Introductions

Hello, and welcome to Chronotopography!

My name is Dan Hansen, and I am a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Chicago. My research concerns the figure of the Picts, the people who inhabited what is now northern and eastern Scotland from ca. 300-900 CE. I am interested in how this identity category of Pict, which was first a Roman exonym, then an early medieval endonym, then a descriptor for a lost past people, came into being and continued to be re-created through people’s ongoing engagement with material remains and places “of the past.” If you would like to keep updated with my dissertation research, I update my project blog biweekly here.

More generally, however, my interests lie in the social dynamics of place-making. How is that people, in apprehending and engaging their environments, come to understand particular places in terms of larger cosmological structures? Why are some places “good” and others “bad?” Why are some places seen as “rich with history” while others seem flat and dead? How do we distinguish “our” places from “theirs?” How can modifying a place and its affordances—the way it looks, the way one can move through it, which strata of time are presumed to be represented in it—affect the very social categories that give the place meaning? And what is a “place” anyway? How is one place distinguished from everything else? Can there be “non-places,”[1] and how are they made?

These questions—which are frequently as salient for ordinary people living out their social lives as they are for the scholars studying them—all implicate temporality, implicitly or explicitly. As the anthropologist Keith Basso writes:

That certain localities prompt such transformations, evoking as they do entire worlds of meaning, is not […] a small or uninteresting truth. Neither is the fact […] that this type of retrospective world-building—let us call it place-making—does not require special sensibilities or cultivated skill.[2]

“Retrospective world-building” manages to capture both a past-oriented vector of meaning-making (“What happened here?”) and a future-oriented one (“What is this place capable of?”). As Basso puts it, “remembering often provides a basis for imagining.”[3]

Trained in both archaeology and ethnography, and engaging a dissertation project that uses both, I often encounter this dual semiotic of remembering and imagining. In fact, it is exactly what archaeologists do when they reconstruct the past and present it to the contemporary world. It is also what my interlocutors do when they tell me stories about the people—real or imagined—who once inhabited the places I now study. And it is certainly what people in the past—such as the Picts who I study—did when they built the monuments and settlements I now uncover.

This blog will be a place to reflect upon, and sometimes to delve deeply into, this nexus of place, time and retrospective world-building, and I invite you to think, read, and observe with me every other Wednesday.

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[1] Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (Verso, 1995).

[2] Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 5.

[3] Basso, 5.