Persistent Pasts: Engaging with Conflict Legacies in the Present | Tue Dec 17 14:00:00 | Room 777/80
Conflict both destroys and creates on a local and global scale, reconfiguring existing landscapes, power structures, beliefs and practices, and in the process forges - and often enforces - new and distinctive human-thing relationships.This session invites papers focussing on the reuse of material cultures and/or landscapes of conflict from prehistory to the present day. The session welcomes, but is not limited to, contributions covering themes such as transformation and (re)appropriation of landscapes and objects, material persistence, material/human resistance, destruction/creation of lifeworlds, human/non-human entanglements, conflicts over natural and cultural resources, conflicts in and over the Anthropocene, and practices of recycling within conflict or post-conflict settings. Papers proposing new theoretical and conceptual approaches to living with and transforming conflict legacies are particularly encouraged, as are contributions which draw on materials and case studies from a range of different contexts, including indigenous and non-Western perspectives.(Please note: the first half of this session picks up themes from the linked Session 46: Archaeology and Heritage Studies in, of and after the Anthropocene, and participants are encouraged to attend both sessions to facilitate discussion between and across them).
Session timetable |
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14:00 | Esther Breithoff, Birkbeck, University of LondonSession Introduction |
14:05 | Emma Waterton, Western Sydney University; Hayley Saul, Western Sydney UniversityGhosts of the Anthropocene: Spectral Accretions at the Port Arthur Historic SiteAs a place of heritage, the Port Arthur Historic Site in Tasmania, Australia, provides a substantial representation of a colonial landscape composed of the material remains of many pasts and many lives. Principally associated with Australia’s convict history, the vestiges that are found there today take the form of extant buildings, shorelines, cemeteries, walls, garden beds, exercise yards and punishment cells. Port Arthur is also thought to harbour less-tangible residues of its pasts in the form of ghostly apparitions and atmospheres. Indeed, it is often referred to as being one of the most haunted places in Australia. This sense of ‘haunting’ plays a powerful role when it comes to making connections between the physical spaces in which visitors stand and what is known to have happened there. Rather than focus on the supernatural traces of deviant criminals once imprisoned at Port Arthur, however, this paper will take a broader account of ‘ghosts’. To do so, the paper will draw on work emerging from the environmental humanities, such as Deborah Bird Rose’s (2013) notion of a ‘dark Anthropocene’ or ‘Anthropocene noir’, and the work of Anna Tsing et al. (2017) in their volume theArts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Using the framework of ‘spectral accretions’, we will illustrate the ecological interrelations between human and non-humans in the Anthropocene by describing our attempts at a multispecies ethnographyat Port Arthur in 2017. In particular, we will look to the abiding presence of ‘arboreal-others’ in order to re-enliven our understanding of Port Arthur’s pasts and re-imagine the role of these more-than-human protagonists in shaping its present and potential futures. |
14:25 | Anatolijs Venovcevs, UiT The Arctic University of NorwayRepairing Towards… Living with Landscapes ScarsThe second half of the twentieth century witnessed an acceleration of resource exploitation in the northern and remote regions of the world. These developments employed military-like organization, justified through patriarchal and militaristic jargon, while ostracizing the local Indigenous peoples from their land. Thus, this drive for resource exploitation can be seen as a form of conflict by the colonizing southern national interests against northern environments and their people. However, the high hopes and ambitions for creating new, colonized norths fell short with the late twentieth-century collapse of the social and economic systems that conceived these developments. While many of the resource extractive communities remain in place, holding on to existence by perpetuating their single-industry purpose, they live in and amongst the landscape ruins of vestigial development. |
14:45 | Oladimeji Oluwadamilare Salami, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria; Veronica Oluwatobi Afenkhena , Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, NigeriaPolitical power, migration and modernity: archaeological exploration into Nigeria’s socio-politico-economic presentNigeria’s civil war of 1967 to 1970 is arguably the bloodiest catastrophe in the history of the nation. After a series of peaceful negotiations had failed, a particular section of the country had resorted to military action for its secession. However, the great significance of the event is not in the body count but the material contexts of its occurrence as well as its pre- and post- histories. Moreover, while the event can be securely consigned to history, its effects on the political system of the nation and migration are there for all to see. The current lack of trust among the constituent tribes, which leads to perennial constitutional breakdown, has taken its stem from the seemingly-forgotten 1967-1970 events. Ever since then, the seceding tribe has always complained of being marginalised in the sharing of political powers and in the distribution of economic dividends. This paper explores the archaeological facts of the present, documenting the transformation of some cities affected by the war. In this presentation, we propose that a critical historical archaeology can contribute substantially to a nuanced understanding of the ironic socio-politico-economic development of a nation. Contradiction, sovereignty, governmentality, states of exception, surplus enjoyment, cycles of creative destruction and reterritorialisation, renewal, and subjectivation are explored by juxtaposing, grafting and merging archaeological evidence with social theory, textual evidence, ethnographic data and interdisciplinary scholarship to present an archaeological history greater than the sum of its parts. |
15:05 | Israel Hinojosa Baliño, Durham UniversityIcxitoca: From conjectural paradigm to retrospective predictionsIn this paper, I will talk about the retrospective predictions and the word icxitoca, and how we as archaeologists could use this term in an intrinsic relationship between society, conflict and academia. |
15:25 | BREAK |
15:55 | John Winterburn, University of OxfordShankill Poppies: defining an urban conflict landscapeShankill Road is a major thoroughfare that runs west from Belfast city. It bisects what has been described as a working-class area that rapidly expanded during the growth of the Belfast linen industry in the 19th century. |
16:15 | marjolijn kok, Independent researcher/Bureau Archeologie en ToekomstSingle places harbouring multiple conflicts; hidden by design, remembered selectivelyAfter the decolonisation of Indonesia, over 12.000 Moluccans were shipped to the Netherlands and put into about 90 camps (woonoorden). Most of the men were part of the colonial army (KNIL) and their families accompanied them. The plan was they would return to the Moluccan islands in a few months. But due to the aftermath of decolonisation and Dutch politics it turned out that they would stay in the camps for many years or even decades and most would never return. |
16:35 | Jacques Aymeric Nsangou, University of GenevaAntagonistic evolution of two elements of an African fortification in Foumban, West CameroonAt the beginning of the 20th century, the penetration of European colonizers into the African hinterland continued and resulted in a ban: Africans were no longer allowed to wage war against each other as in the past. Then, all the endogenous fortifications and defensive structures, which had been built in the context of the inter-African conflicts, were either destroyed completely or fell into disuse. This is the case of the fortifications of Foumban, a pre-colonial town in western Cameroon, whose defensive structures were never used again after the arrival of the Germans in this locality in April 1902. Consisting of a wall, innumerable pitfalls and two ditches; one of which surrounded the city, these defensive structures have undergone an entirely different evolution. Meanwhile ditches, pitfalls and the wall have been destroyed or abandoned in some areas whereas one of the main gates of the wall has undergone several renovations by the Bamun people. |
16:55 | Session organisersDiscussion |
17:30 | END |