Time Warps
Session II: Wormholes and Other Events in Space-Time

Sunday, May 2nd
2:00-5:30 pm

Session Organizers: Sarah Kautz (Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago) and Shannon Lee Dawdy (Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago)

"Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life." ~ William Faulkner

Archaeologists often try to 'control' for time while conducting excavations or analysis of materials. What happens if we let go? This session invites a conversation about sites, contexts, artifacts, or landscapes that challenge linear chronologies. Practices such as recycling, heirlooming, antiquing, and renovation complicate 'pastness in the past' while experimental inventions, utopian projects, and theme parks can fastforward the longue durée or otherwise wrinkle the trajectory of 'progress'. Participants will be asked to draw on specific case studies to explore how we might capture ethnographic temporalities distinct from evolutionary time. Inspiration derives from the recent work of Gavin Lucas, Richard Bradley, Bruno Latour, and others, as well as the revival of Walter Benjamin, who demonstrated that even modern time does not fly in the straight line it proclaims.

2:00: Sarah Kautz and Shannon Lee Dawdy (University of Chicago): Introductory remarks
2:15: Lindsay Weiss (Columbia University): Speculation, Futures and the Archaeology of Modernity’s Rush
2:40: Sarah Kautz (University of Chicago): Genealogies of Japan: Mapping Old Japan and the Tradition of Progress
3:05: Ellen Adams (King’s College London): Monumentality and Representation: Reaching Out Beyond the Present
3:30: Coffee break
4:00: Elizabeth Angell (Columbia University): The Gowanus Project: Polluted Temporality in an Urban Landscape
4:25: Discussion

Participants and Abstracts:

Speculation, Futures and the Archaeology of Modernity’s Rush

Lindsay Weiss (Columbia University)

Rush sites mark spaces of strange temporality. Those who had traveled to sites of mineral wealth, such as the 19th century Diamond Fields of South Africa, existed in an extremely speculative and anticipatory sort of culture. This has particular ramifications for archaeological study, and this elicits a concern to better understand how fantasies of the future (as much as traditions brought from the past) mobilize and determine the flow of material goods and social practices. The site of the rush, taken as a broad category of archaeological analysis, interrupts the very concept of modernity’s telos, and might be imagined in contradistinction to factory sites, offering a 'break' from the modern unfolding of time, such as that described by critical theorist Walter Benjamin.

Genealogies of Japan: Mapping Old Japan and the Tradition of Progress

Sarah Kautz (University of Chicago)

This paper examines archaeology, tourism, and the representation of genealogical continuity in Japan. Since the Meiji Restoration of 1868 until 1945, the ideology of kokutai, or ‘national body’, consolidated state unity and legitimacy around the emperor by linking the genealogy of all Japanese to the imperial lineage. Meiji leaders associated hundreds of kofun tombs with imperial ancestors as evidence of the lineage’s temporal continuity. Likewise, tomb distribution served to anchor the spatial contiguity of the Japanese nation throughout each emperor’s reign. I investigate how the continuity of “Japan” across time and space continues to be projected in similar ways at today’s tourist sites. After Jennifer Robertson (1998), I also explore how, since the 1980s, claims to genealogical continuity compliment the celebration of Japanese progress and internationalization. As Robertson explains, “Any given reinvented ‘traditional’ village or ‘international’ theme-park constitutes an intersection and synthesis of apparently – and only apparently – contradictory trajectories” (1998: 128-129). I suggest that the Dejima Museum asserts a genealogy for progress and represents a concrete synthesis of the seemingly divergent trajectories of tradition and internationalization; at Dejima, progress is tradition and tradition is progress.

Monumentality and Representation: Reaching Out Beyond the Present

Ellen Adams (King’s College London)

This paper considers some of the mechanisms by which people construct and challenge notions of time. In particular, the establishment of monuments and the immortalization of the human body in art and occasionally mortuary practices serve to negotiate relationships with the past and the future. These strategies themselves provide the opportunity to control time in a startlingly different manner from the chronological divisions employed by archaeologists. Indeed, the emphasis seems to be on transcending the linear progression of events and process rather than strictly conforming to them.

The paper will examine Late Bronze Age Knossos on Minoan Crete in terms of its monuments and iconographical data. This case study offers rich examples of elite architecture, frescoes, figurines, seals and burials. This range of data is characterized by various means of transmitting identity over time. Issues to be explored include: distinctions between mobile and immobile material culture; monuments and temporality; the representation of time/time in iconography; statements of collective time versus individual time; the role of heirlooms as grave goods; the representation of age in art; and the impact of deposition and preservation processes for the study of temporality.

The Gowanus Project: Polluted Temporality in an Urban Landscape

Elizabeth Angell (Department of Anthropology, Columbia University)

This paper is part of an ongoing project about the Gowanus Canal, a severely polluted industrial waterway in South Brooklyn that was named a Superfund site in early 2010. Drawing on research and documentation from three years' residence in the canal's immediate vicinity, I explore the complex temporality of the canal--a formerly-industrial infrastructure that has embarked on strange afterlife as the circuits of production and distribution that brought it into being have dwindled. The traces of the canal's past-- particularly in the form of coal tar, PCBs, heavy metals, and other forms of pollution in its water, sediment and surrounding soils--have a palpable materiality that continues to produce unforeseen effects in the present. The canal's aesthetic and affective qualities draw a growing community of photographers, artists, and "urban explorers" to interact with the terrain and surrounding structures. The environmental remediation of the canal, and the Superfund process in particular, prompt further questions about the canal's past and future. Superfund designation means that the cleanup must be funded by the entities responsible for the damage--creating a legal time warp for successor companies that inherit the liability of the manufactured gas plants that lined the canal in the nineteenth century. The process also dictates an archaeological and architectural assessment of the canal, bringing the desire to preserve the canal's history into potential collision with the need to ensure its rehabilitation for future use. The highly-politicized debate about Superfund designation has forced an unusually explicit conversation about that future, with developers, community activists, city and state government, the EPA, urban planners, and artists all articulating visions of what the canal could become. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Tim Ingold, Jane Bennett, and Joseph Masco, this paper considers the canal itself as a time warp in the post-industrial urban landscape.