Available in English for the first time, anthropologist Carlo Severi’s The Chimera Principle breaks new theoretical ground for the study of ritual, iconographic technologies, and oral traditions among non-literate peoples. Setting himself against a tradition that has long seen the memory of people “without writing”—which relies on such ephemeral records as ornaments, body painting, and masks—as fundamentally disordered or doomed to failure, he argues strenuously that ritual actions in these societies pragmatically produce religious meaning and that they demonstrate what he calls a “chimeric” imagination.
Deploying philosophical and ethnographic theory, Severi unfolds new approaches to research in the anthropology of ritual and memory, ultimately building a new theory of imagination and an original anthropology of thought. This English-language edition, beautifully translated by Janet Lloyd and complete with a foreword by David Graeber, will spark widespread debate and be heralded as an instant classic for anthropologists, historians, and philosophers.
The contiguous river basins that flowed in Tlaxcala and San Juan Teotihuacan formed part of the agricultural heart of central Mexico. As the colonial project rose to a crescendo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Indigenous farmers of central Mexico faced long-term problems standard historical treatments had attributed to drought and soil degradation set off by Old World agriculture. Instead, Bradley Skopyk argues that a global climate event called the Little Ice Age brought cold temperatures and elevated rainfall to the watersheds of Tlaxcala and Teotihuacan. With the climatic shift came cataclysmic changes: great floods, human adaptations to these deluges, and then silted wetlands and massive soil erosion.
This book chases water and soil across the colonial Mexican landscape, through the fields and towns of New Spain’s Native subjects, and in and out of some of the strongest climate anomalies of the last thousand or more years. The pursuit identifies and explains the making of two unique ecological crises, the product of the interplay between climatic and anthropogenic processes. It charts how Native farmers responded to the challenges posed by these ecological rifts with creative use of plants and animals from the Old and New Worlds, environmental engineering, and conflict within and beyond the courts. With a new reading of the colonial climate and by paying close attention to land, water, and agrarian ecologies forged by farmers, Skopyk argues that colonial cataclysms—forged during a critical conjuncture of truly unprecedented proportions, a crucible of human and natural forces—unhinged the customary ways in which humans organized, thought about, and used the Mexican environment.
This book inserts climate, earth, water, and ecology as significant forces shaping colonial affairs and challenges us to rethink both the environmental consequences of Spanish imperialism and the role of Indigenous peoples in shaping them.
Lester A. Walton was a well-known public figure in his day. An African American journalist, cultural critic, diplomat, and political activist, he was an adviser to presidents and industrialists in a career that spanned the first six decades of the twentieth century. He was a steadfast champion of democracy and lived to see the passage of major civil rights legislation. But one word best describes Walton today: forgotten.
Exploring the contours of this extraordinary life, Susan Curtis seeks to discover why our collective memory of Walton has failed. In a unique narrative of historical research, she recounts a fifteen-year journey, from the streets of Harlem and “The Ville” in St. Louis to scattered archives and obscure public records, as she uncovers the mysterious circumstances surrounding Walton’s disappearance from national consciousness. And despite numerous roadblocks and dead ends in her quest, she tells how she came to know this emblematic citizen of the American Century in surprising ways.
In this unconventional book—a postmodern ghost story, an unprecedented experiment in life-writing—Curtis shares her discoveries as a researcher. Relating her frustrating search through long-overlooked documents to discover this forgotten man, she offers insight into how America’s obsession with race has made Walton’s story unwelcome. She explores the treachery, duplicity, and archival accidents that transformed a man dedicated to the fulfillment of American democracy into a shadowy figure.
Combining anecdotal memories with the investigative instincts of the historian, Curtis embraces the subjectivity of her research to show that what a society forgets or suppresses is just as important as what it includes in its history. Colored Memories is a highly original work that not only introduces readers to a once-influential figure but also invites us to reconsider how we view, understand, and preserve the past.
A balanced, sensitive study of the history of comfort women in Singapore during World War II.
“Comfort women” or ianfu is the euphemism used by the Japanese military for the women they compelled to do sex work in the Second World War, and has become the term generally used in English to discuss the subject. The role of comfort women in the Japanese empire during World War II remains an important and emotional topic around the world. Most scholarship concentrates on Korean comfort women, with less on their counterparts in Japan, China, and Taiwan, and even less on Southeast Asia. That gap persists despite widespread knowledge of the elaborate series of comfort stations, or comfort houses, that were organized by the Japanese administration across Singapore during the Occupation from 1942 to 1945. So why, the author asks, did no former comfort women from Singapore come forward and tell their stories when others across Asia began to do publicly in the 1990s?
To understand this silence, this book offers a detailed examination of the sex industry serving the Japanese military during the wartime occupation of Singapore: the comfort stations, managers, procuresses, girls, and women who either volunteered or were forced into service and in many cases sexual slavery. Kevin Blackburn then turns from history to the public presence of the comfort women in Singapore’s memory, including newspapers, novels, plays, television, and touristic heritage sites, showing how comfort women became known in Singapore during the 1990s and 2000s. Bringing great care, balance, and sensitivity to a difficult subject, Blackburn helps to fill an important gap in our understanding of this period.
Prisoners at Mittelbau-Dora built the V-1 and V-2 missiles, some of them coming into direct contact with Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, who later became leading engineers in the U.S. space program. Through the continuing story of Mittelbau-Dora, from its operation as a labor camp to its social construction as a monument, Schafft and Zeidler reflect an abiding interest in the memory and commemoration of notorious national events. In extending the analysis of Mittelbau-Dora into post-war and present-day Germany, Commemorating Hell uncovers the intricate relationship between the politics of memory and broader state and global politics, revealing insights about the camp's relationship to the American space pioneers and the fate of the nearby city of Nordhausen.
Constructions of Time and History in the Pre-Columbian Andes explores archaeological approaches to temporalities, social memory, and constructions of history in the pre-Columbian Andes. The authors examine a range of indigenous temporal experiences and ideologies, including astronomical, cyclical, generational, eschatological, and mythical time.
This nuanced, interdisciplinary volume challenges outmoded anthropological theories while building on an emic perspective to gain greater understanding of pre-Columbian Andean cultures. Contributors to the volume rethink the dichotomy of past and present by understanding history as indigenous Andeans perceived it—recognizing the past as a palpable and living presence. We live in history, not apart from it. Within this framework time can be understood as a current rather than as distinct points, moments, periods, or horizons.
The Andes offer a rich context by which to evaluate recent philosophical explorations of space and time. Using the varied materializations and ritual emplacements of time in a diverse sampling of landscapes, Constructions of Time and History in the Pre-Columbian Andes serves as a critique of archaeology’s continued and exclusive dependence on linear chronologies that obscure historically specific temporal practices and beliefs.
Contributors: Tamara L. Bray, Zachary J. Chase, María José Culquichicón-Venegas, Terence D’Altroy, Giles Spence Morrow, Matthew Sayre, Francisco Seoane, Darryl Wilkinson
Several contributors examine how the experiences of indigenous groups and the imperial past are incorporated into public histories in British Commonwealth nations: in Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum; in the First Peoples’ Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization; and, more broadly, in late-twentieth-century Australian culture. Still others focus on the role of governments in mediating contested racialized histories: for example, the post-apartheid history of South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument, originally designed as a tribute to the Voortrekkers who colonized the country’s interior. Among several essays describing how national narratives have been challenged are pieces on a dispute over how to represent Nepali history and identity, on representations of Afrocuban religions in contemporary Cuba, and on the installation in the French Pantheon in Paris of a plaque honoring Louis Delgrès, a leader of Guadeloupean resistance to French colonialism.
Contributors. Paul Amar, Paul Ashton, O. Hugo Benavides, Laurent Dubois, Richard Flores, Durba Ghosh, Albert Grundlingh, Paula Hamilton, Lisa Maya Knauer, Charlotte Macdonald, Mark Salber Phillips, Ruth B. Phillips, Deborah Poole, Anne M. Rademacher, Daniel J. Walkowitz
Drawing on trauma and memory studies and theories of authorship and readership, Contesting Childhood offers commentary on the triumphs, trials, and tribulations that have shaped this genre. Douglas examines the content of the narratives and the limits of their representations, as well as some of the ways in which autobiographies of youth have become politically important and influential. This study enables readers to discover how stories configure childhood within cultural memory and the public sphere.
How we view ourselves and how we wish to be seen by others cannot be separated from the stories we tell about our past. In this sense all memory is in crisis, torn between conflicting motives of historical reflection, political expediency, and personal or collective imagination. In Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Susan Suleiman conducts a profound exploration of contested terrain, where individual memories converge with public remembrance of traumatic events.
Suleiman is one of a handful of scholars who have shaped the interdisciplinary study of memory, with its related concepts of trauma, testimony, forgetting, and forgiveness. In this book she argues that memories of World War II, while nationally specific, transcend national boundaries, due not only to the global nature of the war but also to the increasingly global presence of the Holocaust as a site of collective memory. Among the works she discusses are Jean-Paul Sartre’s essays on the occupation and Resistance in France; Marcel Ophuls’ innovative documentary on Klaus Barbie, tried for crimes against humanity; István Szabó’s film Sunshine, a chronicle of Jewish identity in central Europe; literary memoirs by Jorge Semprun and Elie Wiesel; and experimental writing by child survivors of the Holocaust.
In the twenty years of postrevolutionary rule in Mexico, the war remained fresh in the minds of those who participated in it, while the enigmas of the revolution remained obscured. Demonstrating how textuality helped to define the revolution, Culture and Revolution examines dozens of seemingly ahistorical artifacts to reveal the radical social shifts that emerged in the war’s aftermath.
Presented thematically, this expansive work explores radical changes that resulted from postrevolution culture, including new internal migrations; a collective imagining of the future; popular biographical narratives, such as that of the life of Frida Kahlo; and attempts to create a national history that united indigenous and creole elite society through literature and architecture. While cultural production in early twentieth-century Mexico has been well researched, a survey of the common roles and shared tasks within the various forms of expression has, until now, been unavailable. Examining a vast array of productions, including popular festivities, urban events, life stories, photographs, murals, literature, and scientific discourse (including fields as diverse as anthropology and philology), Horacio Legrás shows how these expressions absorbed the idiosyncratic traits of the revolutionary movement.
Tracing the formation of modern Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s, Legrás also demonstrates that the proliferation of artifacts—extending from poetry and film production to labor organization and political apparatuses—gave unprecedented visibility to previously marginalized populations, who ensured that no revolutionary faction would unilaterally shape Mexico’s historical process during these formative years.
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