Tim Flohr Sørensen

An Anthropology of Luminosity: The Agency of Light

This article addresses the relationship between light, material culture and social experiences. It argues that understanding light as a powerful social agent, in its relationship with people, things, colours, shininess and places, may facilitate an appreciation of the active social role of luminosity in the practice of day-to-day activities. The article surveys an array of past conceptions of light within philosophy, natural science and more recent approaches to light in the fields of anthropology and material culture studies. A number of implications are discussed, and by way of three case studies it is argued that light may be used as a tool for exercising social intimacy and inclusion, of shaping moral spaces and hospitality, and orchestrating movement, while working as a metaphor as well as a material agent in these social negotiations. The social comprehension of light is a means of understanding social positions in ways that may be real or imagined, but are bound up on the social and cultural associations of certain lightscapes.

Rethinking Emotion and Material Culture

In this article, we wish to return to the suggestion made by Sarah Tarlow a decade ago about the importance of understanding emotions in archaeology as a central facet of human being and human actions. We suggest a further expansion of this that focuses exclusively on the relationship between material culture and emotions (as opposed to textually, verbally or iconographically informed approaches), and offer a vocabulary that may better equip archaeologists to incorporate emotions into their interpretations. We attempt to show the implications of such a vocabulary in a specific British Neolithic case study at the henge monument of Mount Pleasant.

The presence of the dead Cemeteries, cremation and the staging of non-place

In academic literature, death and the dead are often treated conceptually and with little regard for the aesthetic and tactile experience of the materiality of the corpse. In this way the agency of the dead body is ignored, and the reciprocity between the deceased and the bereaved remains obscured. In effect, the corpse assumes the role of a neutral object, which blurs the particular potency of the dead bodys materiality. This article proposes an alternative to this inadequacy, and discusses the changes in cemetery culture in rural Denmark within the past 50 years, addressing identity, emotions and attitudes to the materiality of the dead body. It is argued that an immaterial and subjectified recollection of the dead has, in part, replaced the previous externalized and collective commemoration due to an altered recognition of the corpses materiality. In this way the adoption of urn burials, unmarked communal graves and lawn cemetery sections may be seen as ways of creating paradoxical yet tangible non-places, where the forging of identities and meanings of dead individuals are relieved of their material presence and proximity.

We Have Never Been Latourian: Archaeological Ethics and the Posthuman Condition

This article is motivated by the recent proposal of a ‘symmetrical’ approach in archaeology. Symmetrical archaeology takes its starting point in Bruno Latours contention that we have – paradoxically – always been able to practice a symmetry between humans and non-humans, and that we have, simultaneously, also always been able to distinguish humans from non-humans. It has been argued by its proponents that symmetrical archaeology has ethical ramifications, yet this dimension remains only vaguely described in the current literature. This article seeks to explore what it might mean to extend ethics from humans to non-humans, and it contends that such a relationship is already being practised. Archaeological practice and heritage management are salient examples of how the ability to distinguish and conflate humans and non-humans frequently occurs along the lines of a number of undeclared and un-critiqued political and ethical logics. In effect, some things and some people are embraced by an empathetic embroidery, while others are disenfranchised. The article contends that a symmetrical principle in archaeology and heritage poses central ethical challenges to the ways in which the archaeological Other is defined and identified.

Flames of transformation: the role of fire in cremation practices

Abstract This paper explores the transformative power of fire, its fundamental ability to change material worlds and affect our experience of its materiality. The paper examines material transformations related to death as a means of illustrating the powerful property of fire as a materially destructive yet socially generative and creative element. While fire has been widely discussed archaeologically as a technological element, and recently coupled with the social and symbolic powers of pyrotechnology, we focus on the sensuous staging of fire in disposal practices. The paper employs two case studies focusing on cremation burial from Bronze Age (c.1300–1100 bc) and modern Denmark in order to demonstrate widely different sensuous engagements with fire and its experiential significance in a cremation context.

Introduction: An Anthropology of Absence

After losing his arm in the battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1797, Lord Nelson took the pain he felt in his missing limb to be a “direct proof of the existence of the soul” (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1998: 1604). What Lord Nelson had experienced was a phenomenon first identified by the physician Silas Weir Mitchell in the late nineteenth century as “phantom pains”. During the American Civil War, Mitchell treated and studied soldiers with nerve injuries and post-traumatic disorders, who described to him the experience of sensing their amputated limbs (Wade 2003: 518). Since then, phantom pains have been medically defined as the painful sensation of missing limbs, i.e. a sensuous experience of something which is materially absent. However, even before Mitchell’s studies and coining of the term, pain felt in missing limbs and the sense that an amputated limb is still attached to the body had been elements in philosophical treatises. Rene Descartes, for instance, argued that sensations in amputated limbs testify to the unreliability of the senses (Wade 2003: 518-520).

A Saturated Void: Anticipating and Preparing Presence in Contemporary Danish Cemetery Culture

It may appear rather straightforward to connect cemeteries with the notion of absence. After all, a cemetery is most often seen as a place for the dead, who are frequently conceived as absent, gone, missing or lost (e.g. DuBose 1997; Durkheim 1915: 339; Freud 1984 [1917]; Rubin 1985). The state of being - or non-being - of the dead is otherwise poorly defined, and may simply be considered a form of “no-moreness” (Sheets-Johnstone 1986: 50). At the same time, the cemetery can be said to contain the absent, because it is ordinarily a place where prolonged spatial and material relations to the deceased are allowed to exist as opposed to e.g. a mass grave, where the dead are meant to disappear (Rugg 2000: 260).

Sweet dreams: Biographical blanks and the commemoration of children

Abstract In recent years, the commemoration of children and infants has assumed increasingly expressive and conspicuous forms at Danish cemeteries, setting their grave plots apart from the predominant design idiom, otherwise characterised by coherence and modesty, in the form of short biographies of the deceased or by presencing her or his personality. The question, then, is how we are to understand this boisterous mode of commemoration, when the deceased was stillborn or only lived for a few years? Exploring this paradox subsequently leads to the scrutiny of recent developments in public memorial culture as it unfolds on the internet. The article thus examines the intersections of memory and emotion, and it specifically explores the narrative forms for children in commemorative practice.Abstract In recent years, the commemoration of children and infants has assumed increasingly expressive and conspicuous forms at Danish cemeteries, setting their grave plots apart from the predominant design idiom, otherwise characterised by coherence and modesty, in the form of short biographies of the deceased or by presencing her or his personality. The question, then, is how we are to understand this boisterous mode of commemoration, when the deceased was stillborn or only lived for a few years? Exploring this paradox subsequently leads to the scrutiny of recent developments in public memorial culture as it unfolds on the internet. The article thus examines the intersections of memory and emotion, and it specifically explores the narrative forms for children in commemorative practice.

The Two Cultures and a World Apart: Archaeology and Science at a New Crossroads

Within the past decade or so, archaeology has increasingly utilised and contributed to major advances in scientific methods when exploring the past. This progress is frequently celebrated as a quantum leap in the possibilities for understanding the archaeological record, opening up hitherto inaccessible dimensions of the past. This article represents a critique of the current consumption of science in archaeology, arguing that the discipline’s grounding in the humanities is at stake, and that the notion of ‘interdisciplinarity’ is becoming distorted with the increasing fetishisation of ‘data’, ‘facts’ and quantitative methods. It is argued that if archaeology is to break free of its self-induced inferiority to and dependence on science, it must revitalise its methodology for asking questions pertinent to the humanities.

Original copies: seriality, similarity and the simulacrum in the Early Bronze Age

This article explores inter-artefactual relations in the Nordic Bronze Age. Notions of copying and imitation have been dominant in the description of a number of bronze and flint artefacts from period I of the Nordic Bronze Age (ca. 1700–1500 BC). It has been argued that local bronze manufacturers copied imported foreign artefacts, and that lithic producers tried to imitate bronze artefacts in flint. This article argues that these archaeological attitudes to resemblance in the material repertoire are a product of typological analyses, but that it is possible to reclaim the cultural reality of similarity by looking at artefactual similarity as the results of prototyping and as a production of simulacra. In this light, the concept of copying turns out to be more than simply a matter of trying to imitate an exotic or prestigious original, and it fundamentally raises the question how different a copy can be from its model and still be a copy.This article explores inter-artefactual relations in the Nordic Bronze Age. Notions of copying and imitation have been dominant in the description of a number of bronze and flint artefacts from period I of the Nordic Bronze Age (ca. 1700–1500 BC). It has been argued that local bronze manufacturers copied imported foreign artefacts, and that lithic producers tried to imitate bronze artefacts in flint. This article argues that these archaeological attitudes to resemblance in the material repertoire are a product of typological analyses, but that it is possible to reclaim the cultural reality of similarity by looking at artefactual similarity as the results of prototyping and as a production of simulacra. In this light, the concept of copying turns out to be more than simply a matter of trying to imitate an exotic or prestigious original, and it fundamentally raises the question how different a copy can be from its model and still be a copy.