Ghosts of Memory (eBook)

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.

Contributors.

Acknowledgments.

1. Introduction: Ghosts of Memory: Janet Carsten (University of
Edinburgh).

2. Ruins and Ghosts: The Domestic Uncanny and the
Materialization of Anglo-Indian Genealogies in Kharagpur: Laura
Bear (London School of Economics and Political Science).

3. Enlivened Memories: Recalling Absence and Loss in Mongolia:
Rebecca Empson (University of Cambridge).

4. Connections and Disconnections of Memory and Kinship in
Narratives of Adoption Reunions in Scotland: Janet Carsten
(University of Edinburgh).

5. Memories of Movement and the Stillness of Place: Kinship
Memory in the Polish Highlands: Frances Pine (Goldsmiths College,
University of London).

6. Moving on? Generating Homes in the Future for Displaced
Northern Muslims in Sri Lanka: Sharika Thiranagama (University of
Edinburgh).

7. Belonging to What? Jewish Mixed Kinship and Historical
Disruption in Twentieth-Century Europe: Stephan Feuchtwang (London
School of Economics and Political Science).

8. Threading Time in the Biographies of London Sex Workers:
Sophie Day (Goldsmiths College, University of London).

9. Kinship, Memory, and Time in the Lives of HIV/AIDS Patients
in a North American City: Veena Das (Johns Hopkins University) and
Lori Leonard (Johns Hopkins School of Public Health).

10. The Cares of Alice Alder: Recuperating Kinship and History
in Switzerland: Michael Lambek (London School of Economics and
Political Science).

Index

"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