Introduction: Afterlives in objects

Abstract

In this introduction to our edited volume, Material Afterlives, we specify the interventions and arguments of our collection as a whole. To begin, we reflect on the recent proliferation of “afterlives” as a concept and metaphor within the social sciences and humanities, a development that we describe as the “new hauntology.” As we argue, this new hauntology favors the subjective rather than objective aspects of afterlives and consequently neglects questions of materiality. The overarching goal of Material Afterlives is to remedy this neglect. Following this, we examine the contributions and limitations of the concepts of ruin/ruination and waste to the investigation of material afterlives. While the concepts of ruin and waste presuppose a decrease in value in the face of time and change of function, material afterlives, by contrast, accentuate the proliferation of enhanced and unanticipated material values. We then enumerate the implications of our consideration of material afterlives for Memory Studies broadly, with particular emphasis on how material afterlives unsettle the orienting role of trauma in the discipline. Finally, we briefly outline the five specific contributions that constitute our volume.

Introduction: Afterlives and the new hauntology

Revenants. Vampires. Phantoms. Zombies. These are the iconic figures of afterlives. While they differ in their habits, hungers, and haunts, each of these modalities of the afterlife expresses a logic of continuity through, and despite, discontinuity. The familiar concept of the afterlife proposes that aspects of personhood and identity in life endure beyond the material decomposition of death. According to this image, afterlives are a matter of a subject's uncanny persistence despite objective deformation or transformation.

As a “concept metaphor” (Stoler, 2016: 3; see also Walton, 2019: 358), afterlives and a host of adjacent terms have seized sociological, anthropological, and philosophical imagination in recent years (Schäfers, 2020). Cumulatively, this turn to afterlives has revolutionized perspectives on temporality and time's effects on the political and the social. By synthesizing Derrida's concepts of specters and “spectrality” (1994) with Freud's (1955 [1919]) inquiry into the uncanny (unheimlich), scholars such as Gordon (2008 [1997]), Ross (2002), Hirsch and Spitzer (2011), Moffat (2019), and Dawdy (2021) have pioneered a new “hauntology” (Derrida, 1994) that explores how afterlives on a variety of scales, from individual biographies to vast political projects, endure after death, dismemberment, and disintegration.

One key intervention of the new hauntology has been a reinvigorated broadside against the tenacious persistence of linear and teleological models of time in the social sciences. The uncanny mingling of past and present in afterlives destabilizes the verities of historicism: the conceit, as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, “that in order to understand the nature of anything in this world we must see it as an historically developing entity, that is, first, as an individual and unique whole … and, second, as something that develops over time” (2000: 23). Such recent critiques of historicism resonate strongly with Walter Benjamin's anti-teleological vision of historicity, which exhorts historians against “telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary (and) … instead … (to) grasp the constellation which his (sic) era has formed with a definite earlier one” (1968: 263). The enveloping of past and present in afterlives results in temporal spectrality, which calls into doubt the “contemporaneity of the present to itself” (Derrida, 1994: 11–12).

This anti-historicist ethos animates the nascent subdiscipline of the anthropology of history and historicity (Hirsch and Stewart, 2005; Palmié and Stewart, 2016; Tambar, 2014; Walton, 2019, 2021), which acts as a compass for our engagements in this volume. Yet, despite its Copernican reorientation of perspectives on temporality, the new hauntology is marked by a significant lacuna. Afterlife as a concept privileges forms of (dis)continuity that characterize subjects in and after death. ¹ This subjective bias has resulted in a neglect of materiality on the part of the new hauntology. One primary aim of our volume, Material Afterlives, is to contribute to the ongoing engagement with the material endurance of “endings that are not over” (Gordon, 2008 [1997]) by a line of inquiry focusing on the objects, rather than the subjects, of afterlives.

What lessons might we glean from the objects that remain after a subject's vitality has ebbed, and thereby constitute a material relationship—a trace, or, more formally, an index (Peirce, 1998) or a metonymy (Runia, 2006)—of a life that has yielded to death? In the wake of lives led, objects and materials cluster, accumulate, and form unexpected constellations. Graveyards and cemeteries are definitive sites of death as a catalyst for material proliferation, but there are others, too. The material afterlives of polities take shape through increasingly sophisticated simulacra and aesthetic mimicry, even as they also involve “whitewashing” the ongoing effects of political power (Jovanović, 2019). Bygone empires lead especially vivid, ambivalent material afterlives (Walton, 2019), and the durability of “imperial duress” (Stoler, 2016) registers sharply in the “debris” (Stoler, 2008) empires leave behind.

The five essays that comprise this volume ponder the material formations and deformations that constitute afterlives in objects. Photography albums, cemeteries, statues, roadside memorials to traffic accidents, and the unclaimed possessions that remain following an unanticipated death are our primary objects of focus. Before describing each of our interventions in greater detail, however, we must consider the insights and limitations of several key concepts related to material afterlives.

Beyond ruins and waste

Within the family of concept-metaphors related to afterlives, two offer the most explicit focus on materiality: ruins and waste. Both ruins and waste emphasize the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity that conditions material objects in their afterlives, but they do so with distinct accents and emphases. Ruination places a premium on the aesthetics and affects of material decay, while waste highlights the transformations in value that stem from acts of discarding, jettisoning, and rejecting material objects.

Svetlana Boym provides a concise evaluation of ruin as both a verb and a noun: “‘Ruin’ literally means ‘collapse’—but actually ruins are more about remainders and reminders” (2011 [2008]). Boym and other recent theorists of ruins look to Benjamin's (2019) prescient, if provocatively (and appropriately) unstructured remarks on ruination as a definitive facet of modernity that undercuts the ideological fundament of modern progress. As Boym concludes, “Off-modern ruinophilia acknowledges the ambivalent relationship between human, historical, and natural temporalities” (2011 [2008]).

In contrast to the dominant current in writing on ghosts, revenants, and other avatars of the afterlife, ethnographic extensions of a Benjaminian perspective on ruins and ruination have foregrounded the relationship among space, objects, and afterlives. Yael Navaro-Yashin's evocative study (2009, 2012) of quotidian life among ruins in the aftermath of warfare and violent displacement in Cyprus exemplifies the generative potential of ruination as a concept. She traces how, as a result of the division of the island in the 1970s, Turkish Cypriots now residing in the north forge relations with displaced Greek Cypriots that “persist in the imagination through interactions and dealings with their abandoned properties, spaces, and belongings” (2009: 2). For Navaro-Yashin, ruination comprises the “material remains or artefacts of destruction and violation, but also … the subjectivities and residual affects that linger, like a hangover, in the aftermath of war or violence” (2009: 6).

Navaro-Yashin's approach to ruins and ruination foregrounds the mutual entailments of subjects and objects, the ways in which affect and materiality condition each other. In this respect, the concept-metaphor of the ruin is a more flexible modality of the afterlife than the phantom or the zombie. Despite these productive inroads, however, Navaro-Yashin's vision of ruination cannot capture the plethora of material afterlives that our essays consider and convey. There are two reasons for this limitation. First, the principal “affect” that attends Cypriot ruins is one of melancholic loss and abjection. ² However, as Boym argues, the affect that characterizes contemporary “ruinophilia” is not abject melancholy, but a critical “type of nostalgia that is reflective rather than restorative and dreams of the potential futures rather than imaginary pasts” (2011 [2008]). Ruins are the material loci for a multitude of affects and emotions including, but not limited to, melancholy. Secondly, material afterlives—including ruins—are not mere matters of affect. Navaro-Yashin is right to stress the relationship between temporality, spatiality, and affect, but this does not imply that affects are the only effects of afterlives in objects. As forms of duration and “duress” (Stoler, 2016: 6), material afterlives may also exceed, defy, and derail the affective coordinates of subjects in the present. To put this another way: taking materiality and objects seriously demands a refusal to reduce them to their affective entailments for subjects.

In this respect, the concept of waste offers a more capacious perspective on material afterlives. While waste certainly incites emotions—traditionally abomination and fear (Douglas, 1966)—rubbish is inseparable from more general questions of value and its transformations. Waste as a form of value involves aesthetic and affective considerations, but it is also a matter of economic and semiotic value (Graeber, 2001). The growing field of discard studies offers insight into material endurance despite changes over time in the value and function of objects (Reno and Thompson, 2017). Inspired by Mary Douglas’ classic theorization on dirt and pollution (1966), works in this vein draw attention to waste as a material medium through which human subjects reflect upon themselves (Hawkins, 2005; Knechtel, 2007). However, and in line with Douglas's pioneering insights, discard studies have focused more on questions of alterity and “the waste-making subject” (Hawkins, 2005: 11) than on rubbish as a mode of the material afterlife, the temporal aftermath of use value's ebb (Thompson, 2017).

Speculation over the afterlives of waste has also generated productive discussions within environmental (Alexander and O’Hare, 2020) and critical heritage studies (İlengiz et al., 2022). On one hand, the urgency of addressing global warming and related environmental crises has animated scholarly discussions of the materiality of toxic waste. Coping with toxicity in the context of chemical waste and plastics became a hotspot for those thinking about and struggling for environmental justice (Sarathy et al., 2018; Parotte, 2021). Simultaneously, toxic material afterlives have played a key role in studies of military disposal (Bendix, 2022; Henig, 2019), and, especially, nuclear waste and “the nuclear uncanny” (Masco, 2006). On the other hand, contemporary struggles for decolonization grapple with the question of what to do with the political potency of the material remains of colonial and imperial power regimes (Raikovich, 2021; Stoler, 2013). While “imperial debris” (Stoler, 2008) intersects with the waste-making global effects of the Anthropocene at large (Zalasiewicz and Waters, 2015), these two modes of the material afterlife should not be immediately collapsed.

Within critical heritage studies, waste has often been conceptualized in opposition to the ideals of commitment, care, and sustainability over time (Martinez, 2017). However, recent research has illustrated that disinvestment and heritagization are fundamentally connected through processes of dispossession (İlengiz, 2021; Karaca, 2021) and repurposing (Von Bieberstein, 2017). For these studies, waste is not merely the opposite of heritage, but its condition of possibility. Transitions from waste to heritage (and vice versa) have been examined through the lenses of rubble (Masquelier, 2022), human remains (Kwapisz-Williams, 2022), and trash (Berg, 2022). Simultaneously, in the context of the Rhodes Must Fall (Rao, 2016) and Black Lives Matter movements, the transformation of monuments glorifying figures of colonial and imperial regimes into toppled down, “wasted” material remains continues to inspire debate within and beyond the academy. Scholarship has only begun to register the politically empowering possibilities of waste-making in relation to the material embodiments of discriminatory regimes of power.

Perhaps even more so than ruination, waste is a potent resource for theorizing the material afterlives of objects. Nevertheless, limitations remain. Above all, a presupposition of a decrease in value–economic, especially, though also aesthetic–continues to color the concept of waste. By contrast, our collective investigation of material afterlives insists that the afterlife is often a forum for the proliferation of enhanced and unanticipated material values. In pursuit of the multiplicity of material afterlives, we require a more capacious set of concept-metaphors. Those that inspire our collection of five essays include relic, scar, tattoo, inheritance (Derrida, 1994), palimpsest, (Huyssen, 2000), stain, trace, and fossil, as well as ruin and waste. Shannon Lee Dawdy's theorization of patina, “the golden stain” that suggests a modality of Benjaminian “aura made curiously concrete” (2016: 11), is an especially insightful concept-metaphor for processes of material duration, accretion, and transformation over time. Taken together, this assemblage of concept-metaphors registers the multiple ways in which the past becomes materially present and takes on material “presence” (Runia, 2006).

Beyond trauma, beyond memory

Our inquiry into material afterlives also stakes important claims in relation to the emergent field of Memory Studies as a whole. As Andreas Huyssen has argued, since the 1980s, our “focus has shifted from present futures to present pasts” (2000: 21). The emergence of “present pasts”—what Francois Hartog characterizes as the “presentist” regime of historicity (2016)—has been influentially interpreted as a general turn to cultural memory by Aleida Assmann (2015: 80). This turn has inspired conceptual discussions and entailed new temporal sensibilities.

While one of the principal inspirations of Memory Studies, Pierre Nora's concept of lieux de mémoire (1989), centers on the relationship between materiality and memory, more recently the field has been dominated by the concept of trauma (Rigney, 2018). The haunting presence of excessive violence in the past, which demands remembrance and recognition, has led to an emphasis on the traumatic, rather than future-oriented, features of the present. Connecting to the present through trauma suggests “a new relationship to memory, to mourning and obligations, to misfortune and the misfortunate” (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009: 278), according to which trauma is the constitutive reference point in the past that determines the present dispositions of subjects and communities. The formation of communities of loss (Oushakine, 2011) in reference to the memory of specific traumatic events calls the living to account, while transgenerational trauma (Hirsch, 2012; Schwab, 2010) binds subjects through “a wound inflicted on the body” that is transferred from immediate victims to new generations.

Critiques of the focus on trauma in Memory Studies first emerged in the early 2000s (Crownshaw and Rowland, 2010; Huyssen, 2000). Ann Rigney has productively interrogated the apparently natural link between memory and trauma” (2018: 369) in order to foreground what she calls “anticipatory” modes of memory, in particular, memory as a platform for hope. Our volume mounts a different critique of trauma by highlighting its relationship to materiality and objects, rather than subjective states and dispositions. Violence and trauma play a role in several of our essays, notably those by Robert Matej Bednar and Çiçek İlengiz, both of which call into question the subjective presuppositions of trauma in order to examine how objects constitute the material afterlives of violence. Furthermore, and in line with Rigney, we insist that violence and trauma are only one among a multitude of collective memories that take on material form. While ruins bear a strong affinity with trauma, other motifs for material afterlives, such as relics, inheritance, waste, and patina, highlight modes of continuity, duration, and metamorphosis.

To a large degree, the trouble with trauma reflects the limitations of memory as a concept-metaphor in general. Memory, especially as a collective formation, is protean and multivalent; rather than a redefinition, we seek to open a space for discussing its limitations by way of the concept of afterlives. In line with our emphasis on materiality and objects, we submit that the subjective connotations of memory are insufficient for reckoning with the multiple modalities in which the past takes on afterlives in the present. Ann Laura Stoler's cautionary remarks concerning “duress” are apposite: “Its impress may be intangible, but it is not a faint scent of the past. It may be an indelible if invisible gash. It may sometimes be a trace but more often an enduring fissure, a durable mark” (2016: 6). Derrida's notion of inheritance, another key point of reference for our volume, resonates with Stoler's concept of duress. By insisting that “inheritance is never a given, it is always a task” (1994: 19) Derrida moves beyond the “presentist” (Hartog, 2016) presuppositions of collective memory to foreground the pressure that the past continually exerts on the present. While memory is dependent on the “willful conjuring of the dead by the living, to serve a politics in the present” (Moffat, 2019: 2), the notion of the afterlife, like that of inheritance, underscores the enduring power of the past, independent from human endeavors of remembrance.

Material afterlives in situ: Our itinerary ahead

With its wide geographical scope, our interdisciplinary collection engages with diverse material forms of afterlives. To begin, Jelena Radovanović conveys us to the 19th century, post-Ottoman Serbian city of Niš to interrogate a photography album that was presented as a gift to Milan Obrenović (1854–1901), the first ruler of independent Serbia. She illustrates in detail the ways in which imperial and national temporalities are embedded in the photography album prepared by the Serbian military, and its effects on shaping both collective memory of and historiography of Niš. Importantly, she highlights the double aspect of the album as a material afterlife. At the moment of its origin, the album consigned the Ottoman Empire resolutely to the past and authorized photography of ruins as the privileged material afterlife for the imperial past in newly-independent Serbia. Now, however, the album is itself a material afterlife of the heyday of nationalism in the late 19th Century and the modes of temporality and aesthetics that defined that moment.

Our journey in the Balkans continues with Jeremy F. Walton's reading of two cemeteries, Mirogoj Cemetery in Zagreb, Croatia, and Zeitenlik World War I Memorial Cemetery in Thessaloniki, Greece. Asking “When is a cemetery?” Walton complicates the materialization of afterlives in the ultimate place reserved for the dead. By focusing on the enduring yet neglected historical legacies of empire and the temporal ambiguities that these legacies provoke, Walton analyzes how both hegemonic and subaltern collective memories are materialized in cemeteries in relation to a variety of socio-political regimes, including bygone empires, contemporary nation-states, and communities that do not fit easily into either political category. Through his rendering, we come to understand the integral relationship between the material afterlives solidified in graveyards and the heterotopic and heterochronic qualities of cemeteries generally.

Questions of material representation and the commemoration of both individual and collective loss are also at the heart of Çiçek İlengiz's interpretation of three public statues in the city of Dersim, in Turkey's Kurdish southeast. İlengiz focuses on the enigmatic sculpture of Şeywuşen, a beloved holy madman (budela) who was murdered in Dersim in the 1990s under murky circumstances. She dwells on the paradoxical way in which the memorial to this madman attempts to contain the “uncontainable”—holiness and madness—in material form, and thereby constitutes a vivid material afterlife, open to multiple invaginations of the past in the present. By contrast, two other statues in Dersim seek to fix the past in relation to the present in monumental and counter-monumental form and thereby lead to comparatively static material afterlives. Dersim's monument to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of Turkey as a nation-state, and its counter-monument to Seyid Rıza, a local religious leader who was martyred during the genocidal massacres of 1937–38, stand in political opposition to each other, yet they both form material afterlives of ideologies, unlike the statue of Şeywuşen. The unbounded space of public mourning that the statue of Şeywuşen opens simultaneously holds multiple narratives of injuries together and generates the potential for joining different communities of loss.

Following this, our volume shifts its geographic focus to the United States of America in order to examine two potent contexts of material afterlives. Robert Matej Bednar draws on decades of fieldwork on roadside memorials to fatal automobile accidents to elucidate a dramatic roadside shrine in Alton, Texas. In 1989, an accident involving a truck and a bus resulted in the deaths of twenty-one middle school students, most of whom drowned in a pond at the bottom of the quarry into which the bus had plunged. In the intervening years, a large, official shrine has arisen at the site of the accident; it is frequently the object of rituals of remembrance for the twenty-one victims. By invoking concept-metaphors including the relic, the scar, and the tattoo, Bednar meditates on how both Alton's memorial constitutes multiple material afterlifes in relation to individual and collective traumas, ultimately speaking to the pervasive yet disavowed violence of American automobility.

The objects that remain in places where life has been lost are central to our volume's final essay as well. Here, we accompany Sofia Pinedo-Padoch in her work as an employee of the Public Estate Administrator for New York City, where legal and extra-legal temporalities both intersect and contradict. When individuals without legally-stipulated heirs die in New York, the Public Administrator is the agency responsible for obtaining, evaluating, and eventually selling their possessions, ranging from real estate to knicknacks, from financial portfolios to fine art and pornography. Frequently, the work of the Public Administrator involves entering homes for the first time since the death of their previous owners or tenants. Pinedo-Padoch tells two such stories. In one case, the material afterlife of a house's deceased owner is rich and aesthetically suggestive, though ultimately the value of the estate boils down to the deceased's financial portfolio. In the second instance, time seems to have been frozen in an apartment following the fatal overdose of its erstwhile occupant—the arrangement of soda cans and drug paraphernalia suggests that someone might have left mere moments ago, though 2 years have passed since the occupant's tragic passing. In both cases, Pinedo-Padoch offers a vivid portrait of how the convergence of legal and extralegal temporalities produces distinct material afterlives in the most literal sense.

From political ideologies to individual biographies, material afterlives embody and illuminate a plethora of relations between pasts and presents. The essays that form Material Afterlives illustrate this key point: the subjects of afterlives, the ghosts, and the zombies, are inseparable from the objects that persist. These objects may be the crucibles for collective and individual memories, as in the case of monuments and photo albums, but they need not be. More importantly, the pressures of the past that material afterlives convey are irreducible to the memories they spark. Afterlives in objects are our inheritance, in a Derridean sense. We hope that we are up to the tasks that they entail.