Ghosts of Memory provides an overview of literature on relatedness and memory and then moves beyond traditional approaches to the subject, exploring the subtle and complex intersections between everyday forms of relatedness in the present and memories of the past.

Contributors.

Acknowledgments.

1. Introduction: Ghosts of Memory: Janet Carsten (University of Edinburgh).

2. Ruins and Ghosts: The Domestic Uncanny and the Materialization of Anglo-Indian Genealogies in Kharagpur: Laura Bear (London School of Economics and Political Science).

3. Enlivened Memories: Recalling Absence and Loss in Mongolia: Rebecca Empson (University of Cambridge).

4. Connections and Disconnections of Memory and Kinship in Narratives of Adoption Reunions in Scotland: Janet Carsten (University of Edinburgh).

5. Memories of Movement and the Stillness of Place: Kinship Memory in the Polish Highlands: Frances Pine (Goldsmiths College, University of London).

6. Moving on? Generating Homes in the Future for Displaced Northern Muslims in Sri Lanka: Sharika Thiranagama (University of Edinburgh).

7. Belonging to What? Jewish Mixed Kinship and Historical Disruption in Twentieth-Century Europe: Stephan Feuchtwang (London School of Economics and Political Science).

8. Threading Time in the Biographies of London Sex Workers: Sophie Day (Goldsmiths College, University of London).

9. Kinship, Memory, and Time in the Lives of HIV/AIDS Patients in a North American City: Veena Das (Johns Hopkins University) and Lori Leonard (Johns Hopkins School of Public Health).

10. The Cares of Alice Alder: Recuperating Kinship and History in Switzerland: Michael Lambek (London School of Economics and Political Science).

Index

Catholic residents of a decayed railway colony in Bengal are haunted by domestic ghosts. Sex workers in London recount pasts that are fragmented among different lives lived under different names. Through a close study of such examples, Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness explores the subtle and complex intersections between everyday forms of relatedness in the present and memories of the past. The essays collected here examine how their various subjects are located in personal and familial histories that connect to the wider political formations of which they are a part. They point to the myriad articulations - of temporality, memory, personal biography, family connection, and political processes - that are manifested in subjective dispositions to the past, and in the imagination of possible futures.

Ghosts of Memory provides an overview of literature on relatedness and memory and moves beyond previous approaches to the subject. It suggests some common forms and themes that emerge through the diverse lives, geographical locations, and social contexts considered in these essays: pasts disrupted by migration, personal trauma, or political upheaval; the present disturbed by ghosts and hauntings, illness, and absent or abusive familial relations. Drawing on anthropology, literature, memory studies, and social history, this collection will be of interest to a wide range of specialist and general readers.

"This volume is full of insights into the manifold ways that people negotiate disruption in family relations, compensate for the absence of close kin, and work through loss. A fascinating and nuanced account of the play of continuity and discontinuity at the heart of human cultures."
—Olivia Harris, London School of Economics

"This superb collection of papers inaugurates a new direction in the study of kinship and politics grounded in the complexities of memory. Carsten and her colleagues link everyday processes of relating with larger webs of power and authority through the ghosts - those whose existence is contested - they have in common. Thus they show that the sociality of remembering and forgetting lies above all in the creation and destruction of persons."
—Gillian Feeley-Harnik, University of Michigan