Description
Book Synopsis What happens when we blur time and allow ourselves to haunt or to become haunted by ghosts of the past? Drawing on archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data, Blurring Timescapes, Subverting Erasure demonstrates the value of conceiving of ghosts not just as metaphors, but as mechanisms for making the past more concrete and allowing the negative specters of enduring historical legacies, such as colonialism and capitalism, to be exorcised.
Trade Review “This book is an exciting and invigorating experience for the reader. The reader is asked to engage actively with stories that stand outside typical conventions of scholarly narratives, and the quality of the writing makes that an easy task…Blurring ideas of time and space allow other critical aspects of the tangible and intangible to come into sharp focus, and gently provoke new ways of thinking and knowing.” • Jane Baxter, DePaul University
“This collection represents contemporary archaeological praxis that realigns the possibilities of archaeological theory through radical, brave, and at times vulnerable intersectional standpoints that inform a new way forward. The case studies, analysis, and life stories stay with you after you read it; it haunts you.” • Uzma Z. Rizvi, Pratt Institute
Table of Contents List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Sarah Surface-Evans, A. E. Garrison, and Kisha Supernant
Part I: Imagining Timescapes: Invoking Haunting, Memory, and Nostalgia
Chapter 1. Telling Ghost Stories: Communicating across Timescapes and between Worldviews
April M. Beisaw
Chapter 2. Material Memories: Interpreting Souvenirs and Heirlooms in the Archaeological Record
Erica Begun
Chapter 3. Journeys through Space and Time: Materiality, Social Memory, and Community at the City of David
Heather Van Wormer
Part II: Confronting Lingering Specters
Chapter 4. Recognizing Ghosts and Haunting in the Rural Midwest: Finding Community, Identity, and Wisdom in the Past
P. M. W. Lawton
Chapter 5. The Unwilling Student and the Ghost of Physical Anthropology: Public Perceptions of the Ethics of Physical Anthropology
Nicole M. Burt
Chapter 6. From Haunted to Haunting: Métis Ghosts in the Past and Present
Kisha Supernant
Part III: Identifying Ghosts within the Capitalist Landscapes of Late Modernity
Chapter 7. Rain on the Scarecrow, Blood on the Plow: Haunting, Trauma, and the Cruelty of the Agrarian Dream
Lilian Brislen
Chapter 8. Boneyard Quiet: A Ghost Story
A. E. Garrison
Chapter 9. Traumascapes: Progress and the Erasure of the Past
Sarah Surface-Evans
Chapter 10. Brickwork, Capitalism, Collective Memory, and the Commons
Brigitte H. Bechtold
Epilogue: Ghosts, Haunting, and Refusals to Erasure
Kisha Supernant, April M. Beisaw, A. E. Garrison, and Sarah Surface-Evans
Index
