Rethinking Materiality , Memory and Identity

This introductory article  considers and questions exactly how materials and people constitute social worlds and relationships which sustain identity and memory and, in turn, the social and political structures or norms that these attachments invest in, stabilise and maintain.

concepts and things, new methodologies are emerging that promise to overcome the traditional separation between fieldwork and analysis. 8 This renewed concern with materiality can also be traced in recent literature and art, particularly since the late 1990s. Zuzanna Jakubowski has suggested that although this is often interpreted as a reaction to the rise of the digital, and a yearning for the authenticity of the 'real', she sees these avant-garde forms of realism as seeking to constitute an affective experience in themselves, rather than a representation of reality. 9 Diverse recent works such as Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence, the loving family chronicle of Edmund de Waal's The Hare with the Amber Eyes, to the Marxist speculative materialism of China Mieville's novels, all freely delve into the affective economy of objects. In discussing Orhan Pamuk's focus on mass produced, every day objects, such as salt shakers and ashtrays, in the Museum of Innocence, Jakubowski suggests that this 'illustrates the Latourian democratic creation of meaning and reality by human and non-human actors alike -the salt shakers might be man-made but at the same time they possess a life of their own'. 10 Roland Barthes' 1968 essay 'The Reality Effect' linked the rise of literary realism and materialism in the nineteenth century -for example, authors such as Balzac and Flaubert -with the contemporaneous rise of a range of realist practices, including 'objective history', and materialist practices, such as photography, archaeology, tourism and museum collecting, where materials were collected to produce a world-ordering narrative. 11 Aligning this new interest in the material with the nonrepresentational allows us to make a link between the preoccupations of the 'new materialism' and emerging new approaches to heritage, archaeology and collecting practices, which move away from humancentred world ordering, to explore the embodied, affective experience of material and social worlds.

EMOTIONAL PASTS
A concern with materiality joins with the recent scholarly interest in the history, political effects and cultural role of emotions. 12 Sometimes termed the 'affective turn', such research has defined emotions, or 'felt judgements', as embodied feelings experienced in the context of cultural values and principles. 13 This field is premised on the argument that emotions, including their bodily dimensions, are culturally and historically determined, rather than biologically based and common to all humans. Although they have a neurological basis, they are learned and expressed in different ways according to social and temporal context.
In this view, emotions are as important in understanding the past as other social categories such as class, race and gender. They may be collective, historically created and locally contingent, and respond dynamically to circumstance, response or refusal in systems of circulation and exchange that Sara Ahmed terms 'emotional economies'. 14 Such practices constitute 'objects of feeling' -those toward whom we feel pity, anger or love. 15 An interest in emotions emerged in the context of broad theoretical shifts such as postmodernism with its scepticism toward grand narratives, self-reflexivity in interpretation, a related emphasis on language and discourse and a concern with gender and power in the reconstruction of past societies. 16 In our own time, a politicised commitment to exploring inequality, and to understanding our own 'positioned subjectivity', may also constitute a productive source of critical engagement, including approaches such as 'auto-ethnography' that have allowed us to scrutinise our methodological and theoretical presuppositions and procedures, and myriad, otherwise overlooked aspects of archaeological, historical and heritage praxis. In addition, a focus upon our own engagement with the stuff we study contributes to our understanding of materiality: for example, in helping us understand relationships between humans and the material world through devices such as object biographies. Such processes may challenge Western ontologies and transcend traditional Western oppositions, such as the division between object and meaning. Finally, such an approach forces us to re-visit longstanding historiographical questions of empathy and its place as a heuristic device in understanding others.
Such concerns are linked to the anthropology of archaeology, sparked by an interest in the socio-political context of knowledge production that began during the 1970s. Such studies argued that science is not an objective set of techniques or principles but rather a culture, and that the objects of scientific study are socially constructed. 17 Archaeologists have long argued for attending to their own disciplinary culture, especially in conducting fieldwork. Lynn Meskell notes that attention to the hybrid communities and discourse around such research de-centres 'the past' as a privileged locale and re-orients analysis in terms of the present and 'how archaeology works in the world'. 18 As Tracy Ireland's contribution to this collection insists, our response to heritage objects relies upon a 'visual code of authenticity' and on a history or narrative framework that is intimately related to political cultures. However, we must also recognize our identification with the sensuous and exotic past has its limits.

THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
Merging heritage and ethnographic practices allows the exploration of the meaning of the past in the present, the politics of practice and contemporary debates focused on the material traces of the past. In their discussion of archaeological ethnography, Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos emphasise the significance of this approach in challenging the assumptions and authority of 'conventional' archaeology, and acknowledging a diverse range of interests in and ways of comprehending and narrating the past. 19 Attention to the finegrained experience of fieldwork -or 'deep hanging out', to use Clifford Geertz's phrase -shows how 'humans, non-humans, things, and their places of encounter become the context in which archaeological knowledge is co-created and produced'. 20 Steve Brown's contribution to this issue is a wonderful example of a lovingly detailed autoethnographic exploration of identity and belonging. He explores 'the phenomena of identity from my perspective of home and memory as experiences elicited, provoked, invoked and creatively imagined through encounter and entanglement with the "field site" and "found objects"'. Steve explores his identity as an archaeologist and how it is constituted within entangled webs of relationships with places and things that give meaning to his understanding of his own personal heritage.
In contrast, Erin Gibson ventures out to explore how memory is accumulated around place, as the indigenous Stl'atl'imx (pronounced Stat-lee-um) people of the lower Lillooet River Valley, in British Columbia, Canada, aim to preserve a colonial wagon route as a strategy for decolonizing and reclaiming their traditional territory and identity. She also looks in detail at the road's importance to a group of Grade 10 students who experience the wagon trail as part of a high school excursion, focusing on how the embodied experience of moving through this landscape is incorporated into their understandings of their own identity and their own future.
Tracy Ireland gets 'up close and personal' with two archaeological sites conserved in situ, comparing the 'Big Dig' archaeological site conserved in situ in Sydney, Australia, with the Pointe-à-Callière Musée d'archéologie et d'histoire in Montreal, Canada, in order to explore how these material encounters appear to 'create stable objects of memory and identity from a much more contingent and complex matrix of politics, social structures, and the more-than-human materiality of the city'. In particular, she argues that understanding heritage 'as a material structure for the "accumulation of affect"', and of how people feel heritage and the past through aesthetic and sensuous experiences of materiality and authenticity, bring us closer to understanding how heritage is seen to sustain identity and memory.
In contrast to the previous articles which focus on the sensuous materiality of archaeological remains and fieldwork in their many forms, Jane Lydon considers the webs of relationships that enmesh significant early photographs of Australian Indigenous people, arguing that through their materiality they exert a living power for descendants and for the nation as a whole. She charts the transformation of collections from anthropological data, to archives, to Aboriginal heritage, and considers the various roles and impacts prompted by their digital transformation and mobilization -from positive strengthening of families and identities to the riskier re-enactment of colonial stereotypes. She notes that 'visual technologies have always provided diverse and mutable conduits for transmitting images around the globe. Australia's first 1840s photographs of Aboriginal people, for example, were daguerreotypes, singular metal mirrors that could not be shared unless transformed into engravings and printed by a press into a publication'. While digitization offers powerful opportunities for re-connecting family networks and telling the truth of Indigenous experience, she describes the careful, intensive research and consultation that is required to do this without reifiying identity and tradition.
Finally, Ralph Mills' charming evocation of the mysteries of his mantelpiece, explores mass-produced objects, such as ceramic figurines, that may have been displayed on mantelpieces in working-class nineteenth and early twentieth-century houses, which he has encountered in archaeological contexts around Manchester in England. 'Above the hearth, at the heart of the home,' he writes, 'objects located on the mantelpiece could be said to be central in reflecting a number of aspects of the lives of those who placed them there'. Ralph relates how he constructed his own art installation to explore the ways that visitors to an art gallery in Manchester interacted with these small things, and how individuals might 'curate' collections in ways that transform mass produced items into 'objects of memory'.
As an assemblage these articles exhibit a careful consideration and questioning of exactly how materials and people constitute social worlds and relationships which sustain identity and memory and, in turn, the social and political structures or norms that these attachments invest in, stabilise and maintain. While each analysis works to reveal the histories and structures that might be concealed behind uncritical acceptance of ideas of 'possession and belonging', they all reflect the enchantment, pleasure or more ambivalent emotions that these authors derive from their work with small and forgotten things.