The body is a site of knowing. An emplaced ethnography attends to the issue of experience by paying close attention to the relationships between bodies and the materiality and sensoriality of place, which often exceed the representational canon. Embodiment can be considered as a process that is integral to the relationship between humans and their environment (Pink 2009: 27; Birth 2006a). Our encounters with memoryscapes are frequently non-verbal. Smells, touch, sounds, and taste can transport us to places in the past; they can aid in the recall of events, people, and places. Moreover, they act both as prompts to memory and inseparable parts of the memory landscape.
The body is also a site of political memory, and serves as a filter to guide individuals in the social worlds in which they are enmeshed. Whether prompted by identity or body politics, we make sense of our social and perceptual worlds in tandem. Judith Butler advocates the primacy of the body and interpersonal stance in the performance of identity and social and cultural norms, which she calls ‘performativity,’ or rather ‘not a singular ‘act,’ for it is always the reiteration of a norm or set of norms’ (1997: xxi). Resistance to the norms and conventions of a social group are concepts very close to Butler’s work, which finds purchase in this context.
Thus, the focus of this section is on the dynamics between place, space, the body and emotion, starting from the premise that collecting and sharing memories means dealing with tales of the body and remembered corporeal experience, as well as through the gestures of the body in recollection which may be filtered and shaped by the socialised body. Memory can also be felt, enacted, and experienced through the body.
The body as a place of memory can be simultaneously a vehicle of mobility through memory spaces and a site of memory situated in the places and stories of memory. The tethering or unsettling of the body to/from place varies. Experience is key, as is memory, and the autobiographical experience we carry is skin deep. Kevin Birth (2006b: 176) asserted that ‘remembering can use far more than the written word … it can rely on buildings, spaces, monuments, bodies and patterns of representing self and others.’
Contributors in this section make a powerful case for the body as part of an experiential and epistemological framework with which to better understand how memory and remembrance work.
The section begins with two chapters, by Emma Waterton and Shanti Sumartojo, that override prescribed narratives and modes of consumption at memorial sites though the lens of affectual re-imagining and disclosure. Emma Waterton leads the reader through a sensory experience of visiting the heritage that is connected to the attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawai’i. This chapter articulates the layers of intensity that define Pearl Harbor as a place of memory, together with the meanings and identities that this iconic site evokes and attracts. Through the optics of ‘bright objects,’ Warterton constructs the idea of the ‘encounter’ at Pearl Harbor and other wartime memory sites as being linked to various ‘registers of affect’ that can do unbidden work when we visit sites with a traumatic past. Thus, this chapter could be read alongside the contributions in the Handbook’s section on ‘Difficult Memories (Part 2).’
In a similar vein, Shanti Sumartojo also advocates for sensory experience in guiding and building intellectual and imaginative understandings of memory sites, drawing on her previous work on commemoration as lieux de mémoire. Sumartojo links the imagined and the affectual to the historical memory of historic sites, positing that the material is fundamental in framing the ways that memory ‘not so much pierces the present, but ongoingly comprises it through our sensory experiences.’ The chapter develops around the idea of spontaneous and unruly impact of the senses and the body during these encounters. Experiencing a lieu de mémoire, she argues, functions as a phenomenological encounter with the remembered past that percolates visitors’ own logics, identities, and expectations.
Dan Hicks then examines the relationship between the body as represented in photographs of his younger self, found in an archaeological archive, and the embodied practice of archaeological excavation and performance: photology as a visual knowledge of the past. Hicks frames this disclosure in Proustian and Barthesian terms of inquiry, developing the intriguing notion that archaeological depictions and the human body are compromised in the same assemblage. Timelines and materialities intersect through the uncanny yet pervasive absence-presence of the photographic trace and the phantomic qualities of the body-as-archive.
The body that moves through this section, in its various guises, then goes walking. Ceri Morgan explores the fundamental human practice of walking, set within a burgeoning cross disciplinary interest in walking as a process and method, but here mainly addressed from psychogeographic perspectives. In this foray into alternative ways of navigating space, Morgan discloses the potent links between industrial spaces, abandonment, and presence. We become engulfed in a dreamlike world of movement and spectral encounters, framed as a compelling commentary that considers absence in relation to industry while articulating creative walking methods at the core of a series of student workshops. This chapter could be read alongside the other contributions in Part 4 ‘Industry’ and in Part 3 on ‘Memoryscapes’ it also finds resonance with Toby Butler’s contribution.
Walking then segues into the relationship between maps, mapping, and memory. In Patrick Laviolette, Anu Printsmann, and Hannes Palang’s chapter, ‘anthropography’ is articulated as one of the ways in which people find meaning in maps, mapping experiences, and map-like images. The authors explore some of the ways that individuals may attach cartographic significance to places through the optics of tourist brochures, counter mapping and other ‘charting’ practices. Here, a comparative review of the many forms of mnemonic mapping serves to entrench the central role of the body in how life experiences are qualified, made sense of, and represented. This chapter also assesses popular items of visual/material and digital culture depicting such a relationship (such as tourist brochures, guidebooks, postcards, Points of Interest [POI], and Global Positioning System [GPS]). Two themes come to the fore: map production and mapping practices and globalisation, as expressed through new technological production and the promotion of international tourism. This contribution could be read alongside the chapter by Sebastien Caquard, Emory Shaw, José Alavez, and Stefanie Dimitrovas (Chapter 5, ‘Mapping memories’) on migration and diaspora story mapping.
Finally, Luis C. Sotelo’s chapter foregrounds ‘voicing’ and listening as a mechanism of bridging past, present, and future in Colombia. We follow his core inquiry about the meaning of effective ‘voicing’ and listening in a post-conflict context. The author tells us how performing artists in Colombia started working with both victims and offenders of abuses of human rights in an attempt to stage collaborative performances informed by or based on the real-life stories of those directly affected by the armed conflict. Here, we can glean the performativity of memory trumping political and social divisions in a shared rehearsal of memory through carefully timed and choreographed strategies and practices of uttering memories and listening.
The contributions in this section of the volume have more in common than just an attention to the body and the senses as forces of memory-making: they highlight memory experience as something which occurs at the embodied level as it unfolds in the political and shapes the social.
Birth, K. (2006a). Time and the biological consequences of globalization. Current Anthropology, 48 (2): 215–236.
Birth, K. (2006b). The immanent past: Culture and psyche at the juncture of Memory and history. Introduction to the special issue “The Immanent Past.” Ethos, 34 (2): 169–191.
Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New York and London: Routledge.
Pink, S. (2009). Doing sensory ethnography. London: Routledge.