“A welcome addition offering rich ethnographic cross-cultural accounts and successfully demonstrates how the work of memory plays out in intimate, informal, non-ritualistic, everyday forms and practices of kinship.” (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, March 2009)
“This volume is full of insights into the manifold ways that people negotiate disruption in family relations, compensate for the absence of close kin, and work through loss. A fascinating and nuanced account of the play of continuity and discontinuity at the heart of human cultures.”
―Olivia Harris, London School of Economics
“This superb collection of papers inaugurates a new direction in the study of kinship and politics grounded in the complexities of memory. Carsten and her colleagues link everyday processes of relating with larger webs of power and authority through the ghosts – those whose existence is contested – they have in common. Thus they show that the sociality of remembering and forgetting lies above all in the creation and destruction of persons.”
―Gillian Feeley-Harnik, University of Michigan
From the Inside Flap
Catholic residents of a decayed railway colony in Bengal are haunted by domestic ghosts. Sex workers in London recount pasts that are fragmented among different lives lived under different names. Through a close study of such examples, Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness explores the subtle and complex intersections between everyday forms of relatedness in the present and memories of the past. The essays collected here examine how their various subjects are located in personal and familial histories that connect to the wider political formations of which they are a part. 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.
Ghosts of Memory provides an overview of literature on relatedness and memory and moves beyond previous approaches to the subject. It suggests some common forms and themes that emerge through the diverse lives, geographical locations, and social contexts considered in these essays: pasts disrupted by migration, personal trauma, or political upheaval; the present disturbed by ghosts and hauntings, illness, and absent or abusive familial relations. Drawing on anthropology, literature, memory studies, and social history, this collection will be of interest to a wide range of specialist and general readers.
From the Back Cover
Catholic residents of a decayed railway colony in Bengal are haunted by domestic ghosts. Sex workers in London recount pasts that are fragmented among different lives lived under different names. Through a close study of such examples, Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness explores the subtle and complex intersections between everyday forms of relatedness in the present and memories of the past. The essays collected here examine how their various subjects are located in personal and familial histories that connect to the wider political formations of which they are a part. 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.
Ghosts of Memory provides an overview of literature on relatedness and memory and moves beyond previous approaches to the subject. It suggests some common forms and themes that emerge through the diverse lives, geographical locations, and social contexts considered in these essays: pasts disrupted by migration, personal trauma, or political upheaval; the present disturbed by ghosts and hauntings, illness, and absent or abusive familial relations. Drawing on anthropology, literature, memory studies, and social history, this collection will be of interest to a wide range of specialist and general readers.
About the Author
Janet Carsten is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community (1997) and After Kinship (2004). She has co-edited About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond (1995) with Stephen Hugh-Jones, and edited Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (2000). Her current research deals with new approaches to kinship in anthropology, adoption reunions, kinship and memory.
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