Professor Yael Navaro (University of Cambridge)
Catastrophe and More-than-Human Worlds
‘Memory’ has been the overarching framework for anthropological studies of political violence in its long durée. But, until more recently, ‘memory’ was conceptualised in a human-centred way, with works on loss, trauma, their social construction, cultural mediation, and collective commemoration. In this lecture, I ask if memory’s qualities and associations may be studied across ‘more-than-human’ worlds in sites of catastrophe and its aftermaths. Reflecting on the evidentiary limitations on research in the aftermath of catastrophe, when the human witnesses have been absented or silenced, I explore memory’s ‘other-than-human’ and ‘more-than-secular’ possibilities. Threading my ethnographic work on the aftermath of the Armenian genocide through with the aftermath of the recent earthquake in south Turkey, I ask if ‘more-than-human’ beings, ‘non-human’ things, and ‘more-than-secular’ entities may be incorporated in memory’s conceptual work and evidentiary potentialities.