Bringing Memory Home: Historical (Post)Memory and Patricio Pron's El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia (2011)

Published in 2011, Patricio Pron's semi-autobiographical novel details the return of a young Argentine academic to visit his dying father in Buenos Aires, and points precisely to the problematic generational inheritance that characterises the work of Argentina's second generation of dictatorship victims. Negotiating both personal and appropriated memories of his father's militancy during Argentina's last dictatorship (1976–1983), the protagonist gestures to memory not as a source of any objective or official history, but to its inherent quality as a subjective, postponed and mediated construct. Playing with the distinction between history and memory, the novel problematises the potential of postmemory's insistence on creative investment and highlights the difficulties inherent in the re-writing of history as an attempt to understand the past. By building on critical debates surrounding the application of post-Holocaust theory in Argentina, this article will place theories of postmemory firmly within an Argentine context and call for the need to reassess the political nature of the legacy inherited by this second generation. While advancing the discussion of these political elements of Argentine postmemory, attention will thus be drawn to the mechanisms of mnemonic transfer both between and within generations, highlighting how the subjective modification of what is being remembered allows Pron to move beyond an objectively unknowable past and look toward a future that is both open to, and shaped by, his contemporaries.     

Guilt by Association? The Hazards of Linking the Concept of the State with Violence

The last 30 years have seen an increasing acceptance of an apparently ubiquitous link between the state and the use of force, with violence now seen as a defining attribute of the state. Few have questioned this approach, but it constitutes a significant shift that contrasts with that of previous eras, where violence was a symptom of failure. This unquestioned link would appear to be deepening our problems in considering the difficulties facing liberal democracies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Résumé:?Les trente dernières années ont vu le renforcement du lien entre l'état et l'usage de la force et la violence comme un attribut essentiel de l'état. On a peu contesté cette approche bien qu'elle soit en contradiction avec des interprétations précédentes qui considérait la violence comme l'admission d'un échec. Remettre en question ce lien entre état et violence permet de reconsidérer les difficultés des démocraties libérales au début du vingt et unième siècle.     

The influence of temperature on rehydroxylation [RHX] kinetics in archaeological pottery

Almost all archaeological ceramics undergo slow, progressive rehydroxylation by chemical combination with environmental water. The reaction is accompanied by an expansion, and also by the small but measurable mass gain that provides the basis of the RHX dating method. The rate of the RHX reaction increases with increasing temperature. Here we describe comprehensively the effects of temperature on the RHX process in relation to the dating methodology. We deal in turn with the kinetic model of the RHX reaction, the temperature dependence of the RHX rate, and the influence of varying environmental temperature on the RHX mass gain. We define an effective lifetime temperature and show how this is calculated from an estimated lifetime temperature history. Historical meteorological temperature data are used to estimate the lifetime temperature history, and this can be adjusted for long-term climate variation. We show also how to allow for the effects of burial in archaeological sites on the temperature history. Finally we describe how the uncertainties in estimates of RHX age depend on the estimates of temperature history and effective lifetime temperature.     

Reviews

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Sheena Mackellar Goulty, Heritage Gardens. Care, Conservation and Management, London and New York: Routledge, 1993. 176 pp., 82 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–415–07474–6. £19.99.

Anne Fahy (ed.), Collections Management, London and New York: Rontledge, 1995. xii + 304 pp., 2 figs. ISBN 0–415–11283–4. £19.99.

Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. vii + 280 pp., 112 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–300‐ 05972–8. £35.00.

Lesley Hoskins (ed.), The Papered Wall. The History, Patterns and Techniques of Wallpaper, London: Thames and Hudson, 1994. 256 pp., 185 col. and 157 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–500–23695‐X. £32.00.     

The birth of biometric security

We are currently witnessing a rapid rise in biometric security. Borders are apparently becoming 'smart'; passports are becoming e-passports, and when you set out on your travels your data double is already at your destination. Access to airports and even continents will increasingly be determined not by your national citizenship but by the security of your identity. Biometric security has received little anthropological attention despite historical associations with the discipline. Here I wish to outline a brief genealogy of biometric security in order to argue that, beyond the apparent newness of the technology, key biometric technologies owe their origins to 19th-entury deployments and then as now they may be understood as a form of bio-governmentality in which the security of identity opens possibilities for population control.