somewhat loose and open-ended, and their clients come from disprivileged groups, the organizational structure tries to mirror this open-ended character of the patient/client. Thus, for instance, a patient can be late for an appointment and the physician will still see her rather than ask her to make another appointment. If a patient misses an appointment, the nurses will call her, or a person identified as a caregiver will be asked to bring the patient to the clinic. The clinic organizes many types of support services for patients, such as courses on parenting and “life skills”; support groups; case management services; therapy sessions; and referrals to community agencies for help with housing, employment, substance use, and mental health services. The social workers try to help patients find jobs or augment skills, and try to make themselves available for any emergencies that might arise. In short, the clinic tries to think of the patient/client as embedded in forms of relationships and in particular social and cultural contexts

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rather than as an autonomous individual; the goal is to make the person into the sovereign individual when she is finally ready for the transition into the adult world. The very definition of the clinic as a transitional space makes it into a space for informal interactions as well as formal ones, and we found modes of address, forms of gift-giving as well as discussions about family and friends that regard the patient as a whole person rather than as an objectified bearer of disease. Since the clinic recognized the fact that there are many forms that care-giving relationships can take, they were not wedded to a genealogical notion of kinship, but assumed that the main caregiver in an adolescent girl’s life might be a parent, a neighbor, a friend, an aunt, a step-parent, a boyfriend, or any combination of these. This is what makes it fascinating to think of how family and kinship were reconfigured at the intersection of a life and a disease.

Origins For some purposes we can think of the moment of receiving a diagnosis of HIV as a moment that has the quality of an origin. From one perspective it is possible to think of this moment of origin as having the quality of a pure event. In the strong sense of the term the event comes from nowhere – it disrupts the expected and hence puts time out of joint (Das 1995). The health care professionals who reveal the diagnosis have their own rendering of this disruption but they assume an orderly succession in phases ranging from shock and denial to final acceptance in the psychic process that is akin to mourning (KublerRoss 1969).6 However, what the clinic construes as denial is placed in a very different chronograph by the individual receiving the diagnosis – it is as if the past all at once turned on an axis, making something that was concealed break out into the open. Let us consider two different accounts of this moment of revelation. The following account is from an interview with Sammy, who was 21 when we met her, but 15 when she first received a diagnosis of AIDS. Sammy: I had this big lump growing on my neck and my mom had tried to put leaves and herbs and like native medicine and stuff on it and then it grew so bad and in school, I tried to hide it but then

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I was too sick, so they found out and they took me to hospital and stuff. There they did all kinds of tests and then they told my mother. So I saw my mother and she crying and they called my uncle and he too was crying like. I asked “Why you crying and stuff,” and when they told me I burst out laughing. The doctor thought I don’t understand but I laugh because I am free now.

From what did the diagnosis of AIDS free Sammy? Sammy had been molested as a young child by her mother’s live-in boyfriend, as had her younger sister Leena, but the freedom she was referring to was not from this man, whom she thought of as her step-father. By the time she was diagnosed this man had already abandoned their mother and returned to Haiti. The freedom that Sammy was referring to was from a “kindly” neighbor who used to drive Sammy and Leena to school every day. As we learnt in the course of our interactions with the two girls, their mother suffered from a variety of disabling conditions throughout their early childhood. She was scared to be seen outside the house for fear of being assigned to a state psychiatric facility. She was scared that her children would be taken away from her. This was not completely imaginary since Sammy had been removed to foster care once when she was about 3 years old. What facilitated her return to her mother was not clear from her narrative, but is probably related to the fact that state policies prefer placing children with their kin even if they are being placed in state custody.7 On the way to school the neighbor would stop at a small store owned by a friend of his. While Leena was sent into the store to wander among the things there, he would rape Sammy in the car. Sammy had been unable to tell anyone of her predicament with either her step-father or this neighbor. Here are bits of our conversation: Sammy: I think that was the one secret, even though I was a blabbermouth. That was the one thing that I didn’t tell nobody, except for Leena, because I think that I was too ashamed to say it to myself. I was scared to tell anybody about it. Q: And when did you bring yourself to tell Leena about that? S: I think I told her when I was little. Real little, I told her. Because she, she didn’t really remember until I reminded her. So she was real little. I think like the first time that happened, I told her and stuff. Because she was young like me, we didn’t know what to do. So it’s not like . . . It never, anything, ever help each other for that

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and stuff. And after that, I kind of remember him threatening Leena, so I just kept quiet with it. I guess I can keep a secret if I think about it, because that was one that I kept to myself. I was really scared and stuff. I remember, the guy that used to take me to school all the time, the second one that molested me. He used to talk about, “Oh, I think Leena’s ready.” And I’ll be like, “No, no, no. Leave her alone. She’s too young,” and stuff. Like when she got pregnant, he’d make comments like, “Oh, I should have had her because maybe she has my baby,” and stuff like that. I think I tried to protect her and stuff but . . . Q: So it was the first one that threatened Leena because you had told her about the second one. Threatened Leena that he was . . . ? S: No, threatened me. Q: Threatened you? S: That he was going to do something with Leena. Q: Right, right. Okay. And Leena knew about both of them or just the first one? S: Just the first one. Like the second one, she didn’t know. She knew about him but he never did anything to her. Q: And you said both of them were infected and then you got reinfected with the second one? S: Yeah. Q: Yeah, and how did you find that out? S: I found out the other one . . . The first one died of HIV and stuff, in Haiti. But I didn’t really worry about that one and stuff. The only reason I found out the second one was infected is because this girl . . . There was a girl and she used to live in our neighborhood and he used to take her to school too, like sometimes, so I think she was getting molested by him too. I saw her like the other day in the Adult Clinic . . . and her child is infected. So I was like, “He had to have it too because of what happened,” and her child was . . .

We have tried to retain the stuttering quality of the speech and the confusion of pronouns because it took us some time to sort out the story. In interviews with Leena we discovered that she (Leena) remembered being molested by the step-father but said he was not brutal; in all other respects he was a good father. Sammy elaborated on why Leena and she thought that “except for the sexual part he was a good father.” I guess . . . well, because that’s the first man figure I can remember in my life. He would take us to parties, he’ll take us out to places. He

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actually spent time with us, actually, and everything. He just like a real father. Well, my idea of a father is supposed to be, I guess, what you get from TV. And he was closer to that than anybody I thought because I really liked him as a father.

Sammy and Leena’s concern as they were growing up was not so much with revealing their sexual abuse as it was with protecting their mother from what they suspected were hostile forces aligned against them. Their mother had left Haiti because of a family dispute. According to Sammy, her mother’s younger half-sister had gotten pregnant by her (Sammy’s) father and the family blamed her mother for letting her husband go astray. In the US, Sammy’s mother reported herself as single because, according to Sammy, she thought that if one reported oneself as married, one would be deported. From her conversations it appeared to us that Sammy’s mother did not have legal papers. Two years after her arrival in the US in the late 1980s, her husband followed her and Sammy was born that year (I was the present he brought from Haiti, she said), but he never acknowledged Sammy as his daughter, accusing her mother of bearing the child with someone else. Sammy also attributes this to the fact that the mother had registered herself as single – later on, he acknowledged Leena as his daughter but not Sammy. In many of the interviews the question of who her father was would resurface. For instance, she sometimes said that she was the oldest daughter though there were four siblings in Haiti whom the mother had left behind. After her father (or her mother’s husband, depending on how one reads his rejection) left her mother, he remarried. According to an older brother who visited from Haiti once, the father had twenty-seven children in all and he kept a record of their names in an exercise book. This brother told Sammy that her name was on the list but “it was on the side” because she was not originally listed as his child but as she grew up and began to resemble him he added her name to the list. The provisional character of fatherhood – abandonment, molestation, and love modeled on TV – these were the affects distributed over the various father-like figures in Sammy and Leena’s lives. Taking the overall context of her mother’s life – the fact that she did not have any legal papers and was abandoned by her first husband – one might suspect that she might well have known what her boyfriend was doing to her daughters but was too dependent upon him

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to deal with the situation. After her boyfriend left them the family became truly destitute. They lived in an abandoned house with no electricity or running water. Their mother used to stitch quilts and sell them, and all they remembered eating was rice and beans. Sammy kept the secret of her abuse because she was scared for Leena and felt that she needed to protect her and their mother. Leena remembers it like this: Q: And what was it like? Like what can you remember of your childhood? Leena: School. I remember school. Q: Your first house, that you remember? Your first home? L: Down here, it’s on “Street Name.” Q: And that was your mom’s place or your uncle’s place? L: My mom’s. Q: Your mom’s place? L: In the area. I remember my mom saying like. Yes, I remember, like when . . . there was a house there. There was a house that momma had stayed in the house. That’s where Sammy was born and we had stayed there. Q: So do you have good memories of your childhood? Were you happy as a kid? L: I don’t think so. Q: No? L: I don’t think so because they say stuff. They always say my momma had to hide us in this lady’s house because she didn’t want . . . When they’d call . . . When my uncle and them made her go to the mental house thingy, they were going to take us and put us in foster care and momma would hide us in this lady’s house, she said. Q: To keep you from your uncle? L: To keep us from the police. Q: Oh, from the police. L: I remember that. Q: So people say your mom is mentally ill. What do you think they mean? Do you see this or do you . . . ? L: I don’t see it as bad as like what they said. But the first time my mom talked about stuff that don’t make no sense, you know that people, when they’re in their right mind, they would not say that. Q: Like what kind? L: Like sometimes my mom . . . Okay, she listens to Spanish radio. She don’t understand no Spanish and she says they’re talking about her.

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Momma don’t speak Spanish and I know my momma don’t speak Spanish. And then she said . . .

Leena and Sammy both describe a childhood in which their major task was to prevent their mother from being declared mad or incompetent. They learnt early on that they had to project what was happening in the house in such ways as to protect their privacy from the prying eyes of school teachers and vengeful uncles and policemen and something they were later to learn to call “child protective services.” Leena became pregnant when she was 14 by a boyfriend and learnt that she was HIV-positive, while Sammy learnt of her diagnosis when a lump in the neck failed to heal. Both were then removed to a foster home in a largely white neighborhood. Neither liked the foster mother or the neighborhood. It seems they were constantly moved from one home to another. Sammy tried everything to be with Leena. At the age of 18, when Leena could legally leave the foster home along with her child, they set up a kind of extended family with Leena, her son, and her boyfriend, and Sammy. Their mother sometimes lived alone, sometimes with them and sometimes with another relative such as a son or a brother. Such residential arrangements were quite common in these groups, as noted by other researchers with regard to related and unrelated cohabitants (Cancian and Reed 2001; Cherlin 1992). In her essay on houses Carsten says, “I find it impossible to say what a house is divorced from the people and the relations within it. Houses offer us a way of grasping the significance of kinship ‘from the inside,’ that is, through an exploration of the everyday intimacies that occur there” (2004:56). While emphasizing that houses provide anchors of stability (they can be havens in both a literal and a metaphorical sense), Carsten also says that through their wider links with economy and polity, houses can be fragile, vulnerable to attack and disruption. As Sammy and Leena’s memories of their house show us, life lived in an abandoned house, without electricity and running water, in the midst of an otherwise affluent society and with a mother gradually going insane, generates notions of intimacy that take the shape of a desperate protection that the children try to provide their mother. The house here is always vulnerable to the state, to the hostilities of neighbors, and to the threat of child protective services. Memories of kinship then become testimonies to the instability of kinship – we do not even

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know who is a child and who an adult. The freedom that Sammy saw in the diagnosis of AIDS was perhaps a freedom from not only the oppressive sexual abuse, but also the burden of a knowledge that she had become too tired to carry.

Another Scene of Origin The story of Nikita is completely different. At the age of 14 she went for a school graduation party and ended up in a bar with an older man with whom she had sex. “It was the first time I had sex and I got pregnant and I got HIV.” Nikita lived at that time with her mother, who was from Puerto Rico, and her step-father, who was part of the Cuban diaspora. Her own father had been arrested for a drug-related crime when she was very young and she has no memory of him. She has a brother who also lived with them. Nikita did not tell anyone about her pregnancy for nearly five months. After that, when she went for prenatal testing, she discovered that she was HIV-positive. But let’s step ahead a bit to another day when she was 15 and her son a few months old. Nikita: When I was . . . on my 15th birthday, I went out with some friends and when I came home I found [my mother] sleeping with my boyfriend, and when that happened, you know, I guess rage just took over me, and me and her just started fighting, and from that day, I haven’t talked to her and, you know, she kicked me out and I was with my son. Q: But since that time with your mom, that’s been the end of your relationship with her? N: Yeah. Q: Had your relationship become difficult earlier? Your relation with your mom, had it sort of deteriorated earlier? N: I guess when she found out I was pregnant, I don’t know what happened, but she just changed, you know, and then she would like go out to clubs and I’m sorry, but me, personally, and my brothers, too, think that, you know, a mother should be like one of those . . . not necessarily one of those old ladies, but, you know, ladies that go in the kitchen and cook cookies and come out with them “. . . I made cookies for you and your friends. You want some milk?” You know, stuff like that. Not to where she’ll come out with a see-through bra in front of your friends, and that’s embarrassing, you know? You have all your friends in the house, guys and girls, and then your mom

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comes out halfway naked talking about, “What do you guys want for dinner?” You know? I’m like, “Why don’t you put some clothes on before you show my friends everything you’ve got,” you know? Just embarrassing. Before that time, before it happened, it was like a little rocky because of the stuff that she would do. She would go to like the gas station where I had to use the payphone, she’ll walk over there in a mini-skirt and then like when a guy would come, she would bend over and it’s just embarrassing because then they look at her and automatically they’re going to get a first impression off of her, and from that they’ll be like, “Okay, so if that’s her mother, then she must be the same way,” and I’m not like that. I’m not that type of girl . . . I’m very shy about my body and, you know, I’m just personal with my stuff, you know? I’m very to myself when it comes to physical, you know? I dress nice and I, you know, dress cute and – but I don’t like to show too much, you know? I’m not the type of person that could just be like all out there and be like, “Hi. Look at left and right” [pointing to her breasts], you know? It’s just I don’t like that. I think that’s very unladylike, you know, and then it came to a point that my mom would be like, “Okay, we need some money.” I’m like, “Okay, what are you telling me?” She was like, “Well, let’s go work in a strip club.” I’m like, “Hold on. You’re my mother and you’re telling me let’s go work in a strip club?” You know? I just . . . I wasn’t . . . I didn’t know that it would ever come to a point that my mom would be telling me, “Let’s go to the strip club.” I thought it would always be like if I were to ever work in a strip club, she’d try to beat me down, or something, for, you know, being her daughter and working in a strip club. It’s degrading. But I guess she’s always been the wild card in her family, but she didn’t show it until after I got pregnant, I guess because she thought that I was pregnant, that I’d be the same way or that I’d probably do the same things that she does or . . . I don’t know.

What is so important in Nikita’s revelation of her pregnancy and her disease is that both revealed in her a potentiality – that of being her mother’s daughter – inheriting her mother’s sexual attributes, of which she was previously only half aware. Nikita would often say that both the pregnancy and the HIV were such grown-up things to happen to a child. These propelled her into an adulthood in which she seems to have lost the mother of her childhood – this new mother was transfigured into a sexual being that she did not recognize. For her mother, the pregnancy and the grown-up disease were signs (at least in the

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eyes of the daughter) that she was ready for a grown-up existence of the kind her mother liked – stripping, dressing in see-through clothes – whereas for Nikita this move into adulthood became a struggle to find a respectable bourgeois existence. We cannot take the story much further here but simply note that the baby’s father abandoned Nikita after seeing his child briefly in the delivery room. For reasons of space we cannot go into the details of how ideas of resemblance and nonresemblance play a role in establishing kinship or disowning it but it is likely that the man thought that the baby did not resemble him. Recall, in this context, Sammy’s story of how her father added her later to the list of his children as he began to sense that she resembled him rather than another cousin he initially suspected had been his wife’s lover. Nikita has since met another man, taken and left jobs as a waitress and as a research assistant for a local university, gotten married and had a second baby. In terms of external criteria, she would seem to be the ideal person that the clinic imagines in that she has a steady relationship, works, and has settled into family life. This respectability, however, is purchased at the cost of her future health, for in one fundamental respect, Nikita failed the clinic. She has never told her boyfriend – now husband – that she is HIV-positive and she has stopped taking medications because the side effects make it impossible for her to hold on to a job or to provide care to her children. At least since the classic work of Carol Stack (1974), we have known that there are systems of rights and obligations that she calls “folk” that lead to various ways in which kinship relations are aligned to provide for care. What her book does not make evident, however, is that this is not only a matter of the structure of personal kindreds, but also that the very affects that are considered appropriate between various kinds of kin are subject to constant reformations. The infliction of what is seen as “a grown-up disease” on young children, acquired through sexual contact, propels them into an adulthood that brings to light the concealed aspects of relationships. For Sammy, the diagnosis freed her from the exhaustion of the everyday terror of being raped and bearing the burden of protecting her younger sister from her abuser and her mother from the prying eyes of the state. For Nikita, the concealed aspect of her relationship with her mother had something to do with parental sexuality. The immediate impact on their lives was that Sammy and Leena had to be removed to foster care

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where they had to begin another struggle to free themselves from state-imposed forms of family. For Nikita, this led her down the road of respectability, which paradoxically compromised her ability to deal with her disease effectively.

A Funeral Within the clinic, discussion of death seemed to be taboo. Though this was not explicitly stated, the entire emphasis was on attachment to life. Yet there were few discussions when some reference to death did not surface. Sometimes this would be in the nature of a casual reference to someone who was in the program who had died. The threat of this was domesticated by what one might call an institutionally sanctioned narrative of “it was her own fault” – meaning that the person must have stopped taking medication. As we got to know the girls better, we could detect real despair. Once, Kathy, who was suffering from full-blown AIDS, congestive heart disease, and kidney failure described to us the successive deaths of three friends. One of these friends had come to her house one evening, eaten a meal with her, watched TV, and slept. In the morning Kathy had to call the paramedics because her friend wasn’t breathing and couldn’t get up. Several days later Kathy was present as her friend was taken off the respirator and died. After telling us about each of these deaths, she wondered aloud whether she was next. Neither of us encouraged further reflections on this – we, too, had internalized the idea of attachment to life. Yet, one of our biggest regrets is that we failed to take the cue and talk to Kathy about this. In our last visit with Kathy, we had eaten in a restaurant and then again visited with her brother and her in their apartment in the evening. We had walked by the sea and spoken about a new surgical procedure she was contemplating that would obviate the need for the three times a week schedule of dialysis. Within a month we heard that Kathy had suffered heart failure during dialysis and that she had gone into a coma and died. As with some other families, the story of who exactly could be designated as father or mother or caregiver in Kathy’s case was hard to determine. What was clear was that as a child she had been molested and abused by her uncle and was suffering from AIDS. She lived with her brother. Her mother had moved back to

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Haiti and her father had abandoned them and gone to live in the Bahamas. There was an aunt who occasionally brought food for Kathy. There was a young nephew for whom Kathy babysat. Otherwise, there were friends she hung out with and a couple who lived in the same housing complex who gave her assistance. Kathy’s funeral was expected to be a small affair. The clinic had collected money and received a small amount of aid from an agency to cover the costs of the burial. The father who Kathy had said had disappeared from her life somehow managed to resurface and send money towards the cost of the funeral. Lori went to attend the service that was held in a church, and that was presided over by a Haitian priest. As it turned out, the funeral brought angry recriminations between relatives and friends, and it was a violent event. First, Kathy’s friends were late because they had wanted to get T-shirts designed to commemorate Kathy. Then they couldn’t find the church because the venue had been changed several times by Kathy’s relatives who had quarreled over the arrangements. When they finally arrived, the funeral was just ending, and they were seething with rage. With the exception of Nikita, many of the young women we interviewed were used to street violence and wielded small weapons such as knives. When they approached the church screaming, some of the clinic staff became visibly scared. Kathy’s friends and the mother of one of the friends whose death Kathy had witnessed began questioning clinic staff about what had happened at the hospital and why Kathy had died. The funeral director opened the casket for a final viewing, but had to shut it quickly when one of the girls reached in to grab Kathy’s body. At a previous funeral of one of the clinic patients the body had been pulled from the casket; because of this the funeral home had initially refused to oversee the ceremony for Kathy. At the cemetery a fight broke out about the language of the service. Kathy’s aunt had wanted the service to be in Creole but others wanted it in English. Kathy’s friends angrily demanded that the pastor repeat what he was saying in English because they didn’t understand Creole. One of them accused Kathy’s aunt of letting her husband rape Kathy and give her HIV. The same patient slapped Kathy’s brother for not standing up to this aunt and insisting that the ceremony be conducted in English. The brother was grief-stricken. Many times Kathy had said that he was the only one who cared for her. Now he was left bereft. But what was striking was that death, which had not been talked

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about, now figured as the ever present possibility that was suppressed in the everyday discourse of the clinic. The knotting together of sex and death, seen through the lens of HIV infection, showed how kinship was made at the intersection of state, clinic, and family. It takes away the idea of the givenness of kinship, but what of time and memory? Michael Peletz (2001) has written about the ambivalence of kinship but our experience with the girls suggests that more is at stake than mixed emotions implied by the term ambivalence. Conjoining the terms kinship and memory opens a way for thinking about how HIV/AIDS and the autobiographical occasions provided by the management of this disease allow a certain subjectivity to emerge.

Time and Subjectivity: Towards Some Conclusions Looking back at kinship studies at the moment of their inauguration, one is struck by issues relating to time and subjectivity. In the classic formulation of Lewis Henry Morgan on classificatory kinship systems, there was a mismatch between relationship terminology and the extant procreative practices of the groups under study. This led him to think of kinship terminology as encoding memory of past practices. Time, in a way, was always out of joint as were actual kinship practices and the legal coding of these. Studies on new kinship show the same kind of mismatch between inherited ideas of kinship and the actual proliferation of relations due to new reproductive technologies. Biological relatedness and social kinship are joined together or disjoined through acts of intention. Strathern (2005) discusses a fascinating case in which the courts held that in disputed cases of parentage involving new reproductive technologies, it is the intention of the couple that initiates medical procedures to bring a child into being that constitutes claims over parentage. Yet courts of law are only one site on which notions of intention in relation to kinship are being articulated. The event of HIV/AIDS in the lives of the girls in our study similarly shows how notions of intention are articulated in the pedagogic projects of the clinic and also how the eventuality of this event brings the central place of contingency in forging relatedness to the fore. If memory is about the weight of the past, intention is about projection into the future. Yet time continues to be out of joint.

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In crafting patients into responsible, sovereign subjects in relation to their disease, the clinic staff put a great stake on the capacity of the girls to speak truthfully about their relationships. The disease was seen to convert their sexualized bodies into sources of danger not only for themselves but also for those with whom they might form a relationship – their boyfriends, their sexual partners, and any children born of these unions. Thus the orientation of the clinic was towards the future – towards a reform of their relationships and a reorientation to their own bodies. Simultaneously the diagnosis of HIV/AIDS revealed the earlier, concealed aspects of relationships – a father or father-like figure was revealed to be the one who was implicated in molestation and in the transmission of the disease or a mother was revealed as incapable of providing care. The clinic tried to encourage the emergence of a new sociality that could help convert the girls into responsible, compliant patients. This would involve not only taking medications regularly, but also keeping medical appointments, practicing safe sex, revealing their HIV status to any potential partner, and consenting to complicated medical procedures for in vitro fertilization if they wanted to have more children. Thus there are two different intentionalities that are at play here. First is the intentionality of the clinic embodied in its programs to convert the present precarious sociality in which the girls are embedded into relations that are dependable, in which truth about their HIV/AIDS status can be acknowledged and care given. This intersects with a second intentionality, that of the girls to somehow affirm their attachment to life in the face of imminent death over and above the denials and the stories of hope that the clinic puts forward. It is one thing for a court of law to locate intentionality as the basis on which parental status can be claimed in a single hands-off legal transaction and quite another thing to translate the intentionality of becoming ever watchful in one’s relations to others in the flux of everyday life. Multiplicity of parent-like figures in the lives we discussed is imbued with the affect of hurt, rejection, and violence. Recall the list of his twentyseven children that Sammy’s father made and the entry of her name as an afterthought. Under these conditions the subjectivity constituted through the various temporalities in the lives of the girls focuses more on the present moment, in the hope that the past will not repeat itself. This is their way of claiming the past rather than becoming a hostage to it – which is not to say that they expel the past completely. If

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nothing else, the disease and the presence of death around them is a reminder of how memory is embedded in the body.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to Jonathan Ellen for supporting the anthropological inquiry and the ethnographic method in trying to generate an understanding of issues relating to the social context of HIV/AIDS and its management. We also thank the staff members of the clinic who provided assistance in arranging the interviews and regret that we are unable to name the clinic for reasons of confidentiality. Our heartfelt gratitude goes to the girls and their families and friends who shared their lives with us. We thank the participants of the conference on Kinship and Memory and especially Janet Carsten for their insightful comments. This study is part of a larger study supported by National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) RO1 DA14706.

NOTES

1

2

3

We refer to the patients in this study as both “adolescent girls” and “young women.” This is because they range in age from 16 to 24 and thus straddle the age of majority, but it is also because of their ambiguous and transitional status in the clinics. In most of the sites they are eligible to receive care in the adolescent medicine clinics until the age of 24; however, in some sites transition to the adult clinic is mandated earlier. In a study conducted with ninety-nine HIV-positive patients whose adherence to combination antiretroviral therapy was monitored using a microelectronic monitoring system, Paterson et al. (2000) documented “virologic failure” in 22 percent of patients with adherence rates of 95 percent or greater; 61 percent of patients with 80 percent to 94.9 percent adherence, and 80 percent of patients with less than 80 percent adherence. Patients with adherence rates of 95 percent or greater also spent fewer days in the hospital than those with less than 95 percent adherence. Few adherence studies have been conducted with HIV-positive adolescents; the REACH study (Reaching for Excellence in Adolescent Care and Health) was the first to assess adherence to antiretrovirals among 13to 18-year-olds who acquired HIV through sex or injection drug use. Of the 161 adolescents followed, 28.3 percent reported taking all of their medications in the last month (see Murphy et al. 2001, 2003). Depression

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was associated with reduced adherence. Other “barriers” included “complications in day-to-day routines” such as being busy or having a change in one’s daily schedule, and not wanting others to know about the HIV infection or not wanting to be reminded of it. 4 The name of the city is withheld for reasons of confidentiality. All names of respondents are pseudonyms. 5 The literature on HIV/AIDS recognizes that a disproportionate number of persons with AIDS have been blacks and Hispanics although the dominant image of AIDS, at least till the end of the 1980s, was that it affected primarily white (gay) men (Friedman et al. 1987; Rogers and Williams 1987). In addition to higher prevalence and incidence rates among these populations, African Americans survive for a shorter period than whites after being diagnosed with AIDS (Duh 1991). Whitehead (1997) notes that the disproportion between whites and blacks is even greater for women of childbearing age – while African American women are 13 percent of the US population they account for 53 percent of all AIDS cases among females. 6 The stages of grief model with some modifications is widely used in clinical settings when dealing with patients suffering from chronic and life-threatening diseases. 7 The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act was signed into law in 1974 and led to a substantial increase in the number of children placed in foster care. Historically, several federal child welfare policies have paved the way for a child’s placement with relatives, beginning with the Child Welfare Act of 1978 which required agencies to keep Native American children in kinship homes where possible. The number of children in foster care dropped substantially in the 1980s following the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act which mandated states to make reasonable efforts to prevent unnecessary placement of children in the foster care system and to reunite children with families whenever possible. However, by the mid 1980s crack cocaine and the HIV/AIDS epidemic contributed to an increase in the number of children in foster care and their average length of stay (see Barbell and Freundlich 2001; Gilbert 2003). Of the 523,000 children in foster care in 2003, 35 percent were African American and 17 percent were Hispanic while 39 percent were Caucasian. Of these 46 percent were placed in non-relative foster care homes and 23 percent were placed with kin. The rest were in places like institutional homes or psychiatric hospitals (Department of Health and Human Services 2005). In Sammy and Leena’s case they were placed in several foster homes after their molestation came to light, but they had nothing positive to say about their foster homes. In two other cases the children had histories of molestation by a father or close male relative and were placed in foster homes

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of either distant relatives or non-relatives; their experiences of both their own homes and their foster homes were quite negative.

REFERENCES

Barbell, Kathy and Madelyn Freundlich, 2001 Foster Care Today. Washington DC: Casey Family Programs. Biehl, João, 2004 The Activist State: Global Pharmaceuticals, AIDS, and Citizenship in Brazil. Social Text 22(3):105–32. Biehl, João, 2005 Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley: University of California Press. Borneman, John, 1996 Until Death Do Us Part: Marriage/Death in Anthropological Discourse. American Ethnologist 23(2):215–35. Butler, Judith, 2002 Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual? Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13(1):14–44. Cancian, Maria and Deborah Reed, 2001 Changes in Family Structure: Implications for Poverty and Related Policy. In Understanding Poverty. S. H. Danziger and R. H. Haveman, eds. Pp. 69–97. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Carsten, Janet, 2004 After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cherlin, Andrew, 1992 Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Cohen, Deborah, Suzanne Spear, Richard Scribner, Patty Kissinger, Karen Mason, and John Wildgen, 2000 “Broken Windows” and the Risk of Gonorrhea. American Journal of Public Health 90:230–6. Cohen, Deborah A., Karen Mason, Ariane Bedimo, Richard Scribner, Victoria Basolo, and Thomas A. Farley, 2003. Neighborhood Physical Conditions and Health. American Journal of Public Health 93:467–71. Cook, Robert L., Rachel A. Royce, James C. Thomas, and Barbara H. Hanusa, 1999 What’s Driving an Epidemic? The Spread of Syphilis along an Interstate Highway in Rural North Carolina. American Journal of Public Health 89:369–73. Das, Veena, 1995 Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Das, Veena, and Renu Addlakha, 2001 Disability and Domestic Citizenship: Voice, Gender, and the Making of the Subject. Public Culture 13(3):511–31. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), 2005 Foster Care: Numbers and Trends. Washington DC: National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information.

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Duh, S. V., 1991 Blacks and AIDS: Causes and Origins. London: Sage Publications. Durbin, Meg, Ralph J. DiClemente, David Siegel, Flora Kravsnovsky, Nancy Lazarus, and Terry Camacho, 1993 Factors Associated with Multiple Sex Partners among Junior High School Students. Journal of Adolescent Health 14(3):202–7. Feeley-Harnik, Gillian, 2001 The Ethnography of Creation: Lewis Henry Morgan and the American Beaver. In Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. S. Franklin and S. McKinnon, eds. Pp. 54–84. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fichtenberg, Caroline M. and Jonathan M. Ellen, 2003 Moving from Core Groups to Risk Spaces. Sexually Transmitted Diseases 30(16):825–6. Friedman, Samuel R., Don C. Des Jarlais, Jo L. Southern, Abu AbdulQuader, Beny J. Primm, Conrad Meugé, Douglas S. Goldsmith, Wafaa El-Sadr, and Robert Maslansky, 1987 The AIDS Epidemic among Blacks and Hispanics: Implications for Prevention. Milibank Quarterly 65(2):455–99. Gilbert, Dorie J., 2003 African American HIV Affected Children and Adolescents: Intersecting Vulnerabilities. In African American Women and HIV/AIDS. D. J. Gilbert and E. M. Wright, eds. Pp. 85–101. New York: Praeger Publications. Hartman, Saidiya V., 1997 Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and SelfMaking in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Howard, Donna E. and Min Qi Wang, 2004 Multiple Sexual-Partner Behavior among Sexually Active U.S. Adolescent Girls. American Journal of Health Behavior 28(1):3–12. Jennings, Jacky, Barbara S. Glass, Patrice Parham, Nancy Adler, and Jonathan M. Ellen, 2004 Sex Partner Concurrency, Geographic Context, and Adolescent Sexually Transmitted Infections. Sexually Transmitted Diseases 31:733–9. Jennings, Jacky M., Frank C. Curriero, David Celentano, and Jonathan M. Ellen, 2005 Geographic Identification of High Gonorrhea Transmission Areas in Baltimore, Maryland. American Journal of Epidemiology 161:73–80. Kubler-Ross, E. 1969 Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan. Meyers, Todd, Lori Leonard, and Jonathan M. Ellen, 2004 The Clinic and Elsewhere: Illness, Sexuality, and Social Experience among Young AfricanAmerican Men in Baltimore, Maryland. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 28:67–86. Murphy, D. A., C. M. Wilson, S. J. Durako, L. R. Muenz, M. Belzer, and the Adolescent Medicine HIV/AIDS Research Network, 2001 Antiretro-

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viral Medication Adherence among the REACH HIV-Infected Adolescent Cohort in the USA. AIDS Care 13:27–40. Murphy, Debra A., Moussa Sarr, Stephen J. Durako, Anna-Barbara Moscicki, Craig M. Wilson, and Larry R. Muenz, 2003 Barriers to HAART Adherence among Human Immunodeficiency Virus-Infected Adolescents. Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine 157:249–55. Paterson, D. L., S. Swindells, J. Mohr, M. Brester, E. N. Vergis, C. Squier, M. M. Wagener, and N. Singh, 2000 Adherence to Protease Inhibitor Therapy and Outcomes in Patients with HIV Infection. Annals of Internal Medicine 133(1):21–30. Peletz, Michael, 2001 Ambivalence in Kinship Since the 1940s. In Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, eds. Pp. 413–45. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rapp, Rayna and Faye Ginsburg, 2001 Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship. Public Culture 13(3):533–56. Rogers, M. F. and W. W. Williams, 1987 AIDS in Blacks and Hispanics: Implications for Prevention. Issues in Science and Technology (Spring):89–94. Santelli, J. S., N. D. Brener, R. Lowry, A. Bhatt, and L. Zabin, 1998 Multiple Sexual Partners among U.S. Adolescents and Young Adults. Family Planning Perspectives 30(6):271–5. Schiller, Nina G., 1992 What’s Wrong with This Picture? The Hegemonic Construction of AIDS Research in the US. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 6(3):237–54. Schneider, David. M., 1980 American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stack, Carol B., 1974 All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Harper & Row. Strathern, Marilyn, 2005 Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives are Always a Surprise. New York: Cambridge University Press. United States Department of Labor, 1965 The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington DC: US Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research. Wallace, Rodrick, 1990 Urban Desertification, Public Health and Public Order: “Planned Shrinkage,” Violent Death, Substance Abuse and AIDS in the Bronx. Social Science and Medicine 31:801–13. Weston, Kath, 1991 Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press. Whitehead, Tony L., 1997 Urban Low-Income African American Men, HIV/AIDS and Gender Identity. Medical Anthropological Quarterly (N.S.) 11(4):411–47.

10 The Cares of Alice Alder: Recuperating Kinship and History in Switzerland 2 Michael Lambek 2

One bright day my research assistant, Bea Schwitter, and I took the bus from the city of St Gallen up into the excessively green hills of Appenzell and disembarked in a picturesque village of neat houses clustered around the venerable clock tower of a Reformed church. I was in this corner of Switzerland interviewing health practitioners as part of a research project on medicine and citizenship.1 Switzerland is interesting for the degree of autonomy its local communities still reserve for themselves and for its traditions of direct democracy. The canton, or rather, half-canton, of Appenzell Ausserrhoden split off in resolute but peaceful enthusiasm in 1597 from Catholic Innerrhoden. Calling itself subsequently “the most reformed little place on earth,” Appenzell Ausserrhoden (AR) was also recognized for a time as the most liberal of Swiss cantons. While this liberalism – a combination of political doctrine and economic practice – did not extend until 1989 to votes for women,2 it did include quite forthrightly the explicit profession in its constitution of “freedom of medical practice” ( freie Heiltätigkeit). Practitioners of the healing arts who lacked the credentials necessary for practice in other jurisdictions flourished in Appenzell Ausserrhoden. In a population of some 57,000 inhabitants in 2004, the number of registered practitioners of “holistic medicine” ( ganzheitliche Heilpraxis) or “naturopathy” (Naturheilpraxis) stood at 270, thus one healer for every 211 inhabitants and in comparison to 85 practitioners, or one doctor per 670 inhabitants, of allopathic medicine (Schulmedizin).3 Needless to say, clients flock to AR and health forms the main

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source of tourist revenue in what is sometimes referred to as “the Mecca of naturopathy.” The list of registered and hence regularly inspected practitioners of holistic medicine includes both those who arrived before the institution of a cantonal exam in 1987 and those certified since as a result of passing that exam.4 Yet the number of practitioners in AR is undoubtedly larger than those registered by the canton. Alice Alder is not on the official list. She is one of the healers who falls partially beneath the gaze of the state, whose practice forms part of the underground network of alternative medicine even in this most liberal of regimes of authorized practice.5 We learned about her not from an advertisement, but by Mundpropaganda, word of mouth, which is how her clients find her. A friend of Bea’s had consulted Frau Alder and highly recommended her as a “life counselor.” On the telephone Frau Alder readily agreed to an interview and indicated her support of our project by providing the names of colleagues who would be of interest to us. Because she was unofficial, Frau Alder did not have the ubiquitous sign on her house advertising a “cantonally approved naturopath” (Kantonal approbierte Naturheilpraktikerin) or listing her specialities. Even her neighbors, she later averred, did not know exactly what she did for a living. It is not evident how to distinguish kinship and memory from one another without objectifying the terms. One can analyze kinship as a function of memory or memory as a function of kinship, but it seems a category mistake to speak about the relationship between memory and kinship as though these were two discrete things. This is apparent when we listen to people speaking about the personal past. In the ordinary course of events remembering is a practice, one in which the goods are internal rather than external (MacIntyre 1984). That is to say, it is the journey (the acts of reminiscing), not the destination (specific memories), that is of the essence, or even that the journey and destination cannot be clearly distinguished from one another. Put another way, along a contrast made explicit by C. B. Macpherson (1973), remembering is a human capacity rather than a utility. The question to ask of a capacity, says Macpherson, is whether we have the power to exercise it. It is when our power to exercise the capacity is blocked, whether for external or internal reasons, or in some

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combination, that we have a problem. Then “memory” as an object rises to consciousness or is objectified in various expert discourses, as a form of what Ian Hacking calls memoro-politics (1996). When memory is conceived as a utility, questions of scarcity (or excess) arise. But that is not how memory ordinarily operates or is experienced. In the normal course of events remembering is not an object or a good at all. It is a human capacity, a practice or series of related practices – recalling, reminiscing, etc. (see Casey 1987), and it is carried out relatively unselfconsciously or at least without reference to an object or utility called “memory.” Much the same could be said of kinship, which anthropology has for far too long treated as a noun (or set of nouns, and even in the symbolic approaches to the topic) rather than a set of acts or practices. In an earlier essay (1996) I argued that remembering can be seen as a moral practice and that it occurs in the space, or movement, between the stream of embodied experience and objectified narrative, being itself neither the one nor the other. I argued further for emphasizing the inter-subjective rather than the private qualities of memory. Consider the simple question often posed by a family member or friend: “Do you remember . . .?” To reply, “Yes, I remember . . .” is to affirm a social relationship in its deep temporality. Memory in this sense has a dialogical quality and it expresses an ethic of care. This again is not dissimilar to kinship.6 I suggest that a semantic, experiential, and practical dimension along which kinship and memory are mutually implicated is that captured by the multiple connotations of the English word care. To remember is to care, and to care in several senses of the word: to care for and to care about; but also to take care of someone; to take care, as in to be careful; to have cares, as to be full of care; and to be vulnerable, to care what others say and do. Caring is the form of remembering generally characteristic of the ethos and practice of kinship everywhere. Parents care for and about their children and siblings and spouses care for and about one another, but perhaps one of the most striking things about human kinship is the way we care for and about our elders, our ascendants, and even for the dead. Recall that the great myths and tragedies – the collective memory of culture – entail the problems and foundations of kinship. Remember that the plots often hang on memory. Thus, in Sophocles’ tragedy, Thebes suffers for Oedipus’ absence of memory. Remembering is the

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7

discovery of kinship connection. Interestingly, here continuous memory is contrasted with both recollection (recuperation) and with prospection, as they are accomplished, and even conjoined, in the forecasts of Teiresias and other oracles. The myths also offer a prospect of the future, a future to be handed down and enjoyed – whether in blessing or curse – among generations of kin. In retrospection we look back and we see our mythical forebears anticipating our fate. For Oedipus, to remember kinship is not simply a matter of ideation, of the ability to recite genealogy, but of practice, of remembering to enact the correct relationships with a father and a mother. Oedipus has not taken sufficient care, either to consider his own origins or to listen to the diviners in Corinth and Thebes. Not only must Oedipus remember his parents, their failed obligations to him and his to them, but the tragedies establish the respective acts of Oedipus’ children in subsequently caring for their impaired father. As the Theban cycle continues, the care shifts to commemoration. Antigone remembers her father in ensuring his secret burial at Colonus and remembers her brother in attempting to bury him at Thebes. With these thoughts in mind I return to Alice Alder whose account offers an interesting twist on the Sophoclean theme of anagnorisis – discovery or recuperation. Frau Alder answered our ring and ushered us up to her office on the third floor, past a number of woven hangings, vases of dried flowers, and photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe. Her office too was full of objects and decorated somewhat eclectically. She sat behind a table with some cloths laid over it. We sat on chairs facing her. Behind us was a high bed or medical couch that might have been used for massage. To our left were windows hung with long pale blue curtains and strings of eggshells and feathers. A wooden chest was covered with an assortment of crystals, small sculptures, and a broken pot and there were various other curiosities around the room, including a flag with a yellow circle on a black and red background that recalled a meaningful encounter with an elderly Aboriginal man on a visit to Australia. On the desk was a large pad of drawing paper open to the top sheet. Just above this was laid out a string of beads and against it rested a neat row of freshly sharpened colored pencils ordered according to the spectrum and starting with blue on her left. When listening to clients, Frau Alder concentrates on the energy of the colors and sometimes enters a state she calls autohypnosis. The drawing she

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makes with the pencils or the colored markers also at hand affords a basis for interpreting her client’s problems. A box of tissues, a tape recorder, and a stumpy candle completed the items on her desk. On one wall hung an icon of Saint Nicholas (der heilige Niklaus), patron of healers, sailors, and farmers. The mixture of objects in the room corresponded to nothing like the medical charts or bottles and relative uniformity of design, whether modernist or traditional, we saw in the offices of other practitioners. Frau Alder herself was somehow different too. I had imagined a trim, efficient woman who would advise on bourgeois lifestyles and professional multi-tasking with a little too much satisfaction. In fact, Frau Alder proved to be one of the few slightly heavy middle-aged women I met in Switzerland. She wore a sleeveless top and vest and a large necklace in the form of a snake clasping its tail. Her smile was fleeting and her gaze somewhat indirect. However, like most other practitioners, Frau Alder was informal, friendly, and more than ready to talk about herself and her work. One of the surprises I had on starting research in Switzerland was the lack of formality in social intercourse. People address each other quite deliberately by first name, and in deference to that convention, I will refer to Frau Alder as Alice. I summarize parts of Alice’s conversation, drawn from my handwritten notes. They are mostly paraphrases but I have used quotation marks around phrases that are verbatim or very close and to remind readers that the voice is Alice Alder’s, not mine. My voice circles and interrupts in brackets and footnotes. Alice talked a good deal and it was I who eventually drew the session to a close. At the beginning her remarks were rather vague, but as she warmed up, she spoke with very little prompting or questions from me. I wanted to situate the nature of her practice, the kinds of knowledge and training she had, and the techniques used. I was also interested in why she was not registered with the canton and whether she was on the insurance rolls. Although we did discuss these issues, I focus here on the theme of kinship and memory with which she surprised me. Alice explained that in both her mother’s and father’s families there have been many generations of healers. Alice herself has worked and trained in a wide variety of therapeutic practices and indeed quite recently completed the training program of the Swiss Society of Naturopaths (NVS )8 and received a diploma. But unlike most practitioners

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who advertise and speak about specific techniques [kinesiology, reflexology, acupuncture, homeopathy, bioresonance, etc. – the list is very long], she did not wish to identify herself in that way and did not want to submit her practice to the regulation or schemes of classification of the insurance companies. Such a “technical” approach distorts the meaning of holistic practice, she averred. Alice also distinguished her perspective from allopathic medicine and the mental health professions. Instead of focusing on pathology or disease, holistic practitioners think in terms of well-being, of human being, she explained. They are concerned with harmony of force (Kraft) or energy. There are energies of body and mind, but for holistic healers, mind is the center, not body. I asked whether this was not psychology, but she replied, no, that it goes much deeper or higher than psychology. She said that she had studied psychology and had undergone psychoanalysis, having attended some lectures at the Jung Institute in Küsnacht, just outside Zürich, and having seen a Freudian analyst in private practice. She explained that she could not have built on this for her career because one needs the Matura in order to register for programs in official medicine or psychiatry. [The Matura is a high school baccalaureate, possible only if one has followed courses at a Gymnasium. Alice’s lack of Matura is quite typical of women of her age; even today school streaming is prevalent and attendance at Gymnasium remains a minority option in rural Switzerland.] Alice has worked in a number of health professions over the years, including nursing. At first she counseled patients released from psychiatric clinics living at home. Currently she trains physiotherapists and other people who work with the handicapped to realize their energies and to differentiate between their own energies and those of their patients. The idea is to draw on what comes from you outside of the work and to develop as a human being for yourself. This is holistic medicine that draws on energy produced by thermodynamic, electric, and protein systems. Alice’s discourse here is fairly typical of the kind of thing I heard from practitioners of complementary medicine who are as a group simultaneously critical of biomedical science and eager to borrow its language and concepts, and sometimes even its technology. But like many healers, Alice had her own particular understanding of the connections. She enthused over the colors of vitamins and minerals, arguing that colors have specific energies.

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Alice also had her own particular reasons for study and portrayed her life as something of a quest. It was never her intention to practice as a psychologist, she said, but rather to make bridges between what the sciences say and what she has seen with her senses. This is her avenue. When Alice speaks of her sensory experience she alludes to her childhood. Her family did not have an easy place in society, she said, because they practiced holistic medicine years ago, before the evidence was available to validate it. Her senior relatives had the reputation of being a bit crazy – she laughed – but they had enough money, so they didn’t have to rely on the opinion of others. It was rather vice versa: others relied on them. Yet she is the only healer in her generation. The others have the gift for it but they didn’t want to develop it and refused to train. Alice’s heritage comes from both sets of grandparents although neither parent was a healer. These things tend to skip a generation, she added. She comes from a community in the Toggenburg [a valley that wraps itself around the west and south of Appenzell, politically separate from it but closely related culturally and socially]. Her family were farmers and included some artists and teachers. Their work as healers was never full-time or officially recognized. However, while there is a big difference between official, allopathic medicine [Schulmedizin, literally school medicine] and what her grandparents practiced, the two kinds of practitioners used to get along very well. Until about 1975 her grandparents exchanged services, knowledge, and sometimes patients with the medical doctors and did so in lieu of financial transactions. Alice’s grandparents used a combination of plants, hypnosis, homeopathy, Geistheilung (spiritual or psychic healing), and magnetopathy, and they also made their own medical products. “My grandmother used aura healing, spiritual healing. She had visions and could predict events of the future. In 1957 she told me about computers and what life with them would be like.” Alice said she learned a lot from her grandparents. But she had great doubts too, because there was no possibility of comparing or validating what they taught her with other kinds of knowledge. Moreover, her mother was strongly opposed. “My mother had a religious conflict with it. And indeed such practices are forbidden to members of the Reformed Church.” “This is a big conflict here, almost a kind of schizophrenia,” Alice continued. “The healing tradition is older than the Christian

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tradition.” Real healers, she asserted, all know about reincarnation. Thus no real healer is a true or good Christian. All have been opposed to the Church and the Church has been against them. All the healers in her family were believers in reincarnation and thus outside the Church. She added that AR was a bit more open-minded about these matters than where she grew up. “No witches were burned here in AR.” Alice said that had she admitted or shown her skills openly at home she wouldn’t have been safe. One had to confirm belief in the Church at the age of 16. Confirmation in the Reformed Church was a major event of the life cycle. But she already knew by that age that she couldn’t do it. This was a big problem for her family who were concerned about public appearances, and also for the preacher. In those days [1966] everyone had to be confirmed; it wouldn’t have been possible to gain an apprenticeship or apply to schools without confirmation. In that time it was hard. Her family resolved the dilemma with money. Her father paid the church to hold a collective confirmation rather than individual ones that year. Alice stood among the cohort of confirmees reciting the pledge in unison but was discreetly silent. Officially, she was confirmed. Henceforward, she laughed, she was allowed to pay church taxes.9 Through this account of her family Alice offers the historical memory of a longstanding alternative to Christianity and the form that accommodation to Christianity took. Alice traces resistance far back in time, well beyond the Reformation. “Since 1100 no male member of the Alder family has done military service, nor any female either. The family never believed that war was a solution. They were always free thinkers,” she said and then corrected herself, “No, counterthinkers.” [Service in foreign armies and the Papal Guard was for many centuries an important source of income and the Swiss Federation continues to maintain compulsory military service for men.] Alice explained that during the Reformation her family converted along with everyone else in their community. It was only those members of the family who practiced as healers who weren’t real Christians. The others were good, even puritanical, Protestants. [In other words, those who had the healing vocation remained outside the Church while the other family members attempted to make up for them by being extra devout.] This is why her mother had a religious conflict. Her mother always wanted to be successful in the outer

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world, and her brothers and sisters did too. As a result they have all distanced themselves from her. She describes herself as the black sheep of the family. “What about your father?” I asked. “My father didn’t say anything. He protected me always, despite the many personal disputes we had.” Alice then said she had been her father’s healer. Her father fell as a child and sustained a head injury (Hirnblutung [brain haemorrhage?] ) that left him in permanent pain. He was sent to a psychiatric clinic at the age of 17 and diagnosed with depression, but in reality his problem stemmed from living with constant pain. He couldn’t handle it; whenever he was emotionally stressed or excited he would react with great aggression, laugh hysterically, or begin weeping. She described his condition as an “affective psychosis” and said he took very strong medication – sedatives and tranquilizers. “How could he marry?” I asked. “Money.” “Did he have a job?’ “He worked only when he felt like it. My mother was a business woman.” Alice and her grandmother both had the ability to alleviate his suffering. This was not difficult; her hands stabilized him and assuaged the pain. “The morphine in his own body would become elevated so he couldn’t feel the pain. He had so much pain, he often felt like committing suicide. It wasn’t easy for him.” “Nor for his children,” I suggested. “We couldn’t have other children over to visit – any extraneous noise caused him pain.” I asked Alice when she first became able to treat her father. She said she started her medical development around the age of 4. She began by curing the farm animals. Word of her ability spread and neighbors began to fetch her or stop her on her way to school and ask for help when their cows were having difficulty giving birth. I asked whether this was training, objective knowledge, or a gift. Alice replied simply, “A gift.” She said she was born with it, but added that she began training early with one of her grandfathers. Her ability was noticed by others and it was drawn to her attention because she began saying “silly things.” She would predict that someone would fall ill and was told not to say things like that. For example, when she

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was around 4 years old her mother told her the postman would be bringing something the next day. She said, “No he won’t, because he’ll be flat on his back.” And then he was. She laughs, “People didn’t like that!” By now she has learned to keep quiet. Rather hesitantly, but mindful of her earlier reference to the persecution of witches, I mentioned the name of Anna Gölding, a woman who was burned as a witch in the canton of Glarus about 120 years ago and is said to be the last witch killed in Switzerland. Gölding has been the subject of a bestselling novel and a film or two and is well known in Switzerland. I was curious to see whether Alice identified herself as a witch. Alice immediately said yes, she had the same gifts as Anna Gölding. She repeated that this was a source of conflict for her parents. Then she added something rather extraordinary. “The conflict began at my birth. When the midwife handed me to my mother she said, ‘Here, you’ve got your witch.’ ” People of this kind are identifiable by marks on their bodies – marks the midwife observed. Alice pointed to her neck, where I didn’t see anything unusual, and then to her armpit, where she exposed a large mole. The Spanish Jesuits burned people who had marks like hers, she said. Normally these marks appear later in life, but she had them at birth. In fact, they were much darker then and have lightened in color and grown less visible over time. It is said that if a person has these marks and understands their situation, the color lightens. “Understanding” means understanding one’s vocation – and accepting it. Alice added that it was only recently that she had begun to talk about herself. Before that she had just operated in secrecy. That is, she didn’t reveal how she worked or what she did. Even when she was treating patients energetically she always gave them some pills or ointments that weren’t really necessary in order to conceal what she had done and to cover up the role of energy in her therapy. Not even her regular patients knew how she treated them. Working with plants was seen as much more normal or acceptable: “the other thing one didn’t talk about.” In 1989 or 1990 there started some public discussion about esoteric things. There were films on TV and she could begin to talk about it. “Healers keep on being called ‘crazy,’ but it doesn’t matter. I don’t

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mind.” A psychiatrist once said to her, “The people who stay in the clinic know they are crazy but you just don’t know it.” Her grandmother always said the difference between their kind of healers and the patients in a psychiatric clinic is that healers have a choice. Alice compared it to watching television. People with psychoses have twelve channels open at one time. Healers could do this as well, they could keep all channels open at once if they wanted to, but they can also choose to keep open only one channel at a time and they can choose which channel they want at any given moment. She hastened to add that this is only a metaphor for how the gift functions. But this is why most people when they feel they might have such a gift become anxious: they feel all the channels at once. Other people are afraid of the gift and don’t even want to hear about it. Relationships have been destroyed. She herself has been married three times, but each of her husbands was frightened. “It’s realistic to be afraid,” she laughs. Alice said that only a few families have the gift or tradition. And they suffered from prejudice. In the 1950s many of these people were kept out of rural society, they couldn’t find partners, and ended up having to marry or live with people like alcoholics. [Perhaps she is alluding to her mother’s situation.] She reflected on the fate of an earlier generation of women in her family: My mother’s father’s sister had the same gift. She wanted to study but they put her in a psychiatric clinic. That’s what money can do. She would have liked to study medicine, but the family didn’t want it. It was impossible because she was a woman. At most she could have been a midwife, but not a doctor.

Alice’s grandfather had another sister, younger than the first. She kept quiet until their parents died. Then she inherited some money and went to England. She met a doctor there and moved to the United States with him. “They developed orthomolecular therapy together. This is very modern; a therapy with lots of vitamins and minerals.” She also drew on her gift. The doctor was already married to someone else and hadn’t gone through a divorce. The couple didn’t file their tax forms as she was in America illegally. They were discovered, her

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money was confiscated, and she was sent back to Switzerland by the police. Then her brother – Alice’s grandfather – brought her to a psychiatric clinic. She lived up to the age of about 100, first in the clinic and then in the Bürgerheim of the Gemeinde.10 “She was declared legally incompetent by her brother. And this was a person who had diplomas in five different languages! But she could never work again. It was terrible.” This is the other side of being wealthy, she explained; her grandfather had the money to make his sisters disappear into a clinic. “Money is not always an advantage.” Alice referred to money as “Vitamin B,” a Swiss phrase for business “connections” (Beziehungen), the string-pulling that can be gained through money. Her grandfather paid to put away his sisters because he was ashamed of them. He was very active in local politics. As a child, Alice once met her grandfather’s sister. A woman came up to her one day after church and told her she was her great-aunt. When Alice went home and told her family, they denied it. They said the woman was not a member of their family. Many years later she realized the truth. She had asked her mother whether her grandfather was the eldest of his siblings. Her mother said, without thinking, that he was the fifth. But Alice had always thought that there were only three siblings. Suddenly she realized there must be two others. Her mother didn’t want to talk about the great-aunts. Finally she said that one of them had died of TB. They had put her in a bath of very cold water from which she couldn’t get out – a sort of psychiatric therapy formerly used. “She caught a cold – no, an inflammation of the lungs – and TB developed.” Alice sometimes works telepathically, over the phone with clients in Germany. She also draws on visions, which she has had since childhood. In this way she may learn the medications needed by a particular patient. Her ability to do this was cultivated when her grandfather [mother’s father] put medicines in her hand and asked her what they were or what effect they had on Mr X or Mrs Y. She had to learn every flower, bark, and mineral, and every form of energy by feeling them. When she had calendula in her hand her grandfather asked her what it was and what was in it. She had to know even the minerals, for example, that there is sulfur in calendula. Her grandfather was testing her. I asked whether he was teaching her these facts or just

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seeing whether she could recognize them by herself and she answered, both. She learned a lot from her grandfather. He was a good healer and a good citizen, founding various local agricultural associations. But he also had his sister disappear. Alice emphasized once again that the family was wealthy. Her greatgrandparents had much land and many cattle and they also engaged in trade and in additional professions alongside agriculture – as teachers, weavers, etc. [This has long been necessary for Alpine farmers and herders in order to make ends meet. When Alice speaks of wealth I think she means relative to other farmers in the district who were forced to sell their labor or to emigrate.] Alice described how her predecessors took their livestock over the Alpine passes to Milan and sold the animals there. They returned with goods that you could purchase in Milan – wine, shellac, and dyes. Her great-grandfather wove the deep red waistcoats of the shepherds. The travelers returned from Milan with a dye known as Purpur (purple) and with Panama bark from India that made wool very soft. And they brought back medicines – China bark and sandalwood, everything you could get in Milan, from all over the world. In addition, her maternal grandfather lent out money and got it back with interest. Her paternal grandfather was also considered to be rich. “The Alder family was well respected. Everyone still knows our name. Ask anyone in W. Those that weren’t healers were good Christians.” “I’m not a Christian!” Alice laughs, “And yet I probably know more about the religion than most people.” Religion is of interest to her only as part of her inner education. Unlike nature religions, Christianity does not recognize an energy balance. Another objection to Christianity is that it is not really for women. “The only woman in the church is Maria, who couldn’t lead a sexual life. And the Reform church doesn’t even recognize Maria – there are no women at all!” Alice referred to Zwingli – “the most important Reformer of [German] Switzerland” – who said, “Don’t ever seek the counsel of a woman, because she is the devil.” Recalling that she had said that all the healers in her family believed in reincarnation, I asked Alice whether she might be the reincarnation of one of her ancestors. Alice replied that reincarnation was indeed a fact, but not of one’s own ancestors. She then began to tell us about her previous life.

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As a child Alice was troubled by puzzling visions. At the age of 46, on a holiday trip to Germany, she suddenly recognized a place she had been before and she also recognized the older people. This was the very site of her childhood visions! In talking to people she soon established her previous identity, the person she had been. Alice herself was born in 1950. In her previous life, she learned, she had died in 1947. “It was very interesting to talk with people in this German community. I could tell them things they had done in the past; I knew them up to 1947.” And they knew about the person Alice had been, what she had been like and what she had done. “It was so interesting to compare their version with what I remembered of my former life.” She remembered – and was told – that she had been an eccentric who did not get on well with others. She didn’t want to marry and was a person who liked to have and display power. In fact, she didn’t accept her sex; she acted and worked like a man. Alice described her previous self in the German village by means of a striking term, as a Querdenker, a “lateral thinker.” [Quer means sideways; despite the gender dysphoria of her past life, it has none of the connotations of current English usage of the word “queer.” Swiss people described Querdenker as a somewhat unusual word for someone whose way of thinking is at odds with others’.] When the Allied bombs flattened her village, this made her crazy and she only lived a few more years. In fact, she had been considered “crazy” before, because she had been against the war. One of the reasons she entered her new family in the Toggenburg was because they were people who wanted nothing to do with war [recall how her ancestors evaded military service]. In her former life she was opposed to Nazi thinking. She spoke out publicly against the Nazis and the war. In fact, the only reason she wasn’t arrested was because she had long been considered eccentric. She wasn’t taken seriously in the village, just an odd and harmless woman. Otherwise she would have been arrested and murdered by the Nazis. At that time and in that respect it was good to be a woman, although in that life she had not wanted to be one. Alice said that if you hear about other persons talking about former lives you often don’t take them seriously and even she hadn’t known what to think about herself. But it is very different if you encounter people from that life. She saw her own grave! It made her sick for several weeks. Having been confronted by this, she has had to

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rearrange her mind, find a new order in her life [that is, it was a transformative event]. In former times she lived with these visions but thought they might be just fantasy; she didn’t know. She said to herself that everything she saw in her visions might be shown to be untrue. “But at least I had the outer world to share with others. Then I understood that my inner world had not been an illusion. It suddenly became clear.” As a result, she realized that other things she saw in her visions, for example with regard to the surgery she directs over the phone, were also factual, not illusions. “I got more realistic. I could no longer dismiss my visions as fantasy.” [Thus, her experience in Germany helped to convince her of the legitimacy of her inner experiences and her authority as a healer.] Alice moved to this village a few years ago in order to be near her married son and grandson. The grandchild has the gift but right now, at age 7, he refuses to learn. Every healer must develop in their own personal way. Alice doesn’t like to intervene. She felt her grandparents intruded too much. Even today she’s not sure whether it was a good thing. A person has to want it for themselves. So she doesn’t push her grandson; it is up to him to make the decision. She did begin training him and thinks he will return when he is older. They had very good communication until he was 5 years old. All levels of telepathy were easy and normal to him. His mother even made use of his skill; when the two of them were out shopping she would ask her son whether his father was already at home and whether he was in a good mood! Alice’s daughter-in-law is positive but also fearful. She is a successful nurse and believes in modern medicine. This produces conflict for her. This is as it had been with Alice’s mother. And this, in turn, produces conflicts in their relationships. At the age of 5, when he realized there were differences between his mother and grandmother, the grandson stopped all activities with Alice out of loyalty to his mother. Alice leaves him be. It is not always easy for her, but it’s good; she has no problems with the arrangement. Alice enjoys living in Appenzell because people are individualistic and tolerant, with a good sense of humor. Appenzellers recognize that communication takes place at two levels – the everyday world and the world behind the mask. They talk allusively and leave people to live

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their own lives. Once her neighbors learn of her profession they refrain from asking questions: it’s enough for them. However, they are also a little afraid of her because they don’t know what she is actually doing – she doesn’t use a known form of therapy or local plants – and this creates a certain distance that she likes. People don’t ask her what she does but they know that it is more than meets the eye. Alice said she didn’t care one way or the other whether I used her real name. Her work is to make things clear and she would be glad if people would lose their fears. She had several times used computers as an analogy. As we were leaving she referred back to her grandmother who once told her that computers are created in order to make people forget or not recognize they still have the old gifts. But actually, even working with a computer activates the gift. Alice Alder is engaged in ongoing construction and consolidation of her life in a manner that draws upon and is constrained by memory and kinship. There is substantial evidence of care in all the senses of cultivation, concern, attention, worry, and vulnerability evoked above. Once the interview was under way, Alice’s narrative took on a life of its own and, I believe, led her to talk about things that were genuinely important to her. Indeed, I could not have anticipated what I would hear and would not have known what to ask in order to learn the kind of things she told us. I tried not to display excitement or undue interest and do not believe that I encouraged her to embroider her story. I had the sense that the story was told less to impress me than that Bea and I served as a kind of reflecting surface against which Alice could narrate for herself, to meet her own needs.11 I had the sense that she was still working through the meaning of her life for herself, that she had reached a kind of plateau of adjustment or equanimity, but that her journey was not yet completed. It was as if she continued to surprise herself. As for me, I was excited by what Alice had to say. To begin with, Alice paints a fascinating and, I think, quite realistic picture of rural life in the past century: cattle farmers who supplement their income with other professions and activities; the romance of crossing the passes to Italy and returning with exotic products used in making “traditional” garb; the role of community leaders, but also the ruthless ways they managed their families and engaged in money-lending; the clear

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boundaries established between outer and inner life and the importance of intensive engagement in each. These facts are part of Swiss public knowledge about the past. But Alice adds a window into a suppressed aspect of history. While her family’s resistance may not date back to 1100, there is no reason to suspect that the patterns she describes do not have significant timedepth. Whether it is a matter of reincarnation, conscientious objection, or psychic healing, and whether these extend back only to the Reformation or even just the nineteenth century, there was a significant alternative to the Church and a tradition maintained and transmitted in secrecy within the family. This is, in fact, a very neat instance of kinship as the vehicle for historical memory. Alice herself is clearly an unusual person, even among the highly individualistic practitioners of holistic medicine in Appenzell. She is someone to whom the words psychic healer or witch might be applied. Like other healers described in the literature, Alice draws upon her own experience in order to understand and heal others. As Lévi-Strauss (1963) once said of shamans, she abreacts. She herself is consumed with the need to put this experience into context, to understand herself and her family’s practices with reference to some contemporary explanatory system though she would reject the psychoanalytic one. She has sought an explanation in a number of diverse healing and knowledge traditions before finding and validating it for herself through her encounter in Germany. Alice’s life is deeply informed by her childhood and family origins. She identifies closely with her grandparents, and further ascribes their mutual experiences and therapeutic practice to generations of kin before them. She is proud of this tradition but at the same time her birthright has been deeply problematic. This is, first, because of the discrimination and abjection healers like her have faced. She describes them as shunned by rural society, unmarriageable, and identified with the mentally ill. Indeed, the very family that kept these traditions sought to maintain them as secret and did so at the expense of having some of their women committed to psychiatric institutions. At least, this is Alice’s interpretation. Perhaps her grandfather made a distinction between psychic healing and mental illness and diagnosed his sisters as being genuinely disturbed. It is clear that the family sees a connection between the two, and the danger of sliding from one to the other.

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A further aspect of the problem for Alice was the way in which her grandparents appear to have encouraged her powers but without giving her a suitable language in which to articulate them. Her grandparents were unable to name them in an authoritative language or to link them up to the other forms of knowledge that Alice encountered. It was as if she were expected to practice healing without a shared explanatory model (Kleinman 1980). Moreover, there was no public language offered in which to articulate her personal experience (cf. Obeyesekere 1981). The life course she describes has been in part one of seeking to place herself in language, of moving beyond embodied experience, kinship, and private memory in order to connect to others like herself. Perhaps the most poignant thing she told us was that in the course of her studies she had been seeking people like herself but had not found them. At the heart of kinship lie struggles of identification and separation. The family of healers stretches back in time, but the salient figures for Alice are her parents and grandparents. Her maternal grandfather is pivotal as the teacher who mentored her development as a healer but also as the ruthless patriarch who gave her little choice in cultivating her gift and who disposed of his sisters when they were inconvenient to him. The memory of kinship coexists with silence and silencing. Strong themes of Alice’s narrative are obviously the suppression of women and their resistance – and these fit with the broader kinds of analyses that have been offered with respect to European witchcraft. However, Alice’s own identification with other women, as mediated by her mother, is ambivalent. The mother is ashamed of her daughter and critical of her practice. And yet, who could it have been but the mother who told Alice what the midwife had said when she handed over the new baby? This memory is also inscribed on the body, in the form of the moles that fade over time, but only on condition that Alice overrides her mother and accepts her vocation. Alice describes a life of quest but also one of secrecy. Her ascendant kin have cultivated her talents but also conspired to enclose her memories and curtail her practice. Only recently were the memories of her great-aunts inadvertently brought to light, validated by her mother. The great-aunts were a mystery kept from her, she said, and yet she now recounts their ages and other details of their lives and renders them central to her story. This illustrates how the “facts” of kinship brought forward by memory can genuinely vary across the life course

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of the subject. But as remembering in the present collapses the difference between distinct acts of memory, linear sequence is inevitably disrupted and replaced either by a kind of anachronistic flattening or by a sense of irony. Only in 1989 or 1990 was Alice able to begin to admit, even to her patients, the basis of her healing. She enjoys the kind of double entendre characteristic of informal communication in Appenzell. Yet she refrains from telling her neighbors too much about herself, lest, as with her former husbands, such knowledge should provoke fear and distance. To explicitly remember is to see, in Ricoeur’s phrase, “oneself as another” (1992). Such a view is not taken from a distance; it is not the objectified perspective of the expert, the theorist. It is to somehow continue to take one’s part. It is a view of proximity, of affinity. The positions we take to ourselves are ones we have learned, ones that others have taken to us. Those others, since internalized, can be none other than close kin, parents, and other emotionally invested caretakers. It would seem that there is no escape from them. Yet, if one sees oneself as another, one may as well see another as oneself. And so we come to Alice’s experience in Germany which affirms and makes sense of the memories of her visions in childhood while at the same time offering her another set of memories. I do not wish to further psychologize Alice, nor do I want to emphasize the specificity of reincarnation. Rather, I note the formal similarity between her articulation of a past life and that of the spirit mediums in Madagascar who embody and give voice to former members of their society and are thereby able to re-present and work through history (Lambek 2002, 2003). The critical point is that reincarnation provides Alice with the means to develop an historical alter and that this alter is given a precise temporal (and spatial) location relative to her own life. Alice has said nothing about how her parents experienced the Second World War, or where their political sympathies lay, nor what it meant for a sensitive child to hear about the war (cf. Cappelletto 2005). But in portraying this eccentric, anti-Nazi “lateral thinker,” Alice has begun the task of recuperation of a greater public memory, of Switzerland itself as a “free-thinking” country but one that may not have done enough to speak out against Nazism.12 Alice has the basis for constituting a personal myth with public resonance.

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Perhaps the most striking continuity between her past and present personae, and one that links her past life in Germany to Alice’s Swiss family of origin is the appellation of Querdenker, “lateral thinker.” Thinking “orthogonally” is rooted in Alice’s memory and kinship. It is also a perspective from which to speak one’s mind independently, to intercede on behalf of clients and oneself, to acknowledge and remember one’s past in one’s own way, and to transmute a possibly abjected identity into a positive one. To be a Querdenker is to be unconventional, to see and engage the world from a peculiar angle, but equally to invest in the critical insights’ laterality. This figure of resistance to gender boundaries and to Nazism may form for Alice an analogue to the gods for the Sri Lankan mediums who are able to invest in public symbols and thereby personalize them (Obeyesekere 1981). Alice’s vehicles are not as overt or public as matted locks, but to draw on the image of resistance to Nazism is hardly to produce a uniquely private symbol, out of touch with everyday reality. Her practice appears closest to the alternative Obeyesekere refers to as “subjectification” – the externalization of internal psychic states through images that do not form part of a publicly accepted culture but may be tolerated by it (1981:123–4, 137). Yet perhaps the past life does not simply represent personal needs and fantasies but is part of a long tradition of reincarnation – about which, because of the secrecy surrounding it, we, like most citizens of Switzerland, still know little. In any case, if discovery of her past life transforms Alice’s memory or reinterprets her childhood, it does not appear to provide alternative bonds of kinship. Alice mentions encountering acquaintances but no family members in the German village and, indeed, having been single in her past life obviates the problem of dealing with any living offspring of the person she reincarnates. Alice is left with her original kin and the orientations to past and future they provide. For Antigone, the crux of kinship lies in her obligation to bury the dead. This effort is also where Vico locates the beginning of human history and of human mind. As Edward Said puts it, “the masses of dead bodies – Vico’s metaphor for the undifferentiated, polymorphously perverse desire for that unlimited presence which is ahistoric existence – are buried, and thereby ordered into intelligible sequence” (1975:371–2). Hence the care inherent in acts of kinship makes possible the separation necessary for memory. Conversely, what can it be but the cares of memory that motivate human burial?

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Like Antigone, Alice attempts to bury her dead. She visits the grave of her German alter and lays her to rest. But with her parents and grandparents it is not so easy to mark a finish and an order. Our predecessors can appear as angry ghosts or benevolent ancestors or become transformed from the one to the other (to paraphrase Hans Loewald 1980). The fates of Alice Alder’s ascendants appear as yet undecided. Alice suffers the cares her destiny brings, but also cares for it and cares about it. Care becomes the modality not just of kinship or memory but of engagement in the world. Conversely, Alice’s ethical practice, her care for herself no less than for her clients, is constituted in a dialectic of retrospection, prospection, and lateral thinking, in a life cultivated within a particular family of orientation but contextualized with respect to other possible lives.

NOTES

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The support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada is gratefully acknowledged. Many people in Switzerland, including the Cantonal authorities of AR; Peter Witschi and Iris Blum of the Cantonal Archives; Eva Keller, and Ruth, Zwi, and Michael Guggenheim, were enormously helpful. My gratitude to Alice Alder is no less heartfelt for referring to her by a pseudonym. This paper draws from an intense and surprising three-and-a-half-hour interview with her that took place on July 22, 2004. I could only partially understand her language (Swiss German and German); she frequently used English but was not entirely comfortable with it. Alongside was my superb research assistant and translator, anthropologist Bea Schwitter, who intervened or exercised her role intermittently and with whom I discussed the interview immediately after. I am indebted to participants in Edinburgh and to Bea Schwitter and Janet Carsten for comments on an earlier draft; since the paper was completed I have continued work with Alice. 2 This was at the cantonal level. At the municipal level women gained voting rights in 1972 (Der Kanton Appenzell Ausserrhoden in Zahlen 2002/2003). In 2003 the Landamann, chief political officer of the canton, was a woman, Frau Alice Scherrer-Baumann. She was also Minister of Health and a strong advocate for “complementary” medicine within the canton and on the Swiss federal scene.

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11 12

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Figures are courtesy of Peter Guerra, Heilmittelinspektor for Kanton AR (interview July 19, 2004). The exam is set annually by a cantonal committee headed by a medical doctor and is reputedly quite easy to pass. It is less clear that Alice falls into the informal economy; she says she pays taxes on her earnings. But she is outside the health insurance regime and her clients’ payments are neither recorded nor reimbursed by an insurance company. Think of the phrase “to remember someone in one’s will.” The Sophoclean theme of anagnorisis, the recovery of memory, recurs with respect to kinship in much fiction. A recent novel that adopts such a plot is Mawer 2002. The Naturärzte-Vereinigung der Schweiz has a large school in Herisau, capital of AR. The use of the word ärzte is somewhat controversial since it implies medical doctors. Some argue that the title Naturarzt should be replaced by the less pretentious Heilpraktiker. Members of a parish (Kirchgemeinde) pay an annual tax collected alongside that of the municipality (Gemeinde). In the past every Gemeinde (municipality) was responsible for looking after its indigent citizens and those unable to care for themselves. Nowadays, the Bürgerheim have been converted into Altersheim, old people’s homes. I do not know Alice well enough to speculate about transference. Her encounter in Germany may not be unconnected to the appearance of the Bergier-Bericht, a report revisiting with considerable public controversy and criticism Switzerland’s relationship with Germany and response to refugees during the war.

REFERENCES

Antze, Paul and Michael Lambek, eds., 1996 Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York and London: Routledge. Cappelletto, Francesca, ed., 2005 Memory and World War II. Oxford: Berg. Casey, Edward, 1987 Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hacking, Ian, 1996 Memory Sciences, Memory Politics. In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. P. Antze and M. Lambek, eds. Pp. 67–87. New York and London: Routledge.

240

Michael Lambek

Kleinman, Arthur, 1980 Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lambek, Michael, 1996 The Past Imperfect: Remembering as Moral Practice. In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. P. Antze and M. Lambek, eds. Pp. 235–54. New York and London: Routledge. Lambek, Michael, 2002 The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lambek, Michael, 2003 Memory in a Maussian Universe. In Regimes of Memory. S. Radstone and K. Hodgkin, eds. Pp. 202–16. London and New York: Routledge. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 1963 The Sorcerer and His Magic. In Structural Anthropology I. Claire Jacobsen and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, trans. Pp. 161–80. New York: Basic Books. Loewald, Hans, 1980 Papers on Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair, 1984 After Virtue. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. Macpherson, C. B., 1973 Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mawer, Simon, 2002 The Fall: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown. Obeyesekere, Gananath, 1981 Medusa’s Hair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul, 1992 Oneself as Another. Kathleen Blamey, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Said, Edward, 1975 Beginnings: Intention and Method. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sophocles, 1974 The Theban Plays (King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone). E. F. Watling, trans. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Index

absence making relations through 61–70 of memory 83–103 recalling 58–62 adoption 5, 11, 19, 73, 175–6 different life chances in 95–6 effect on subsequent family 98–9 reunions in Scotland 2, 15–16, 18, 83–103 UK legal context 99–100 Adra, girl from 40 Africa 88, 89 African Americans 198–9 agencies appellate 148n as frames for refugees 143–4, 146–7 agency in adoption reunions 99, 101–2 women’s 65–9 agnatic kinship 60–1, 63–70 Alder, Alice 12, 15–16, 16–17, 218–40 Algeria 136 alternative healer, Switzerland 2, 11–12, 16, 218–40 amnesia culture of 28n “genealogical” 88 anagnorisis (discovery or recuperation) 221, 239n

ancestors association of ghosts with 51–2, 238 link in political and cultural autonomy 90, 101 memories in everyday life 88 secret Jewish 157 slavery as being lost to 90 Andamans 47 Anderson, Benedict 5 Anglo-Indians 36–57 apathy about politics 46–7 and Catholicism 11, 36, 48–50, 51–3, 55 food and cultural identity 41 ghost stories 47–53 legal constitutional definition 41 men 53–4 post-Independence 46 wedding 53 women 40 anthropology kinship in 2, 84, 194 and memory 2, 3, 58–9 and notions of culture 55, 198 the uncanny in 37 anthroposophic movement 157 antiretroviral drugs 195–6 Antze, Paul 5, 15–16, 86–7 Appenzell Ausserrhoden (AR) 218–40

242

Index

archives 170 Arnheim, Rudolf 59 Assmann, Jan 105, 106 Augé, Marc 178, 182 Auschwitz 167–8, 170 Austin, J.L. 71 autohypnosis 221–2 Bachelard, Gaston 19 Bahloul, Joelle, The Architecture of Memory 136 Bakhtin, Mikhail 129, 146 Balinese kinship 88 baptismal records 52 Baruch 153, 154–9, 168, 169, 170 Bear, Laura vii 10–11, 18, 22–3, 25, 36–57 belonging ambiguities of 150–71 different from kinship 172–3, 185 house as metaphor for 107, 131 remaking 133, 133–6, 145–7 Bengal culture as sanskriti 39 railway colony 1, 10–11, 18, 19, 22–3, 36–57 Benjamin, Walter 19, 25 Berlin, Jews in 150–71 Berlin Wall, fall of the 29n Betsimisaraka 23, 88, 90, 101 Biehl, Joâo 196 biographies bracketing sex work in 179–80 conventions of 187–91 as a frame 172–93 generational axis and consociates and contemporaries 181 out of time and place 179–80 privileging of continuity in 173–4, 180, 190–1 see also life stories birth certificates 24, 92–3, 144 birth kin coincidence and shadow encounters 94–7 connecting and disconnecting 85–6, 91–4

physical appearance 91–2 reunions with 11, 83–103 uncertain outcomes of meetings with 84–6, 99–100 black family, as site of pathology 198 Bodemann, Y. Michal 153–4, 163–6 body management in HIV-patients 212–13 marks of witchcraft on the 227, 235 objectification in rebirth 58, 74–6, 77 Bouquet, Mary 54 Bourdieu, Pierre 133 Boyarin, Jonathan 25–6 Brazil 195–6 bureaucracy family history and nationalism 54–5 and memory transmission 21–4 burial after cremation 158–9 as care of memory 237 burial sites 20, 158–9 Buryat pastoralists 2, 11–12, 17–19, 20, 22, 58–82 Byelorussia 158 Canada, exile in 15, 135 care, kinship memory as an ethic of 220–1, 233–8 care-giving relationships 200, 209–10 caring cooking as 41–2 as remembering 220–1 Carsten, Janet vii, 1–35, 17, 41, 54, 83–103, 151, 205 After Kinship 194 Casey, Edward S. 59, 78n Catholicism and Anglo-Indian railway workers 11, 36, 48–50, 51–3, 55 and Judaism 160 Chicago, images of 114, 115, 116–17 childhood, family memories 110–14 children babies’ clothing of adopted 93 born in refugee camps 143–4 first hair-cutting 67–8

Index China 3 Christianity, alternatives to 224–6, 234 Citizenship 53–6 divine 51, 230 domestic 194 and medicine 218–40 clinic intentionality of the 212 as a transitional space 199–200 clinical services, and HIV-positive adolescent girls 195–200 cognatic kinship 88, 89 Cole, Jennifer 23, 88, 90, 101 collective memory 3, 26n, 58, 122, 123, 220–1 Colombo, Tamils in 135 colonial history 3, 37–47, 90–1 colonial studies, uses to which memory has been put in 90–1 colors, energy of 221–2, 223 commemoration 3, 74, 221 public as opposed to private 105–6 community continuity 52–3 degeneration of 36, 40, 44–7 imagined 5 trust and shared information 175 complementary medicine 223 computers 233 confidentiality 174 Connerton, Paul 58, 106 conscientious objection 225, 234 consociates, and contemporaries 180–7, 186 conversion in caste context 52–3 to Judaism 160, 169 cooking, as caring 41–2 Corsica, funerary rites 10 cosmopolitanism 161, 163, 169 cremations 10, 158–9 “critical events” 4–5, 200 Cuban Americans 199, 206 culture in anthropology 55, 198 collective memory of 220–1

243

hegemonic construction of 198–9 curiosity 98, 151–2, 156–7 Daniel, Valentine, Fluid Signs 131 Dar Refayil 136 Darieva, Tsypylma 154, 158, 162 Das, Veena vii, 4–5, 12–13, 16, 20, 24–5, 194–217 Day, Sophie viii, 12, 16, 20, 23, 172–93 death HIV-positive patient 209–11 ink mark at 69–70 memories evoked by 118–22 as taboo subject 13, 209 debt see obligation deceased kin, recalling 70–4 desh 36, 37–47, 54, 55 disability studies 194 discrimination against healers 228, 234 against refugees 130 antisemitic 162 dislocation accommodation to extreme 15, 24 and strategies for the future 169–70 displacement 2, 5, 18–19, 126–49, 164 as an orientation 129, 141–5 and identity 143–4, 146–7 internal and external 135 sociality in 128–9, 131 disruption biographical 5, 173 of expectations 151–4 distance 181 documentation 21, 24, 53, 92–3 domestic servants, in colonial Java 90–1 dowry 108–10, 157 dreams 97, 119 East Prussia 156–7 eating together 41–2 Elon, Amos 157 embodiment of a memory in rebirth 75–6, 80n and terminal illness 212–13

244

Index

embroidered pictures 17–18, 19, 58, 63, 65–9, 76, 77 emotions, memories and 109, 110–14 Empson, Rebecca viii, 11–12, 18–19, 22, 58–82 enactment, of past memories 76 energy 222–3, 227, 229–30 ethnic cleansing, eviction in Sri Lanka 127–8, 137, 141–5 ethnic conflict 5, 126–49 ethnic solidarity 3 ethnicity, and religion 127, 153 ethnography comparative 21, 24–6 context for HIV-positive adolescent girls 195–7 Europe, Jewish mixed kinship in 150–71 Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 88 exile “bifocal vision” of 15 in Canada 15 expectations, disruption of 151–4 exploitation 174–5

food and cultural identity 41 and place 42 forests, memories associated with 104–5, 121–2 forgetting 10, 13, 17, 87 ancestry 23 and remembering 101 Fortes, Meyer 88 foster care 100, 208–9 framing 122–3, 190–1 in biographies 172–93 institutional of illness 197–200 freedom from burden of knowledge 200–6 in prostitution 16, 23 Freud, Sigmund 37, 56, 223 friendship, and kinship 89 funeral HIV-positive patient 13, 209–11 rituals in Corsica 10 future generation and kin in the 140–1 myths and the 220–1 uncertain 24–6

Fabian, Johannes 180–1 family “pathological” forms of 198 vs. work 187–91 family history Anglo-Indian railway 45–7 bureaucracy and nationalism 54–5 fragmented nature 22 and Holocaust survivors 167–9 omissions from 158–9 and relational practices 181–2 family memories 110–14, 123 family relations absence of 2 abusive 2, 5, 20, 200–6 idealization of 182–7, 189 family stories, and histories of nations 151–4, 161–3, 166–9, 170 Feuchtwang, Stephan viii, 5, 15, 17, 20, 23–4, 148n 150–71

Geertz, Hildred and Clifford 88 Gellner, Ernest 187 genealogies authentication by the uncanny 55 Buryat 19, 63–5 cultural meaning of diagrams 54–5, 63–5 materialization of 36–57 metaphor of 190–1 migration and 107 and political community 54 and production of the self 89 prohibited by the state in Mongolia 77 and relational practices 181 secular citizenship and romantic nationalism 53–6 generations discontinuities of experience between 129, 137–8, 141–5

Index meaning of home for different 14, 19–20 metaphor of 190–1 as predecessors and successors 24, 181 rebirths repeated over 75–6 genocide, and personal histories 151–4 German Jews 2, 153 survivors 163–9 Germany 20 Jewish assimilation in 157–8, 166–9 Nazi regime 12, 15, 21, 28n, 150, 150–71 unification 157–8, 161 ghost stories, Anglo-Indian railway workers 47–53 Gölding, Anna 227 Górale 104–25 graves Christian for Anglo-Indians 49–50 and Jewish identity 158–9 Malagasy 88 seeing one’s own 231–2 Greece, Asia Minor refugees in 132 grief 10, 118–20 for a lost child 50–1 Hacking, Ian 220 Haitian immigrants in US 199 Halbwachs, Maurice 58, 123 Hareven, Tamara K. 173 Hartman, Saidiya 194 hauntings 2, 9–13, 50–1, 238 healing and the Church 224–6 as a gift 226–9, 232–3 psychic 218–40 health care services, and HIV-positive adolescent girls 195–200 heritage, Jewish 159–61 Hirschon, Renee 132 history as events 151 “in persons” 6, 173–4 as intergenerational transmission 151

245

and memory 2, 105–6 official versions and personal memories 3, 105–6 suppressed aspects of 234 Hitler, Adolf 156, 164 HIV diagnosis origins 200–9, 212 psychic process in accepting 200–6 HIV/AIDS patients, North American city 2, 12–13, 16, 24–5, 194–217 HIV-positive adolescent girls ethnographic context 195–7 institutional commitment to kinship 197–200 intentionality 212–13 Hoffman, Eva, Lost in Translation 15 Holland, Dorothy 6, 174, 191 Holocaust 2, 156, 162–3, 166 survivors from Poland 15 Holquist, Michael 146 home/house ideology of the 107 images of 17 meaning for different generations 14, 19–20, 140–5 Mongolian 17–18, 19, 60–1 returning 136–8 vulnerability of 205 see also ur households Anglo-Indian railway workers 42–3 bilateral reckoning based on affective ties 43 family altar or shrine 52, 63 housekeeping 6–7, 17–18 humanism, cognitive scientific 159 Humphrey, Caroline 60, 76 identifications ancestors and 25 divergent 20 and Jewishness 153 and separations 235 identities, multiple 12, 23–4, 176–9 identity Buryat 60

246

Index

identity (cont’d) construction and memory 5–6, 25–6, 86–7, 101 and displacement 24, 143–4, 146–7 European and Jewish memory 2, 21, 158–9 genealogy as sign of permanence 54 inheritance of Jewish 150 Muslim Sri Lankans 127–8, 141–2 uncertain sense in adopted children 87 ideologies dominant 174, 198–9 political 3, 22–4, 25 IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) 127, 130, 135, 143–4 illness 2, 173, 194–217 diagnosis of terminal 5, 12–13, 16, 200–9 institutional framing 197–200 India British rule 38–9, 54 Independence 38, 45–6 individual, responsibility for management of HIV treatment regime 25, 199–200, 211–13 information distinguished from knowledge 175–6 economic and biographical knowledge 175–6 research and sense of shared 174–9 inheritance 59, 150 integration 173–4, 188 intention, and kinship 211–13 international sites, as non-places 178–9 inter-subjectivity 220–1 Israel 154–6, 158 Jaffna 126–7, 135 jati 36, 37–47, 54, 55 Java, domestic servants in colonial 90–1 Jesuit Inquisition 227 Jewish dilution by marrying out 150 identity and graves 158–9 memory and European identity 2, 15

mixed kinship and historical disruption 150–71 Jewish law (halachah) 169 Jewishness 153–4, 155, 162 choices re 169–70 Johnson, Magic 197 Judaism 159 conversion to 160, 169 humanistic 159, 169 Karembola 23, 90, 101 Kharagpur 10–11, 19, 36–57 kinship absence of 11, 83–103 in anthropology 2, 84, 194 based on separation 59–61 “blockage” 85 classificatory systems 211 continuity as a series of disruptions 170 creating via memories 110–14 flexible system of 42–3 framing of memories 122–3, 189 and friendship 89 gay 194 identification and separation 235 instability of 16, 205–6 and intention 211–13 juridical conceptions 194–5 lived experience of 3–4, 5, 194 memory and time for HIV/AIDS patients 194–217 mixed Jewish 150–71 of the nation 54 and obligation 15, 22, 59, 73–4, 151–4, 208 personal history and nationality 151–4 as selective identification 152–4, 157–8, 170 “shadow” 97 as a source of history and continuity 172–4, 190–1 temporal orientations 89–90 as the vehicle for historical memory 234–8 see also agnatic kinship; cognatic kinship

Index kinship memory 5–6, 59, 172, 194 as an ethic of care 220–1, 233–8 and emergence of subjectivity 211–13 and healing 218–40, 233–8 narratives of adoption reunions 83–103 in Polish Highlands 104–25 shared 99 and the state 5, 21–4 transmission of 6–9, 17, 23–4 knowledge about morally acceptable behavior 70–4 as a cultural artefact 59 distinguished from information 175–6 esoteric and religious conflict 224–6 freedom from burden of 200–6 ownership of 59, 73–4, 77 transmission and the state 21–4 Kolkata 44, 49 Küchler, Susanne 75 Kundera, Milan, Ignorance 186 Lacan, Jacques 37, 56 Lambek, Michael viii-ix, 5, 11–12, 15–16, 17, 22, 61, 86–7, 106, 218–40 land history written on the 105 as keeper of memories 14, 20, 107–8, 114 ownership and becoming sontam 138–40 landscape imbued with meaning 18, 19, 105, 106 locating ancestors in the 69, 79n proximity to past 135–6 Langkawi Malays 23, 41, 88, 89 language disputes over funeral 210 of inscriptions of memory 25 lack of public for secret knowledge 235 regional 55 symbolic 107

247

Lass, Andrew 108 Lave, Jean 6, 174, 191 Leonard, Lori ix, 12–13, 16, 20, 24–5, 194–217 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 234 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) 126–8, 133–4, 137, 139, 144, 146 life course, historical approach 172–3 life cycle 172 life stories of different generations of refugees 141–5 mnemonic devices 58–82 see also biographies locality, of residence in adoption reunions 96–7 Loewald, Hans 238 London, sex workers 1, 2, 12, 16, 20, 23, 172–93 loss 2, 7, 13–16 and accumulation 7–8 debt and obligation 15, 22 historical events and 152–4 and historicity 129, 133 of kinship in adoption 11, 83, 103 kinship and place 145–7 politics of restoration and 24–6 recalling in Mongolia 58–62 Macpherson, C.B. 219 Madagascar 3, 23, 88, 101, 236 Malagasy 23, 88, 90 Malangan practices, New Guinea 75 marginality 20, 23, 26 marriage gay kinship and 194 mixed 150 stereotypes of 182–3 medical histories, in adoption 93–4 medicine and citizenship 218–40 holistic 200, 218–40 memories enlivened 58–82, 84 evoked by death 118–22

248

Index

memory absence of 83–103 as an ethic of care 220–1, 233–8 and anthropology 2, 58–9 as capacity 61, 219–20 complexity of national, local, family and personal 105–10, 122–3 disguised form in repressed regimes 105–6 fixing in objects 17–18, 19, 58, 61–77 ghosts of 1–35 and history 105–6 in history 2, 105–6 and identity construction 5–6, 25–6, 86–7, 101 and the intangible 107 kinship and time for HIV/AIDS patients 194–217 multiple levels of operation 62–3 the “murder” of 28n and place 9, 18–21, 45, 141–5 as a political device 59 as recalled or reproduced 59 reinscription of 29n selection from 17, 87 subversion of sites of 105–6 too little 8–9 as a utility 28n 61, 220 the weight of 6–9 see also collective memory; kinship memory; politics of memory; work of memory men Anglo-Indian 53–4 generational transmission of memory 7–8 unemployment in refugee 139 mental illness, and psychic healing 228–9, 234 Middleton, Karen 23, 90, 101 migration 2, 11–12, 23 absence and loss 58–82 ambiguities of 114–18 Anglo-Indian 49–50 Buryat 60 female 19

Polish 104–25 and return 116–18, 119, 129, 136–8, 145–7 mnemonic devices, in life stories 58–82 Mongolia 1, 2, 20, 58–82 Mongol-Soviet government 60 socialist period 60, 64, 77 morality and alternative temporality 12 railway colony 37–47 Morgan, Lewis Henry 211 Morgan, David H.J. 187–8 mothers and daughters-in-law (Mongolian) 65–9 deviant 206–9 disillusionment in meeting birth 99–100 illegitimate demands by birth 84–6 and Jewish identity 150, 169 protected by daughters 203–6 mourning rites 10 movement, stillness of place and memories of 14, 104–25 Moynihan Report (US 1965) 198 Muslims and Anglo-Indians 48, 50 Northern refugees in Sri Lanka 2, 14, 18, 19, 126–49 names adoptive children’s 92–3 different for areas of life 12, 174–9 history of 23 multiple 23, 176–9, 186 Russian/Jewish 162 narratives of adoption reunions 83–103 construction of continuity via 87 of home for refugees 126–49, 141–5 names as devices 177–9 personal in research 106–10 of the self 25–6, 27n subtexts 111–14 nationalism 3 distrust of 21

Index parental metaphor 151 romantic 25, 37, 53–6 nationality personal history and kinship 151–4 religion and ethnicity 20, 127, 153 naturopathy see medicine, holistic Nazi regime 12, 21, 28n, 105, 121, 150–71, 231, 236, 237 concentration camps 166–7 Nehru, Jawaharlal 47 New Guinea, Malangan practices 75 Nisbet, Robert 190–1 nomadism 2, 11–12, 19, 60–1 non-places 178–80, 182 Nora, Pierre 2, 106 North American city, HIV clinic 2, 12–13, 16, 194–217 Obeyesekere, Gananath 237 objects healing 221–2 kinship relations and 88, 93 secret 67–70 to fix memories 17–18, 19, 58, 61–70, 75–7, 135–6 obligation, kinship 15, 22, 59, 73–4, 151–4, 208 Oedipus 220–1 origins 55, 73–4, 190–1 and healing vocation 222, 224–7, 228–9, 234 and HIV diagnosis 200–9 and HIV risk assessment 198–9 orphanages 43, 50 otherness, in railway morality 39–40 others, selection of significant 152–3 parents curiosity about 151–2 intention and parenthood 211 nationalist metaphor 151 relations with adoptive 85, 96 participant observation 106–10, 150–1, 154, 160–1 passports 21, 24, 115, 116 internal Russian 162

249

past dispositions towards the 5, 13 making the present through the 122–3 as a resource for the future 180, 185, 212–13 sense of the 55 patients, compliant 199–200 pedigree, folk notions of 54–5 Peletz, Michael 211 perception 59, 78n personae 12, 152–3 past and present 237 personal history, kinship and nationality 151–4 personhood, modes of negotiating 129 perspectives 67, 74, 107, 237 phenomenology, culture in 55 photographic montages 19, 58, 63–5, 76 photographs 9, 17–18, 93 Pine, Frances ix, 13–14, 17, 20, 22, 26, 104–25 place absence from 45, 60, 119 empowers social relations 134–6 and food 42 immobility of and movement of people 14, 104–25 inside and outside 121–2 memory and 9, 18–21, 45, 141–5 of origin and HIV risk assessment 198–9 and politics 121–2 and relations 129, 131 sense of 7, 14, 18–21 as sign of origin 55 and space 104–25 transformation with time 144–5 see also non-places Podhale region, Tatra Mountains 2, 13–14, 20, 104–25 Poland 20, 104–25 after socialism 107–8, 115, 122 Cold War 122 communist 105 German occupation 121–2

250

Index

Poland (cont’d) Holocaust survivors from 15 martial law (1981) 120–1, 122 political events 2, 4, 105–6, 122–3, 151–4 politics apathy among Anglo-Indians 46–7 of kinship 21–4, 101, 220 and place 121–2 of recalling deceased kin 70–4 of the self 101 politics of memory 2, 3, 21–4, 101, 220 post-colonialism 3 Powers, Charles T. 104 practice approach 16–18, 86–9, 90–1, 174, 191, 218–21 present making through the past 122–3 orientation to the 43 private, and public spheres 21–4, 90, 105–6, 170 progress critique of idea 189, 190–1 spatial metaphor 187–8 property, relations mediated through kinship 108–9 prospection 221 prostitution 1, 2, 12, 16, 23, 172–93 and reintegration efforts 173, 185 UK laws 174–5 psychiatric clinic, healers committed to 228–9, 234 psychoanalysis 90, 223 psychoanalytic theories 37, 56 psychosis, “affective” 226 public, and private spheres 21–4, 90, 105–6, 170 Puerto Ricans 199, 206 Puttalam district, Sri Lanka 14, 126, 127, 129–33, 135, 137–8 Querdenker (lateral thinker) 231, 236, 237 railway colony, Bengal 1, 10–11, 18, 19, 22–3, 36–57 rape 178, 201–6

rational choice 160–1 rebirths 58, 61, 69–70, 71, 73, 74–6 recalling 58–82 recognition, shock in adoption reunions 95 recollection (recuperation) 218–40 recording events 2, 23, 53 recuperation 218–40 anagnorisis 221 Reformation 225, 234 Reformed Church 224–5 refugee camps 14, 19, 126, 130, 132, 135, 138–9, 143–4, 164 refugee settlements 14, 132, 138–40 refugees 5, 23–4 different generations of 140–5 discrimination against 130 from Asia Minor in Greece 132 German Jews 15, 21 Jewish in England 150–1 Muslim in Sri Lanka 2, 14, 18, 19, 126–49 regional identifications 132–3 relations with locals 130 regenerative practices 16–18 registers see voices reincarnation 11–12, 19, 69, 225, 230–2, 234, 236, 237 relatedness contingency in forging 211–13 fluid concepts of 41 non-biological 194–5 relational practices, “inauthentic” 181–2 religion choosing 160, 168–9 conflict with esoteric knowledge 224–6, 230 nationality and family ties 20, 127, 153 remembering as an ethical and moral practice 22, 219, 220–1 and forgetting 101 the “how” of 91–4 “oneself as another” 236 as self-presence 59

Index remembrance, object of 135–6 repositories of memory 19 reproductive technologies, new 211 restoration, politics of 24–6 return keeping open 145–7 migration and 116–18, 119, 129, 136–8, 145–7 right of 135 Ricoeur, Paul 236 rights over people and rebirths 73 refugee 135, 144–5 rituals for the dead 23, 90, 101 private as opposed to public 105 Robinson, Marilynne Gilead 6, 7–8, 18 Housekeeping 6–7, 18 Russia 20, 161 Russian Revolution 154 Russian/German/Jewish 154–9, 161–3 sacred, and secular 55–6 Said, Edward 237 Schiller, Nina Glick 198 Schindler’s List (film) 161 Schneider, David 194 Schutz, Alfred, The Problem of Social Reality 181, 186 Schwitter, Bea 218 Scotland, adoptees in 2, 15–16, 18, 83–103 sculpture, Malangan 75 Sebald, W.G. 10, 13, 18, 28n Austerlitz 8–9 secrecy healing in 227–8, 234–6 and Jewish ancestry 157–8 secret societies 175 self disconnections of the 20 discoveries through finding birth kin 85–6, 98–100 Euro-American preoccupation with 89

251

inscriptions of kinship and 84 internal multiple selves 152–3 physical appearance and resemblance to parents 91–2 politics of the 101 production via genealogy 89 range of roles 187–8 sense of 12, 15–16, 89 self-fashioning 5, 16–17, 24–6, 55–6 senses in memory 18 and the sciences 224 sex workers, London 1, 2, 12, 16, 20, 23, 172–93 sexual harassment 46 sexually transmitted diseases etiological models for 196 HIV 195–200 manageability 196, 212–13 risk classification 197–8 shamanism 69, 70, 234 Shanmugaratnam, Nadarajah 132 sibling ties 85, 99 Sinhalese 126, 144 slavery 23, 90, 101, 194 social class, in adoption 95–6 social immortality 74–6 social markers church allegiances as 52–3 of life course 172 social memory see collective memory sociality in displacement 128–9, 131 new in HIV-patients 212–13 relocation of 60–1, 68–9 Solomon 155, 157–8, 159–61 Sophocles 220–1 soul, in rebirth 69, 79n Southern Africa 195–6 Southeast Asia 89, 100 Soviet Union, Jews in the 154–9, 161–3, 164 space, and place 104–25 space-time 129, 146 speech acts 71

252

Index

spirits 40 spiritualism 97, 28n 236 Sri Lanka civil war 126–49 mediums 237 Muslim refugees 2, 14, 19, 126–49 Stack, Carol 208 state kinship memory and the 5, 21–4, 24, 77 legitimization of non-biological relatedness 194–5 and migration narratives 120–1 and narratives of prostitutes 178 policies in placing children at risk 201 repressive regimes 3, 5, 150–71 Steiner, Rudolf 157 stigmatization antisemitic 157–8 of prostitution 174–5, 184 Stoler, Ann Laura 90–1 Strassler, Karen 90–1 Strathern, Marilyn 73–4, 175–6, 211 subaltern studies 90–1, 173 “subjectification” 237 subjectivity different forms of 59 and time 211–13 suicide 15, 168 “super-addressee” 146–7 Switzerland, alternative healer 2, 11–12, 16, 218–40 symbolism 4, 107, 135–6, 146 Tamils 126–8, 133–4, 137, 139, 144, 146 Tatra Mountains 2, 13–14, 104–25 telepathy 229, 232 Thiranagama, Sharika ix, 14, 17, 19–20, 23–4, 126–49 time biographies and passage of 172–93 capturing and freezing in memory 109–10

different depths 14, 234 different senses of shared 107, 180–7, 190–1 kinship and memory for HIV/AIDS patients 194–217 objective or “constructed” in biographies 181 parallel 11, 12, 88 and subjectivity 211–13 Toronto, Tamils in 135 trauma 2, 167, 173 trust 105, 124n 175, 182 umbilical cord 67–8 uncanny authentication of genealogy via the 55 the domestic 47–53 Unified Communities of Jews in Germany 159, 169 unilineal kinship system 88, 89 ur (home) 128, 130 identifying with a former 129–33 loss of 133–6 Vico, Giambattista 237 visions 229, 231–2, 236 voices different 106–10, 107–10, 122–3 first person 152–4, 197 idealizing 160–1 internal 170 Wacquant, Loic J.D. 133 war and displacement 2, 121 and occupation 110 and personal histories 151–4 war memorials 3, 27n, 105 Ward, Helen 173, 184–5 Weston, Kath 182 witchcraft 227, 234, 235 witness 2 Wolfenden Committee 174 women agency of 65–9

Index in Anglo-Indian railway colonies 40 and Christianity 230 generational transmission of memory among 6–7 mobility of 58 own space in household 65–9 in prostitution 172–93 suppression of 235 work, vs. family 187–91

253

work of memory 15–16, 16–18, 24–6 as interpretive labor 86–91, 101–2 “routine” 172 World War I 110 World War II 46, 110, 225, 231, 236 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim 2 Zwingli, Huldrych 230