Amazonian archaeology; searching for paradise? A review of recent literature and fieldwork

Recent research in Amazonia has diverged from the orthodoxy of the last 40 years and provoked a wide-ranging debate over the nature of human ecology and adaptation in this vast region. New evidence stresses both the abundance of the Amazonian environment and the complexity of long-term human adaptation. New frameworks modeling these adaptive processes and reconstructing sociocultural complexity involve the use of both historical and ethnographic data.     

'Is he still alive, or long since dead?': Loss, Absence and Remembrance in Nuremberg, 1945-1956

This article uses the search for the ‘missing’ Wehrmachtsoldiers in the 1950s as a prism through which to explore theways in which we might insert the notion of trauma into ourunderstanding of West Germany's status as a postwar society.In seeking to point out the connections between the ways inwhich ‘ordinary Germans’ suffered during and afterthe war on the one hand, and the inability of post-war WestGerman society to ‘confront’ the crimes of the paston the other, it argues that the traumatizing impact of warhas to be considered alongside the ideological and politicalnecessities of the Cold War and reconstruction if we are tounderstand why West German society failed to place the Holocaustat the centre of its memorial culture in the immediate post-waryears. Moreover, in pointing to the Lutheran church as a keysite of memorial politics in the post-war era, it argues forthe integration of a study of religious narratives, mentalitiesand discourses into an understanding of the evolution of thecommemorative practices of the 1950s which has hitherto beenshaped by an excessively one-sided focus on secular sites andnarratives.     

Powerful Pots,Humbling Holes,and Regional Ritual Processes: Towards an Archaeology of Huedan Vodun,ca. 1650–1727

Situated along the “Slave Coast” of West Africa, the international coastal trading entrepôt of Ouidah is infamous as the point of embarkation for hundreds of thousands of people spirited into the Middle Passage. Accordingly, scholars have looked to it and the surrounding region as a font of culture and history for diasporic groups. In scholarly narratives, the larger Gbe-speaking region surrounding Ouidah is characterized as the homeland of Vodun, a religious tradition that influenced diasporic religions throughout the Atlantic world. This paper explores early Huedan Vodun at a local level and works to bolster, and at the same time problematize, the project of addressing Vodun at increasing geographic scales and temporal depths. It builds on longstanding research which recognizes that context is critical for interpreting possible ritual or religious significance of archaeological material.     

‘Generation Emigration’: the politics of (trans)national social reproduction in twenty-first-century Ireland

Placing social reproduction at the heart of the experience of migration, this article attempts to move beyond regulatory discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice or ‘the Skype generation’. Following a review of feminist literature on social reproduction, the article returns to research with Irish women migrants and non-migrants in the 1990s to demonstrate how technologically mediated ‘time-space compression’ and its promise of transnational proximity actually gave rise to the experience of gendered ‘time-space expansion’. The Irish Times' ‘Generation Emigration’ (GE) project is then introduced as a site in which similar gendered dynamics emerge as contemporary technologically mediated connections between emigrants and the homeland are celebrated through a compensatory (trans)nationalist discourse that competes with but also compensates for framings of emigration as national tragedy. The article suggests that discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice, or new globalised practice serve to bring emigration into being in circumscribed ways and to produce emigrants as particular kinds of ‘recognisable’ subjects. It asks how the work of social reproduction in the context of emigration might be posed anew in ways that challenge dominant assumptions regarding the location and composition of the population to be reproduced. By moving beyond these regulatory discourses of emigration, and by emphasising the dynamics of technologically mediated transnational social reproduction, the article identifies the racialised heteronormative assumptions that intersect with national and global projects of economic production and social reproduction to produce uneven gendered effects.