Newcastle-Durham Joint Anthropology Seminar Script

Below is the opening of the paper given in Newcastle on November 8th 2023.

This paper reflects on the work I have been doing since 2011 in eastern Poland, alongside more recent work in revolutionary heritage sites in the Republic of Ireland. In particular this paper stays with the complications of conducting anthropological research in places marked by centuries of conflict, pogroms, displacement, partition, and genocide. While eastern Poland and Ireland both have long and complex histories of imperial, ethnic, religious, and civil violence, neither place has gone through a formal process of reconciliation. They are “quiet” post-conflict zones. By this phrase I mean they are places were seeming conviviality masks unresolved conflicts. They are places unlikely to find themselves in a special issue on post conflict anthropology. And yet working in either reveals the central role that conflict and its aftermath has even now. Working within them involves attention to the material and social absences and to the silences that enable the appearance of peace in these societies, as well as the moments where contentious traces reveal unresolved trauma.

There is a tension in both these places between my obligations to scholarship, and my obligations to the people I work with. A tension that I once resolved by speaking only of conviviality and peace-making efforts. Which ultimately fulfilled neither of these obligations. Now for the last three years I have been working with a growing network of people on the concept of trace and tracing across disciplinary boundaries as part of an EU COST funded network on the analytical, ethical, and methodological use of trace. It has led me to rethink working ethically as both necessary and generative, in the field and on the page. But also to question the notion that ethics and dissensus are opposing forces. In particular it has left me confronting what it means for an anthropologist to witness the legacies of conflict to uncover unresolved tensions in convivial spaces and to recognise the impossibility of the “middle ground”.

This paper will discuss graves, unmade memorials, tall tales, naming, golden palaces, and empty fields. I want to untangle the anthropological urge to act as witness, detective and sometimes ventriloquist in areas where the legacy of violence remains unresolved. This paper contends that starting from an ethics of fragments can be an opportunity rather than a constraint for anthropologists.

One of the recurrent features of the work I do has been dealing with the fact that many of my interlocutors have complex and contradictory feelings about discussing violence past and present. I have been surprised by how candid people can be about the experience of violence and its location. And I have to also deal with the fact that often interlocutors will only be able to tell half a story, or will lie to me, or otherwise obfuscate phenomena and social practices central to researching specific conflicts and their aftereffects. None of what I am saying here is particularly new or challenging. In fact I gave a sister paper to this in Belfast a year ago when I first starting imaging what an anthropology of traces and spectres could be.  Alongside this anthropology is a neurotic discipline, often in crisis, and always in self-examination. The era of the heroic fieldworker is long over, for most. And yet I find it hard to stay with the trace, avoiding the self important desire to speak for the silenced history of others, to articulate the stories they don’t want to tell. This paper is about the struggle to analytically engage the places I have worked in for 10 years, while leaving certain things silent, ambiguous and uncertain.

The first piece of writing I presented about my work in Poland was at a PhD writing up seminar. At the time the member of staff leading this seminar commented that my writing reminded him strongly of a WG Sebald novel Austerlitz. This was in reference to my habit of leaving ideas hanging at the beginning of chapters, circling around, going on seemingly tangential discussions of events, spending far too much time explaining the materiality of the spaces I inhabited, often implying rather than explaining a what moment from the field exposed, and my absolute overuse of the comma. I thought this was a wonderful compliment I had succeeded in evoking something of the experience of my fieldwork. It took me a little while into the seminar and some more questions to realise it was a criticism. It reminded me that what we were there to do was to learn an anthropological style of writing. And it’s sticks in my mind in vivid detail. While there’s been many challenges to this idea that there is a singular house style in our discipline, I think we can all agree that here in the UK there is at least an agreed shape. I see it clearly when I am marking student essays, returning PhD feedback or preparing an article for a big-name journal. You start with the ethnography, introduce some background knowledge, break down the ethnography into readable and understandable moments, unpack these moments to reveal the theoretical insights they reveal, and conclude with what you have discovered through this method. Uncover and discover. The longer I work in the UK the more I become convinced that this is one of the many imperial legacies we are still hesitant to name in our work, the idea that real anthropological research and writing is valuable only when it is stripped of ambiguity, shadows and uncertainty. Which often leaves those of us who work with absences and silences practicing patchworking, taking the scraps and turning them into something complete via the addition of theories and examples that fill the gaps.

At the very start of my fieldwork in eastern Poland I went with my landlady to the House of Culture. Officially the House of Culture was now the Municipal Centre for Culture, Sport and Tourism, but most people I met continued to call it by the old socialist term Dom Kultury. It was a long rectangular building painted lemon yellow and orange. It was just off the town square, next to the massive Basilica complex in Biała and beyond that the eastern Polish border with Belarus. On one end of the building the volunteer fire force had a garage and rooms. The other end mainly comprised a large hall, several small antechambers, and on the small second floor a range of offices. The House of Culture was a non-governmental organisation that arranged activities around culture, art, sport and tourism. It also rented out its rooms for parties and events. I had come to the House of Culture so that I could get some basic information about the town and its history from the organisations Assistant Director, Anna. Anna was an enthusiastic middle-aged woman who spoke at a mile a minute. I missed a lot of what she said, and had to keep asking her to repeat information, which she did happily. By the end of our meeting I had filled several pages of a notebook with a potted history of the town. Anna then produced a list of book titles that I might find helpful. She disappeared to a small room and returned with brochures, and two large books. One was a book by a local politician about shrines and churches in the area, and the other was an academic tome covering in detail the history of the noble family that founded the town. I was thanking her profusely and desperately trying to fit everything into my small bag, when Anna produced something that remains one of the most interesting objects I collected during my fieldwork.

It was a small glossy map of the town printed in colour on an A4 page. Circles of black and red covered the map, each containing a number. A strip on the left-hand side matched the numbers to places. At the top of this list was a black and red circle. Beside the red circle was the phrase Obiekty istniejące: Existing Monuments. Beside the black circle the phrase read Obiekty nieistniejące: Non-existent Monuments.

It was nearly 1am on New Year’s Eve and I was sitting on the steps outside the House of Culture with Tomasz and Jakub. Inside the main hall was stuffy and loud; there was a small stage at one end of the hall where a local ‘Disco Polo’ band played. Along one side of the hall were windows and the tables were set under these with piles of homemade food, and alcohol. The rest of the hall was cleared for dancing and about 40 people filled the space. Outside on the steps it was icy, but quiet.

Tomasz was in his 70’s and lived on the outskirts of the town in a small house he had built for himself in the 1990’s. Jakub was visiting from University in Białystok, looking after his Grandmother over the Christmas holidays. Tomasz, taking advantage of his audiences of outsiders, was smoking and telling stories of his youth. The longer we sat there the more exaggerated the stories became. Tomasz had just told us that in the 1960’s he had joined the Soviet Army, Jakub was incredulous, “How? Where did you go to join?” Tomasz made a non-committal gesture. “I don’t believe you.” Tomasz laughed, ask anyone in the town and they would tell you it was true, he insisted. He had joined up and left the town for nearly ten years. “They sent me to the border with Finland” he continued. “There was nothing but snow, white skies and white ground. So white some days your eyes would get blurry. For six months all day it was dark. The sun never rose. Then it was always daylight, the sun never set. The only living things there were rabbits. The Russian were afraid of an invasion by rabbits. All day I had to drink and shoot at rabbits. That’s how I spent ten years. Drinking and shooting at rabbits.” I tried to work out if this could be true if it were possible that throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s the border between Finland and Russia was just rabbits and snow. But I did not know much about the Finnish border, and less about Tomasz. Tomasz interrupted my internal calculations, “I was the best shot. If you like I will teach you how to use a gun. Just to shoot birds and rabbits” his face was pure mischief. “Where will you shoot rabbits around here?” Jakub asked. Tomasz indicated that the forest was full of rabbits and Jakub furrowed his brow. “I think it’s illegal for you to hunt in the forest,” he said carefully. Tomasz confidently told us that it was perfectly legal for locals to hunt in the forest if they only shot one rabbit and two birds each day. With that he finished his cigarette and went back inside. After he left Jakub shook his head. “I think everything he said was lies.” I laughed indicating that this was indeed a possibility. “How can you do research here, just asking old people questions all day. All they do is lie and tell stories.”

This sense that I was never getting the full story troubled me for the first few months of my fieldwork. People did not necessarily lie, but they often told me things that I did not have enough background knowledge to fully understand. The town seemed to be full of abandoned places, or missing buildings. I found myself constantly having to read local histories, and to check and double check the translations of words and phrases with friends outside Biała. So much of what people spoke about referred obliquely to history or local memory, so that often conversations and interviews were like half-finished puzzles. At first, I approached this problem like a detective, asking multiple people for corroboration, ferreting out clues, bringing different pieces of ‘evidence’ together to try to formulate a cohesive story. When I would proudly present my findings to people, often over someone’s kitchen table, they sometimes agreed I had the story right, but not quite perfect. At other points they would tell me I was wrong, but not explain how. Still other times I would be told that what I was saying both was and was not true. About halfway through my year in Biała I began to understand this hesitation and contradiction. In my effort to get at the “true” stories of Biała I had tried to bring together traces and fragments to fill in the silences that emerged in the stories I was being told. I had approached these silences as problems to be resolved. But the silences were essential elements of the stories. By trying to make fragments and traces act as evidence I had missed their inherently multifaceted quality. Traces are as Napolitano has observed, knots of history with an ambiguous auratic presence, located between memory and forgetting, repression and amplification. Many of the stories I was told were incomplete, many of my observations about the town drew me to notice the absences in the landscape. Alongside these gaps many stories I heard, or events I observed seemed to contain traces of other stories and events, but there was no linear way to put these traces together. Studying the history of the area since has been filled with contradictions and vacuums; often one piece of information is used in multiple different ways. I have come to see that my task as an anthropologist is not to order these fragments and fill in the gaps. Rather I am tasked with finding a method of analysis that can include the traces and silences that are an essential part of understanding how the people of Biała lived with their ghosts. I think back to an interview given by Samuel Beckett in 1961

In it he reflected on the mess and despair of modern life and argued that we needed a new form which “admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else.” He argued that the key challenge was now to find a form that accommodates the mess.

How can anthropologists speak about what is not there or not said? Discussing Poland’s complex history with Yael Navaro Yashin in 2013, Frances Pine advocated a shift from the privileging of voice to a per­spective that instead considers the silences, and therefore absences, fragments, and traces. For me trace is a material, linguistic or memorial presence that operates now to pull elements of the past and the future into our everyday lives. It is a temporarily unfocused object or phenomenon that demands an engagement with often fractured pasts and futures. For this reason, the trace and working with trace as an analytical concept requires a certain ethical and methodological working from us. The trace always tells multiple stories, so using it to tell a singular alternative history flattens it into just another piece of evidence. As Napolitano argued, when working with traces the anthropologist must pay careful attention to slippages, lapses, and ephemera. They must work in a way ‘that privileges ways of free association rather than concentrated meaning’.

This temptation exists as traces often appear to be ideal clues (Ginzburg 1989). Traces and fragments are intimately connected. While a fragment stands alone, the trace always leaves a trail. As Ricoeur notes traces may be ‘visible here and now, as a vestige, a mark. On the other hand there is a trace because “earlier” a human being passed this way’. This means that the trace, existing either as mark or track, indicates a movement, between times or places. By paying close attention to traces then we can divine something about the trajectory of story they tell. The trace can exist independent from the fragment, but it can also exist with the fragment. Ricoeur argument that the trace holds the possibility of acting as a tool for uniting fragments. Traces and fragments are essential – but complicated – parts of studying the imbrication of history and social life. Writing about history and history making, Michel-Rolph Trouillot explored the power of fragments and traces to upset hegemonic narratives and practices. For Trouillot the generalising force of history, of and by the powerful, counteracts and silences the complexities and contradictions of the past in specific places, and for specific (often marginalised) groups. Silences are not therefore accidental. They are the result of individual historical processes that seek to legitimate the powerful, by making their stories and histories seem inevitable and universal. Trouillot identifies four places where silences are created in the process of history making.

These distinctions between when and how silences are made are important as they lead us to recognise that not all silences are equal. Silence for Trouillot is an ‘active and transitive process’ that involves stopping a story or fact at one of the four moments listed here, or offering a single interpretation of historical facts, or even in moments where conflicting interpretations and appropriations of historical figures and events are resolved. Some silences are just silence, they do not reveal or indicate anything. But other singular moments can in fact contain multiple layers of silences, overlapping in different ways. And still events and processes can leave traces ‘that limit the range and significance of any historical narrative’. The task of analysis then is to look to the traces in history and draw them into the conversation. As Trouillot cautions the idea of developing a singular ‘alternative history’ narrative from these traces and silences ignores that they are multiple, layered and not necessarily chronological. The kinds of stories that we tell with trace tend to be evocative, rather than direct, they attempt to provoke atmospheres of sympathy. When a story is told through trace, it often features gaps and double meanings or moments where meaning can only be formed by the relationship between the teller and the listener.

Pine, writing about Poland, draws out the importance of listening to how a story is told in order to recognise elisions or hidden narratives. She gives the example of a young village woman discussing her father’s death in a city hospital in Krakow at the start of Martial Law. Martial Law is only briefly mentioned in the young woman’s tale, where the focus is her father’s death, interspersed with descriptions about the dreadful winter that year in the village. The young woman’s description of winter is drastically different to the usual account of how beautiful the season renders the village. Instead, in her tale, the winter is a terrible and terrifying force that constantly encroaches on the family home. In this story then winter features to provoke an atmosphere of sympathy. The recounting of the memory and the depiction of a hostile outside world become entangled and open a way of understanding the village’s experience of Martial Law outside the words usually used to describe it. The young woman is relying on Pine’s knowledge of the extremes of Polish winter and its normal habits. The idea of the cold snow invading the warm personal space of the home is intended to be a shocking image, that creates a feeling in the body, one that the young woman is implicitly connecting to the felt experience of Marital Law. In this example the relationship between the speaker, the listener, history, memory, and modes of expression are essential. In order to render the unspeakable understandable, the story uses silences, fragments and traces.

My work in Ireland has brought out starkly the importance of the said and unsaid, the multiple meanings and timber of listening. I am Irish and grew up there during the 90s and early 2000’s only leaving to become an anthropologist when the 2008 recession cost me a career as a hospital social worker. I was part of the “peace process generation” and later the “Celtic Tiger generation”. I grew up in a time when after 750 years of imperial rule and about 80 years of ongoing conflict Ireland was trying to rethink its relationship to Britain. It was a confusing moment, I was 12 when the Good Friday Agreement happened and as my school was close to the border with Northern Ireland, we were frequently drawn into “peace and reconciliation” events up there aimed at bridging the divide between young Catholic and Protestants, or Republicans and Unionists, none of us were sure. British shops like Miss Selfridge were opening in Dublin and yet my mother refused to let me go into them as she like many others were convinced they would be bombed by the IRA. I was learning about the European Union and the importance of speaking at least one other European language, while in Irish class Stair na Gaeilge” reminded us Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam (no language, no country). I am now returning after 15 years as a migrant in the UK to research Heritage sites connected with the struggle for independence from the UK. I perhaps expected it to be difficult. What is most striking is the importance of the shared language of gaps, overlaps and silences I have with the Heritage workers I am interviewing.

…….. [paper continues]