David Parkin’s article claims to examine the ways mementoes facilitate transition in cases of human displacement, refugees and returnees. He suggests that the mind and body as one entity are created by the movement of objects, using as an example refugees who carry objects for survival and articles of "sentimental value which both inscribe and are inscribed by their own memories of self and personhood" (304). The mistrust created in a person who is experiencing forced displacement also facilitates an increase in trust in objects, beginning at the point of departure. Parkin also asserts that objects in these situations also function as foci for grief over a no longer existent person, community, or homeland, and may also facilitate the recovery process to a depersonalized traumatized person’s body because they carry memories of life before the trauma. Parkin illustrates the process of displacement through citing several instances of Somali, Sudanese, and Eastern European Jewish communities in wartime and genocide risk. Objects as a source of cultural continuity, such as suggested in previous readings by Turan, is suggested by Parkin in examining objects as grief foci and recovery process.
Though the article’s title and abstract promised to focus on mementos, the majority of Parkin’s article focuses instead on the debate between fluid and fixed origin point and the politics of displacement and identity for refugees. While I concede that these are important buffer points to make for contextualization of the memento exploration, I won’t admit to them necessitating as much space in the paper as Parkin allowed them to take over. As a student of diasporic object theory, I found myself making very sparse notes throughout, and actually waiting to get to the point. Perhaps Parkin intended to write a book in which a chapter could have been dedicated to the contextualization of the politics of identity and displacement for refugees. I also found the anthropologic examinations of the process of fleeing genocidal risk in Sudan to be rather disturbing in its nature-documentary tone, ultimately I felt this passage was disrespectful especially because it was unclear why it was necessary to the paper.
Rain’s article focuses on the levels of authenticity of Irish-American diasporic mementos generated in the public and private imagination. Like Parkin and Turan, Rain’s objects facilitate cultural continuity, but they differ in how successful Rain paints the objects in this process. There seems to be a question in the article as to whether the objects can transmit much to the diaspora in terms of cultural continuity because of the ‘authenticity’ or ‘inauthenticity’ of the object. The inauthenticity of the Irish-American memento is linked with kitsch: tourist objects of nationalism, concerned with autheniticity but become severely inauthentic because of their mass production and target tourist market, and the models are thus removed from their original context (time and place). Unlike Parkin’s lengthy debate over point of origin as fixed or fluid, Rain simply implies that it is the mobility of the material culture that renders it inauthentic. She goes on to use examine the construction of ‘the authentic’ in the Waterford glass factory docu-mercial that "deliberately positions both the workers and the product as being outside of the exchange and labour relations which are likely to be the common experience of the tourist at home, both as worker and a customer. And it is precisely through this positioning of Irish craft products as being essentially outside the market, and therefore 'authentic', that their market was and is firmly established" (4). This production of authenticity and thus of demand can be seen as evidence of Appadurai’s assertion that demand is created through the (uneven) distribution of knowledge and distance between the producers, the production of the object and the consumers of the object.
If my concern with more than of few of the article so far including Parkin’s is about the unnecessary length in contextualizing material, then my concerns for Rain’s article are the opposite. There is multiple mention of the terms ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ in the making of kitsch, however there is so little explanation of these terms that I’ve missed it completely. It leaves me arguing with her on the fact that the Irish-American diaspora becomes itself authentically through the purchase and accumulation of tourist kitsch and hope of cultural continuity attached to them – a commonly shared, uniquely diasporic experience that bonds this diaspora and renders it authentically diasporic.
Questions for this week:
1) What are the ethical implications of anthropologizing the actions of object selection by populations fleeing in terror of the real threat of genocide?
2) How might the heirarchizing of ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ construct the validity of the culture of diasporic communities?
Kenji,
ReplyDelete1) I think that anthropologizing such things can somewhat serve as a clouded or misrepresented view of a specific population. Each group of people value different things, and 'to each his own'. As we later study such groups of people from a third perspective, we may initially attach such objects to the respective population without actually digging deeper maybe?
Good point on authenticity. She implicitly denotes authenticity as an imaginary by writing 'authenticity' (the single quotes meant to destabilize a fixed meaning). She also opens it to question in her discussion of the lengths to which producers go to represent authenticity. But she doesn't engage in an explicit discussion of (the myth of) authenticity.
ReplyDeleteyes i think an engagement with explicit discussion in the myth of authenticity would be useful to her article and perhaps provide an incite into authenticity of diaspora - what constitutes an authentic diaspora and how is this realted to kitch and accessibility
ReplyDelete