Social anthropology, originating as synchronic social science by contrast to diachronic historical scholarship, has long grappled with social change, and with the role of the past in present-day human life-worlds. In particular, this fiction of synchronicity has hindered anthropological approaches to colonization and modernisation – and, worse still, an adequate ethnographic understanding of life after these radical transformations and upheavals.
Grounded in anthropological studies of memory, as well as taking inspiration from ‘materialist’ archaeology and STS, geography and heritage studies, anthropologists have more recently turned to the material remains of past human creativity, action and intervention, which endure over time and thus remain in the present – sometimes imbued with significance, at other times vanishing more or less slowly, used as materials for future projects, or serving as foci of commemoration or nostalgia.
This course is about the ethnography of material traces, or tracing as a component in ethnographic fieldwork in our time. The ethnography of traces has become pertinent in a historical era marked by loss - both of the progressive, developmentalist dreams that culminated in 20th century “high” modernist projects, and of environmental resources and possibilities that (in part) were destroyed or depleted by the same project.
Traces reference loss and continuing ruination (Stoler), but also past hopes, aspirations and opportunities, and their afterlives and revivals (Tausignant). Importantly, material residuals of past projects retain transformative potential and can become the substrate of future-making and, often unexpected, emergence. Tracing is thus not an activity directed towards the past – although traces can trigger important 21st century affects like nostalgia and mourning.
Instead, tracing is directed at present human (and non-human) life, and the emergence of futures from present landscapes. If present people live on (and often off) the sedimented substrate of the recent past – of radical transformations, violent interventions, but also hopeful, if often failed, aspirations – then our anthropolgical participation in the present (aka ethnography) is also always about "being with pasts" (Nancy Hunt).
We will address one way of doing this, by turning our attention to material residuals that originate in the past, but persist, in shifting forms and in on-going transformation, in the present. We shall attend to people’s living with remains, and to the traces themselves as potentially potent agents. While acknowledging historical contexts and chronologies as potentially useful information, our interest will be the lives of and with the traces themselves.
Traces may be associated with memories – even commemorated – but also reinterpreted, contested, and erased or forgotten; they can be discarded like waste, or used for future endeavours, like materials of derelict buildings; and they shape and facilitate, or limit and curtail, ongoing human interactions and future-making, as well as more-than-human ecologies and growth, generating unpredictable, sometimes hopeful, sometimes monstrous (Tsing) future forms.
The modernist traces studied by social anthropologists are diverse, including debris of war, abandoned architectures and dysfunctional infrastructures, industrial landscapes, transformed agricultural lands, as well as the afterlives of development projects, health interventions, scientific laboratories, and altered bodies and ecologies – the latter foregrounding the transformative, lively, if sometimes enduringly harmful, potential that traces may harbour.
Tracing is not foregrounding genealogy and causality – how things came about – but about the manifold and entangled material, affective and aesthetic connections that like a rhizome extend below the surface of the present into the past, but also across different, historically connected places and positions within the present. It attends to how people and other life-forms encounter, negotiate, relate to and transform remains in the present.
In this workshop, we will discuss theoretical and methodological approaches, and draw on the landscape of Kisumu city and its environs to conduct daily excursions to exemplary sites and objects originating from the 20th century and continuing to exist in the present city – e.g. government institutions and factories, hospitals and railways, scientific and agricultural sites (adjusting the list, where possible, to the participants’ interests).
Kisumu is uniquely suited for this endeavour: it developed as a colonial town after the colonial railway reached in 1906, and was a focus of colonial, national and developmentalist interventions. Traces of these pasts persist amidst on-going, accelerated urban transformations. Our joint excursions will allow us to test and challenge theoretical-methodological propositions and develop own ideas concerning ethnographic tracing, and, not least, to discern differences in our perspectives, related to our diverse interests, backgrounds and positions.
How we engage with remains of the past depends on our genealogical and imagined relation to that past, our position in the present and in a particular place, as well as our hopes for the future. Tracing as ethnographic method must take such differences into account, and might be best done as a collective endeavour rather than as classic “lone” field research, which is why our course will emphasise collective investigations and outcomes.
Learning outcome
- Familiarity with anthropological and kindred work (e.g., history, archaeology, STS) on remains of the recent past, or ‘traces of modernity’, and their present afterlives.
- Awareness of the vital role of traces in contemporary social lives and processes, after modernism, attendant accelerated change and aspirations, and irrecuperable loss.
- Exposure to ethnographic and experimental methods that focus on, or incorporate, the study of material remains of the past in the pursuit of ethnographic field research.
- Experience, through field-excursions, with concrete ethnographic cases of material traces in urban and peri-urban landscapes, architectures and infrastructures.
- Ability to collectively engage and interrogate specific modern traces, and to describe and share experiences and observations.