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Brigittine M. French
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Department of Anthropology, Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa 50112;

email: frenchb@grinnell.edu
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Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012. 41:337–53 Keywords

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at historicity, memory sites, communicability, erasure, temporality
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This review outlines the conceptual foundations of collective memory
research from social scientific and semiotic perspectives. It locates
collective memories in publicly circulating signs, merging a semiotic
orientation with Nora’s (1989) notion of memory sites. It elucidates
how collective memories are made, remade, and contested through
circulation enabled by semiotic processes of entextualization and
erasure that produce cartographies of communicability. It shows how
recent analytic work in linguistic anthropology focused on temporality
can be mobilized to understand the concrete semiotic and discursive
mechanisms by which the past is selectively brought into the present for
strategic ends. It concludes by highlighting two promising directions for
further inquiry in collective memory research: the role of expert knowl-
edge and the importance of embodied performance. Overall, the review
suggests that a semiotic perspective offers an analytically precise way
of mapping the processes by which representations of past events are
transformed, transmitted, and contested in charged present contexts.

337
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INTRODUCTION
In many ways, concerns with collective mem-
ory are globally ubiquitous at the beginning of
the twenty-first century. They circulate at the
intersections of debates in public discourse,
forms of collective identification, and trajecto-
ries of scholarly inquiry. The expansiveness of
concerns with social memory traverse interdis-
ciplinary investigations in legal studies, history,
psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology,
ethics, literary studies, geography, and political
science. Both intellectual and geopolitical
contexts in the new millennium have led to a
proliferation of attention given to collective
memory in myriad forms, such as ethnographic
monographs, academic journals, international
conferences, news reports, testimony offered
to official international bodies, adjudication in
legal processes, and public controversies sur-
rounding memoralization projects around the
planet. This review focuses on a cross-section
of these sociopolitical efforts from semiotic
and anthropological perspectives, following
some of the analytic contours in related social
scientific research. It does so with the aim to
trace historical continuities, to draw out related
assumptions, and to synthesize trajectories
in collective memory studies that become
possible to investigate in empirical contexts.
To do so, I begin by highlighting some con-
ceptual assumptions and analytic foundations of
research on collective memory. I then move to
locate collective memories in publicly circulat-
ing signs, merging a semiotic perspective with
Nora’s (1989) notion of memory sites to bridge
ideal and material forms of analysis as ways
to understand signification. Next, I consider
how collective memories are made, remade, and
contested through circulation enabled by semi-
otic processes of entextualization and erasure
that produce cartographies of communicabil-
ity. I then show how recent analytic work in
linguistic anthropology focused on temporal-
ity can be mobilized to understand the precise
semiotic and discursive mechanisms by which
the past is selectively brought into the present
for strategic ends. I conclude by highlighting
338 French
two promising directions for further inquiry in
collective memory research: a focus on the roles
of expert knowledge in authorizing the veracity
of collective memories and a focus on embod-
ied performances of collective memory in the
habitus.
SELVES WITH HISTORY:
ASSUMPTIONS AND
FOUNDATIONS
From its theoretical inception to contemporary
ethnographic investigation, “owning history”
is at the conceptual core of collective memory
studies. Although the study of collective mem-
ory from a semiotic perspective is an emergent
theoretical development in anthropology,
it is important to historicize this scholarly
focus because “disciplines do not create their
fields of significance, they legitimize particular
organizations of meaning” (Trouillot 1991,
p. 17). Long before anthropology became
a formal discipline, Europeans, particularly
those in the colonial metropoles, understood
themselves to be “people with history” (Wolf
1982). This notion of collective selfhood stood
in contradistinction to the colonial Other—an
understanding of so-called primitive peoples
who remained outside of progressive temporal-
ity (Said 1978, Fabian 1983, Trouillot 1991).
Indeed, the formalization of the discipline
and its subsequent professionalization in the
early twentieth century were erected upon
the ethnographic investigation of those reified
groups who fit into the “savage slot” that
Europeans created (Trouillot 1991). In rela-
tional fashion, the study of collective memory
in Western social science has been erected upon
foundational assumptions about the Self. More
specifically, in examining the implicit premises
of research dedicated to collective memory
within anthropological and related fields, it be-
comes clear that its study is predicated upon a
naturalized notion of historical consciousness.
In other words, the study of collective memory
has been grounded upon provincial European
notions of selfhood and subjectivity (Behar
1986; Herzfeld 1987, 1991; Connerton 1989;
 AN41CH21-French ARI 16 August 2012 17:46
Nora 1989; Boyarin 1991; Halbwachs 1992;
Karakasidou 1997; Sutton 1998).1
However, the selective interpretation of
the past for contemporary social and political
ends is not a uniquely European phenomenon.
Indeed, the coupling of disenfranchised social
groups’ attempts to challenge official memory
in postcolonial contexts (Trask 1999, Warren
& Jackson 2002) and the staggering degree of
state-sponsored violence against civilian pop-
ulations during the second half of the twen-
tieth century (Lutz 2002, Das & Poole 2004,
Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois 2004, Gusterson
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:337-353. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
2007) has led to profound struggles around self-
conscious and organized efforts to assert col-
lective memories that work against powerful
and commonplace interpretations of the past
mobilized in relation to present conflicts. Such
by Leslie Aiello on 06/26/15. For personal use only.
efforts to assert alternative notions of histori-
cal consciousnesses and concomitant collective
memories are grounded in a politics that seeks
to bring to light historical yet enduring forms of
inequality in service of more inclusive presents
and futures. Trouillot draws attention to this
process: “Minorities of all kinds can and do
voice their cultural claims, not on the basis of
explicit theories of culture but in the name of
historical authenticity. They enter the debates
not as academics—or not only as academics—
but as situated individuals with rights to his-
toricity” (1991, p. 19). The assertion of rights to
historicity necessarily means that assertions of
collective memories are political, polyvocal, and
contested. As I discuss in the remainder of this
review, the exact locations and precise mech-
anisms that constitute these processes may be
analytically revealed by mobilizing a semiotic
orientation.
Although the right to historicity provides
an anchoring assumption for the articulation of
collective memory, the work of French scholars
1
In twentieth-century Europe, the changing memorialization
of the Holocaust presents an example of the way that remem-
bering the Self is constructed through memorialization. For
key discussions, see Young (1993), LaCapra (1994), Koonz
(1994), Hirsch & Kacandes (2004), and Di Bella (2009).
Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora provides
the analytic foundation for conceptions of it.
Halbwachs is heralded as the first contem-
porary scholar to theorize and investigate
“collective memory” (Connerton 1989, Coser
1992, Climo & Cattell 2002, Savelsberg &
King 2007). For Halbwachs (1992), collective
memory is a specific representation of the past
based upon present concerns and should be
investigated with this mediated perspective at
the fore. Halbwachs put it in the following way:
The past is not preserved but is reconstructed
on the basis of the present. It is necessary to
show, besides, that the collective frameworks
of memory are not constructed after the
fact by the combination of individual rec-
ollections; nor are they empty forms where
recollections coming from elsewhere would
insert themselves. Collective frameworks are,
to the contrary, precisely the instruments
used by the collective memory to reconstruct
an image of the past which is in accord, in
each epoch, with the predominant thoughts
of the society.2 (1992, p. 40)
Pierre Nora (1989) assumes Halbwachs’
perspective on the collective nature of selective
representations of the past and develops a
finer distinction between memory and history:
“Memory is life, borne by living societies
founded in its name. It remains open to the
dialectic of remembering and forgetting . . . .
History, on the other hand, is the recon-
struction, always problematic and incomplete,
of what is no longer” (p. 8). For Nora, the
construction of memory and the construction
2
Following the theoretical model of his mentor Durkheim,
Halbwachs assumed the importance of cultural continuity for
societal functioning and looked for mechanisms that fostered
group solidarity that sustained the social order. Unlike his
mentor, Halbwachs did not sacrifice analytic attention to the
role of the individual in the study of the collective: “One
may say that the individual remembers by placing himself in
the perspective of the group, but one may also affirm that the
memory of the group realizes and manifests itself in individual
memories” (1992, p. 40).
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of history are oppositional social processes that
are linked to explicitly modernist spatial and
temporal configurations, a point to which I
return in the pages that follow.
Scholars have built upon Halbwachs’ and
Nora’s conceptualizations while remain-
ing close to their foundational perspectives
(Connerton 1989, Gillis 1994, Climo &
Cattell 2002). Connerton underscores that the
interpretation of the past from a presentist
perspective is at the core of understanding
collective memory: “The images of the past
commonly legitimate a present social order”
(1989, p. 3). This perspective is extended by
Savelsberg & King (2007) who define collective
memory in the following way: “knowledge
about the past that is shared, mutually acknowl-
edged, and reinforced by a collectivity” (p. 191).
Indeed, as Climo & Cattell note, “a prolifera-
tion of terms has attached to the phenomenon
of collective memory: cultural memory, histor-
ical memory, local memory, official memory,
popular memory, public memory, shared
memory, social memory, custom, heritage,
myth, roots, and tradition” (2002, p. 4).
Mindful of assertions that “it is impossible
to fix this concept with a single name and it is
impossible to define it” (Climo & Cattell 2002,
p. 4), there is, nevertheless, analytic utility in
attempting some conceptual precision. Draw-
ing upon the aforementioned perspectives,
along with insights from a semiotic theoretical
orientation that I discuss below, let me suggest
that we may delineate a notion of collective
memory along the following lines: Collective
memory is a social construction constituted
through a multiplicity of circulating sign forms,
with interpretations shared by some social
actors and institutions and contested by others
in response to heterogeneous positions in a hi-
erarchical social field in which representations
of the past are mediated through concerns
of the present. This definition underscores
that collective memories are (a) receptive to
individuals’ positions in society even as they are
not idiosyncratic; (b) mediated representations
rather than absolute truths; (c) made and
remade in complex and unequal social orders;
340 French
and (d ) related to questions of power insofar
as efficacious collective memories are linked
to authoritative truth claims about historical
facts.
SITES OF COLLECTIVE
MEMORIES
From a semiotic perspective, collective mem-
ories are located in publicly circulating signs.
Nora (1989) conceptualized such signs as les
lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, which are
simultaneously “simple and ambiguous, natural
and artificial, at once immediately available in
concrete sensual experience and susceptible to
the most abstract elaboration. Indeed, there
are lieux in three senses of the word—material,
symbolic, and functional” (pp. 18–19). Recon-
figuring Nora’s conception of sites of memory
from a semiotic perspective, we are able to
overcome his implicit material/ideal divide
(Irvine 1989, Mertz 2007) and more pre-
cisely locate signification unfolding in sites of
memory through a complex and simultaneous
interweaving of iconic, indexical, and symbolic
modalities of signification. These modalities
of signification can be empirically and ethno-
graphically located in a multiplicity of memory
sites, only some of which may be discussed in
the remaining pages. Although memory sites
take myriad forms, language, monuments,
memorials, rural landscapes, urban environs,
testimonies, and embodied performances
are particularly salient ones in emergent
ethnographic research on collective memory.
Bauman & Briggs’s (2003) work on the
development of language ideologies, notions
of modernity, and forms of inequality in
the history of Western intellectual thought
highlights the construction of language as
an essential repository of collective memory.
Their writing enables us to see Nora’s work in
a new light. What Nora (1989) laments as the
loss of collective memory that once “naturally”
pervaded traditional life among the French
peasantry, brought about by the advent of
modernity (p. 7), can be seen as an ideolog-
ical construction of tradition that became
 AN41CH21-French ARI 16 August 2012 17:46
linked with notions of language in particular
ways. Indeed, Bauman & Briggs demonstrate
how, during the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries, “tradition becomes a
mode of discourse that is diagnostic of the
past . . . . Tradition becomes the intertextually
constituted continuum of reiterations by which
the language—and thus the thought—of the
past survives into the present” (2003, p. 11).
They show how this prominent configuration
that emerged in strands of German, French,
and British intellectual thought crystallized in
the linguistic ideologies underpinning Johann
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:337-353. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
Gottfried Herder’s philosophy. Herder con-
ceptualized the language of the romanticized
and reified internal Other as the touchstone
of cultural continuity linking the past with
the present in the modern world. From this
by Leslie Aiello on 06/26/15. For personal use only.
perspective, traditional language served as a
treasury of collective memory for the Volk of
the nation (Bauman & Briggs 2003).
Bauman & Briggs underscore that such
ideologies of language are at the center of
broad modernist assumptions that have be-
come deprovincialized from their development
in historical Western European contexts and
taken to be universal in contemporary mod-
ernist projects around the globe (Chakrabarty
2000). More specifically, Herder’s ideological
construction of language as the repository of
traditional collective memory that provides
historical continuity between the past and the
present for a collectivity appears in a variety of
politically charged contexts. Such ideological
constructions underpinned salvage linguistic
anthropological research among American
Indian communities in the early twentieth cen-
tury (Scheper-Hughes 2001, Bauman & Briggs
2003) as well as cultural nationalist movements
that recuperated the essence of the nation by re-
vitalizing vernacular linguistic traditions as the
legitimating basis for emergent forms of politi-
cal sovereignty (Herzfeld 1982, 1987; Hutchin-
son 1987; French 2009a). Linguistic ideologies
linking vernacular codes with the “traditional”
collective memory of collectivities are also iter-
ated in necessarily incomplete national identity
projects that stand in creative tension with
local and regionally based identity claims to
historical distinctiveness (Cavanaugh 2009a,b).
The notion of vernacular repositories of
collective memory are also animated in post-
colonial cultural rights movements where
historical continuity between the past and the
present is taken to be embodied in language.
Such linguistic ideological constructions
further serve as the foundation for a “politics
of recognition” (Taylor 1992) based upon
iconized cultural difference and claims to
rights upon the state to preserve it (for clear
examples from the Maya case, see Sam Colop
1996, Warren 1998, French 2010b). This ver-
nacular language becomes a “site” of memory
in Nora’s sense.
In addition to their visibility in ideologies
of language, sites of collective memory are
frequently constituted spatially. Monuments,
memorials, rural landscapes, and cities are
frequently imagined as bounded and inscribed
with meaning from the past that resonates into
the present. Foote puts it in the following way:
“Landscape might be seen in this light as a sort
of communicational resource, a system of signs
and symbols, capable of extending the temporal
and spatial range of communication. In effect,
the physical durability of landscape permits it
to carry meaning into the future so as to help
sustain memory and cultural traditions” (1997,
p. 33). Of these kinds of memory sites, official,
governmentally sanctioned monuments and
memorials have become ubiquitous in the
modern world. Gillis (1994) points out that
the practice of politically sanctioned memo-
rialization in Western societies, particularly
England, France, and the United States, began
to proliferate in the late eighteenth century.
He underscores that after World War I
. . . memorials were qualitatively as well as
quantitatively different from anything that had
gone before . . . . Nations now felt the need to
leave a tangible trace of all their dead through
graves or inscriptions. The effort to preserve
a trace of every fallen soldier reached its limits
in the interwar period with the monument . . . .
The scale of death was so massive and so many
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mortal remains were missing that all the ma-
jor combatant nations eventually resorted to
erecting the so-called tombs of unknown sol-
diers, thereby remembering everyone by re-
membering no one in particular. (1994, p. 11)
Such memoralizations, found in a multiplic-
ity of nations, are explicitly framed as efforts
to remember the heroism of war combatants
who lost their lives for the good of the national
collective (Gillis 1994, Laqueur 1994, Piehler
1994, Sherman 1994, White 2004, Feldman
2007). Scholars have cogently argued that
these official memorializations are intimately
tied to the hegemonic power of the state that
sanctifies such physical markers (Gillis 1994,
Foote 1997, White 2004, Feldman 2007).
Although usually etched in stone, the meanings
of official state memorial projects are not fixed.
As a state’s geopolitical commitments and
military conflicts shift, so do the messages
embedded in monuments and memorials.
Through practices around nationalized mon-
uments to the dead, the tragic loss of life in
some earlier period is often indexically linked
to contemporary war efforts in which new
lives are threatened by military action in the
present and future (White 2004, Feldman
2007). Feldman (2007) shows, for instance,
what he calls “two way traffic between the past
and present,” that is to say, a dialectic between
shifting meanings of collective memories and
the memorial landscape through an analysis of
two Israeli memorials, Yad Vashem, for victims
of the Shoah, and Mt. Herzl, the national and
military cemetery. Through an empirical focus
on the addition of a “linking path” between
the two memorials, Feldman shows how the
physical landscapes of past and contemporary
collective memory are transformed: “The
Israeli narrative of martyrs for the nation-
state is recast as part of a specifically Jewish
narrative of eternal suffering and victimization.
The discontinuity between the soldier who dies
in combat and the victim of the Holocaust has
narrowed. In the new landscape, they leak into
342 French
each other. Both are seen as having sacrificed
themselves on the altar of the State” (p. 1160).
Sites of collective memory also reside in
less formally regimented, state-sanctioned
spaces like urban (Brown 2003, Low 2004) and
rural landscapes (Rosaldo 1980, Rappaport
1990, Basso 1996, Kelleher 2003). Rappaport
(1990) captures the materiality of collective
memory resonating through understandings
of local geography. She shows how the Páez
of Colombia “have encoded their history of
struggle in their sacred geography, so that
past meets present in the very terrain on
which they live, farm, and walk. Memory
has built upon memory, connecting events
of the distant past, the more recent past and
the present in the topography” (p. 9), a point
that is ethnographically demonstrated among
other indigenous peoples (Rosaldo 1980, Basso
1996). In short, the landscape comes to index
the past for those who inhabit it in the present.
Kelleher (2003) extends this understanding
of memory sites in rural landscapes to show
how they can simultaneously hold different col-
lective memories of distant pasts. He eluci-
dates how the religiously segregated geography
of rural Northern Ireland can be understood
through parallel but different historical narra-
tives. Both displacement and plantation explain
the same process that took place during the
Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland—an histori-
cal process narrated in the present by contem-
porary Irish Catholic and Anglo-Irish Protes-
tant residents on “both sides of the house”
as they move through mundane landscapes of
quotidian activity.
Brown’s ethnography mobilizes Nora’s
notion of memory sites to characterize the
entire town of Kruševo, Macedonia—the
location of a momentarily victorious uprising
against Ottoman rulers in 1903 that ultimately
met with violent reprisal from the empire.
Traversing similar terrain, Brown shows the
ways that collective memories of Kruševo are
implicated in competing (Greek, Bulgarian,
Albanian, Macedonian, and Serbian) nationalist
narratives of the past throughout the twentieth
 AN41CH21-French ARI 16 August 2012 17:46
century. Going beyond other scholars who
have focused on spatially defined sites of mem-
ory for nationalist ends, Brown shows how
alternative understandings of the past, framed
in local, socialist, and egalitarian terms, spill
over nationalist meanings inscribed upon them.
In so doing, Brown’s work underscores that in
such long-standing and polyvocal contestations
over interpretations of the past, hegemony is
rarely achieved: “History, then, is not just a
resource contested by nation and state, or by
nation-states. It has been made and remade
in the course of extended interaction between
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:337-353. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
individuals, institutions, ideologies, and ideas,
in which none have so far secured the power to
pronounce the conversation over” (2003, p. 21).
by Leslie Aiello on 06/26/15. For personal use only.
CIRCULATING MEMORIES:
COLLECTIVE TRUTHS,
COMMUNICABILITY,
AND ERASURES
As I hope to have made clear, collective
memories are semiotic sites—simultaneously
discursive and spatial—of ongoing debate and
contestation. Brown’s (2003) work underscores
that in such debates no clear hegemony of
a unitary perspective on the past is achieved
when examined with a diachronic orientation.
Nevertheless, not all participants enter into the
contest over memory as equals; some actors
have lost more than others. In fact, a great deal
of collective memory work has been undertaken
recently by a variety of constituencies in self-
conscious efforts to challenge empire and/or
state-centered recollections of mass violence
that have proliferated internationally since
World War II. In these instances, the increasing
number of victims’ unacknowledged histories is
embedded in collective memories of loss and
survivors’ demands for recognition. Their
organized calls for acknowledgment of violent
pasts in service of more consolatory futures
often rely upon witness testimony in which
individual experiences are claimed and taken
to be emblematic of a collectivity that they are
said to represent (Menchú 1983, Stoll 1999,
Arias 2001, Hirsch 2008). In this way, “the
space for memory is thus a space for political
struggle, often times albeit not always referred
to in terms of struggle: contra el olvido, contra
el silencio (against forgetting, against silence)
when in reality, it is an opposition of rivaling
‘truths’ a struggle of memory against memory”
( Jelin 2002, p. 6).
The proliferation of internationally spon-
sored truth commissions since the middle of
the twentieth century is a paradigmatic example
of this struggle to reckon competing memories
of violent pasts for contemporary democratic
political objectives. For international political
human rights advocates and activists, survivor
testimony generally is taken to be evidence
of and an instrument for a “victim-centered
approach to lifting a lid of silence and denial
from contentious and painful periods of his-
tory” (Hayner 2002, p. 25; Avruch & Vejarano
2001). Indeed, the organized collection of
survivor and witness first-person narrative
offered in the more than 22 truth commissions
projects undertaken worldwide has been an
integral part of transitional justice efforts in
recent decades (Wilson 2001, Hayner 2002,
Sanford 2003, Moon 2009). Critical discursive
and ethnographic examinations of truth com-
mission efforts have interrogated the limits
and possibilities of these attempts to recognize
collective memories of state-sponsored vio-
lence in a variety of nations, including South
Africa (Wilson 2001, Ross 2003, Moon 2009),
Guatemala (Sanford 2003, French 2009b),
Peru (Coxshall 2005), Argentina ( Jelin 2002,
Kaiser 2005, Robben 2005), and the United
States (Magarrell & Wesley 2008).
However conciliatory and transformative
testimonial discourse offered in truth commis-
sion projects may be, it is equally implicated
in power-laden processes that transform dis-
cursive representations of collective memory.
Although much work on testimonial narrative
offered in truth commission activities has
tended to focus on the content of survivor
testimony (CEH 1999, Hayner 2002, Sanford
2003, Magarrell & Wesley 2008), an emergent
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body of scholarship focuses on the forms
such narratives take, the contexts of their
production, and their ongoing local, national,
and transnational circulation. This work
directs analytic attention to entextualization,
language ideological, and erasure processes
that reveal cartographies of communicability
and the power effects of truth commission
efforts.
Collective memories aggregated in truth-
seeking projects are representations of the past
invoked and narrated in the present. As Ross
has shown, they are “particular instances, syn-
opses of experience, told at given times for spe-
cific audiences and located in distinct spatial
and temporal contexts” (2003, p. 102); that is
to say, the text of survivor narrative produced
is necessarily separated from the context of the
survivor/witness’s experience of the memories
told. Relying upon Bauman’s (1986) distinction
between narrative and narrated events, Briggs
(1996) puts it in the following way: “Such narra-
tives simultaneously represent narrative events,
the discursive setting of their telling, and nar-
rated events, the words and actions that they
relate . . . . Connecting events that are separated
in time and often space involves an active social
process of extracting discourse from one set-
ting and inserting it into a new setting” (p. 22).
Highlighting the entextualization processes of
survivor and witness testimony underscores the
analytic need for a “natural history of discourse”
that “focuses attention on contextually contin-
gent semiotic processes involved in achieving
text” (Silverstein & Urban 1996, p. 2) in testi-
monies as elsewhere. It also suggests that even
as the collection of testimony in truth com-
mission projects is part of standard postconflict
political structures (Wilson 2001, p. 90; Moon
2009), such testimonial narratives are neither
pregiven nor universal forms of telling (French
2009b, p. 97).
Indeed, as testimonial discourse of collective
memories circulates through a variety of forms,
codes, media, and contexts, the processes
by which these testimonies and concomitant
memories become inscribed with truth claims
become a central analytic concern (Briggs 2007,
344 French
French 2009b). In the work of these commis-
sions, as in a variety of Western-derived, highly
regimented discursive forms, the veracity of
truth claims about the past are erected upon an
absolute notion of truth that is assumed to be
transparently revealed by privileging the refer-
ential function of language as abstractable from
its context of production (Silverstein 1976,
Bauman & Briggs 2003, Briggs 2007, French
2009b). In other words, these interpretations of
the past often become “seemingly able to travel
anywhere, crossing scales, social fields, genres,
institutions, countries . . . without shifting
meaning” (Briggs 2007, p. 321). In the case
of truth claims about collective memories that
commonly circulate in the beginning decades
of the twenty-first century, the presumed
transparency of interpretation is magnified by
the iconicity of signs that have been decon-
textualized and re-entextualized in multiple
media because “they seem to be exactly like the
original sign they represent” (p. 324). Briggs
theorizes that such discursive features and
processes “project cartographies of their own
production, circulation, and reception” and
highlights that these commonplace, naturalized
epistemological and semiotics shifts are en-
compassed in the notion of “communicability”
(p. 332). More specifically, then, “cartographies
of communicability” in testimonial discourse
project “transparency, volubility, and infec-
tiousness” (p. 332) so that they may be seem-
ingly decoded as the real story of past violent
experiences.
It is in part through the erasure of entextu-
alization processes that interpretations of the
past for present ends may come to resemble
transparently true objective facts. Irvine & Gal
define erasure as “the rendering of some social
phenomena invisible in ways that simplify a
social field” (2000, p. 37). It is a key semi-
otic process in the creation of authoritative,
ideologically laden representations, which nec-
essarily include representations of collective
memories. Indeed, the aforementioned erasure
of entextualization processes is but one of
myriad erasures involved in the circulation of
collective memories. Gusterson (2007) points
 AN41CH21-French ARI 16 August 2012 17:46
out erasures of a different kind: “The Vietnam
War Memorial in Washington, DC, erases the
suffering of the Vietnamese; the Hiroshima
Memorial erases the South Korean victims of
the Bomb” (p. 161). Trouillot (1995) and Irvine
(2009) provide analytic frameworks that may
be used together to more precisely interrogate
these multiple kinds of erasures implicated in
collective memory projects.
Trouillot (1995) directs analytic attention
to the ubiquitous and selective erasures entailed
in the production of representations of the past;
Irvine (2009) uses a semiotic frame to map some
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:337-353. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
consequences of them. Writing on historicity
and power, Trouillot (1995) identifies three dis-
tinct moments of silencing in the production of
narratives about the past. The first are “silences
that are inherent in the creation of sources”
by Leslie Aiello on 06/26/15. For personal use only.
(p. 51). The second moment of erasure is the
creation of archives that assemble facts about
the past for intelligibility in the future (p. 52).
Trouillot’s notion of archive broadly encom-
passes institutions and social actors involved
in social memory production: “In this sense, a
tourist guide, a museum tour, and an archae-
ological expedition, or an auction at Sotheby’s
can perform as much an archival role as the
Library of Congress” (p. 52). Finally, Trouillot
shows how silences obtain in the third moment
of historical narrativity “when events that have
become facts (and may have been processed
through archives) are retrieved” (p. 53). Irvine
(2009) enumerates an explicitly semiotic ori-
entation for analyzing moments of silencing as
she hones in on the types of erasures entailed in
ideological representations: “Erasure, then, is
not a unitary process; it may involve misrecog-
nition, omission, and/or active eradication”
(pp. 2–3). Taken together, this emergent
orientation suggests that analysts may track
varying degrees of agency and intentionality
implicated in the process of silencing through
erasures, or, to put it another way, for tracking
the communicability of truth claims about the
past as they circulate in different contexts. Such
an examination is particularly pressing when
the very fact of a collectively held memory is
negated through active depoliticization ( Jeffery
2006, Rubin 2008, Tetreault 2009), hyper-
individualization (Arias 2001, Jeffery 2006,
Rubin 2008), and/or “organized forgetting”
(Connerton 1989, Cohen 2001). In these ways,
a semiotic approach allows scholars to make
the invisible visible in the ongoing construction
and circulation of collective memories.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES:
TEMPORALITIES,
CHRONOTOPES, AND
DISCURSIVE RESOURCES
The processes of constructing and circulating
collective memories implicate and impact
notions of time as particular moments from the
past are relationally configured within a specific
present for purposeful ends. For Nora (1989), it
is the disjuncture between the past and present
that necessitates the assertion of collective
memory. He identifies the need as arising from
“the acceleration of history, the increasingly
rapid slippage of the present into a historical
past that is gone for good . . .” and states further
that “our interest in lieux de mémoire where
memory crystallizes and secretes itself has
occurred at a particular historical moment,
a turning point where consciousness of a
break with the past is bound up with the
sense that memory has been torn” (p. 7). Yet,
Nora’s notion of disjuncture is but one way of
configuring the temporal relationship between
past and present. For Anderson (1991), it is
the political imagining of a deep historical
continuity between the past and the present
that provides the temporal basis for collective
memory projects, especially those that emerged
in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century and
became, in his terms, “modular” in a variety of
nationalist movements. His conceptualization
holds well for ethnonationalist cultural rights
movements throughout North and Central
America (Sam Colop 1996, Warren 1998,
Trask 1999, Montejo 2002, LaDuke 2005).
Connerton (1989) offers another distinct
conceptualization of temporality in theorizing
how societies remember. He holds that it is a
radical break between the past and the present
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 AN41CH21-French
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ARI 16 August 2012 17:46
that serves as the basis for collective memory
projects enacted in ritual activities:
All beginnings contain an element of recol-
lection. This is particularly so when a social
group makes a concerted effort to begin with a
wholly new start. There is a measure of com-
plete arbitrariness in the very nature of any
such attempted beginning. The beginning has
nothing whatsoever to hold on to; it is as if it
came out of nowhere. For a moment, the mo-
ment of beginning, it is as if the beginnings
had abolished the sequence of temporality it-
self and were thrown out of the continuity of
the temporal order. But the absolutely new is
inconceivable . . . . The world of the percipi-
ent, defined in terms of temporal experience,
is an organized body of expectations based on
recollection. (1989, p. 6)
Taken together, these theorists show
how notions of temporality are implicated in
collective memory projects that operate within
a relational and dynamic set of configurations
(Irvine 2004). These relational configurations
of temporality are further complicated by
the fact that human actors and institutions
are always already “in a sociocultural time of
multiple dimensions” (Munn 1992, p. 116).
Although the aforementioned work elu-
cidates some of the principles by which
temporality is operative in efforts to mobilize
representations of the past, less attention has
been paid to the specific mechanisms by which
these temporal links are actively made. Repre-
sentations of the past are temporally displaced
from yet implicated in the present moment in
which they are invoked. To put it another way,
there is a semiotically constructed dialogism
that emerges in collective memories such
that they “simultaneously represent narrative
events (the discursive setting of their telling)
and the narrated events (the actions that they
relate)” (Briggs 1996, p. 22). To recover the
former and reconnect it to some aspect of the
latter requires special semiotic effort. How,
then, may these processes be mapped in the
346 French
real-time creation and circulation of collective
memories? Recent contributions by linguistic
anthropologists toward theorizing signs of time
(Silverstein 2005, Parmentier 2007) provide a
precise understanding of the specific semiotic
and discursive resources by which notions of
temporality are actively created in social inter-
action by human actors. In particular, analyses
that highlight the deployment of chronotopes,
the strategic use of voice, and interactional
alignment strategies can be mobilized to show
how temporality is indexically presupposed
and created in narratives that circulate and are
then recognized as collective memories. These
processes can be tracked ethnographically.
Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of chronotope
is particularly amenable to the analysis of
collective memory because it draws attention
to specific configurations of the time/space
relationship in discourse. In other words,
chronotope refers to “a scale of spatial and tem-
poral horizons within which some events are
understood as meaningfully occurring” (Stasch
2011, p. 3). Whereas Bakhtin was primarily
concerned with time/space configurations that
frame action and meaning in literary forms, sev-
eral anthropologists have recently underscored
the utility of analytic focus on chronotopes
deployed in a variety of charged ethnographic
contexts in which time, history, and conflict are
foregrounded (Parmentier 2007, Perrino 2007,
Wirtz 2007, Stasch 2011). More specifically,
they have shown how the artful intertwining of
chronotopes can create discursive connections
among moments presumed to be differently
located in time and space (Silverstein 2005,
Lempert & Perrino 2007). Wirtz (2007) calls
this process “telescoping” in her discussion
of the multiple chronotopes produced in
Santerı́a religious practices (p. 253). She
cogently demonstrates the importance of the
ways that registers of speech index distinct
historical voices from different African and
Afro-Cuban pasts and the concomitant sacred
power associated with them among contem-
porary practitioners. “The juxtaposition of
registers creates ritually meaningful relations
 AN41CH21-French ARI 16 August 2012 17:46
among three distinct chronotopes: sacred,
transcendent space-time (via Lucumı́), ances-
tral/historical space-time (via Bozal), and the
everyday plane of the here-and-now (via Cuban
Spanish). The result is a temporal ‘telescoping’
through which transcendent and ancestral
voices not only speak in the present ritual
moment but temporarily inhabit it, conveying
their historicity” (2007, p. 246). Perrino (2007)
and Stasch (2011) further advance empirical
understandings of the discursive resources that
human actors may use to bring the past into the
present through the use of nonpast deixis to
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:337-353. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
frame past events. Narratives told in the “his-
torical present” function to shift “the deictic
origo from narrating to narrated chronotope”
(Stasch 2011, p. 5), an interactional strategy
known as “cross-chronotope alignment” (Agha
by Leslie Aiello on 06/26/15. For personal use only.
2006, Perrino 2007). Stasch illustrates how the
cultivation of iconicity among a series of differ-
ent chronotopes produces a “hall-of-mirrors”
effect whereby the perceptual similarity across
distinct chronotopes functions as a mechanism
to create efficacious representations of time
and history (2011, p. 9). Inoue (2004) turns
attention toward indexical inversions that pro-
duce a naturalized temporality that “makes the
past both culturally meaningful and politically
enabling for the present” in complicity with the
persistent yet shifting nation-building efforts
of the state (pp. 41–43).
CONCLUSION: EXPERTISE AND
EMBODIED PERFORMANCE
Having traversed conceptual foundations and
analytic foci in the study of collective memory,
I have suggested how Nora’s notion of memory
sites may be understood from a semiotic per-
spective that locates signification through an
interweaving of iconic, indexical, and symbolic
signs in myriad forms. From this perspective,
the notion of “tradition” itself is the product of
semiotic work. Signs of collective memory can
be located and taken up in many sites: ideolo-
gies of language, monuments, memorials, rural
landscapes, urban environs, and testimonies in
truth commissions (and related juridical nar-
rative forms). I have shown how mapping the
entextualization and erasure processes in the
circulation of competing social recollections
through various media in politically charged
contexts is an important direction in anthropo-
logical scholarship. Another analytic dimension
is offered by focused attention to discursive
and semiotic resources that are strategically
deployed in ways that regulate the time/space
configuration; these become the concrete, often
narrative, mechanisms by which the past is in-
serted into the present for specific ends. By way
of conclusion, let me suggest two directions that
offer promising possibilities for ethnograph-
ically and semiotically informed approaches
to the construction of collective memories: a
focus on expert knowledge and a focus on the
performance of embodied memory.
As Trouillot reminds us, “not any fiction
can pass for history” (1995, p. 29). In many in-
stances, experts are structurally positioned ac-
tors involved in the production, authorization,
and assessment of the veracity and legitimacy
of collective memories. In these instances, dis-
ciplining historical facticity is intimately linked
to power in that it underpins particular, of-
ten bureaucratic or social scientific, models of
knowing putatively possessed by an institution-
ally authorized expert (Trouillot 1995, Bauman
& Briggs 2003, French 2010a). In these con-
texts, expertise is presumed to be based upon a
given expert’s knowledge in relation to valued
objects, which, in turn, naturalizes their abil-
ity to decode, translate, and explain “the truth”
(Briggs 2007, Stankiewicz 2009, Carr 2010).
Several anthropologists have recently chal-
lenged this pervasive naturalized assumption to
show that “expertise is something people do
rather than something people have or hold”
(Carr 2010, p. 18). They also underscore that
although expertise is a position of power, it is
not a unitary ideological, institutional, or inter-
actional position (Gal 1995; Angel-Ajani 2006;
French 2010a,b). That is to say, expertise is a
practice that takes form and meaning through
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 AN41CH21-French
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ARI 16 August 2012 17:46
discourse within interactional contexts that are
ideologically charged (Goodwin 1994, Abu El-
Haj 2001, Hamilakis 2007, Carr 2010). With
respect to the conceptual and material terrain
of contested pasts, Abu El-Haj (2001) shows
how interactional practice, in turn, dialecti-
cally shapes expert epistemology. She does so
through an empirical analysis of the ways in
which archaeology in Palestine/Israel was pro-
duced as a “distinctive discipline by explicating
the microdynamics of scientific work and the
paradigms of practice and argumentation out of
which geographies, landscapes, artifacts, histo-
ries, and historicities have been made” (p. 2). In
a related manner, then, anthropological experts
of all ilks—physical, linguistic, sociocultural,
and archaeological—may become implicated
in contentious collective memory projects. In-
deed, the number of anthropologists involved
in the exhumation and reburial of human bodily
remains (Verdery 1999, Beisaw 2010), the col-
lection of survivors’ testimony in human rights
abuses (Ross 2003, Sanford 2003, Jeffrey 2006)
or the refutation of it (Stoll 1999), and the repa-
triation of usurped cultural patrimony (Nesper
2002, Hamilakis 2007) underscores the press-
ing need for critical, disciplinary reflexivity in
these processes that involve “battles over the
future of the past” (Herzfeld 1991, p. 5). In this
way, present anthropological and linguistic en-
gagements with language revitalization projects
are a site for the creation of collective mem-
ory that calls for analytic self-awareness on the
part of scholars, with particular attention to
rhetorics of endangerment (England 2002, Hill
2002, Errington 2003) and ideologies of lan-
guage entailed in the loss of history and tra-
dition (England 2003, Whitely 2003, French
2010b).
Just as expert assessments of collective
memory become meaningful only within an in-
teractional context, so does Connerton’s (1989)
answer to the theoretical question “Where can
social memory be found to be most crucially op-
erative?” (p. 1). His answer directs us toward the
well-traversed anthropological terrain of ritual
ceremony and bodily practice. In other words,
Connerton locates the production of social
348 French
memory in performance.3 He argues: “If there
is such a thing as social memory . . . we are likely
to find it in commemorative ceremonies; but
commemorative ceremonies prove to be com-
memorative only in so far as they are performa-
tive; performativity cannot be thought without
a concept of habit; and habit cannot be thought
without a notion of bodily automatisms” (pp. 4–
5). Further consideration of Connerton’s
theory shows implicit attention to the ways
that meaning is made through signs, in his case,
from the “bodily automatisms and ritual per-
formances” that his analysis underscores. Con-
nerton highlights these points in the following
way: “If we want to continue to speak, with
Halbwachs, of collective memory, we must
acknowledge that much of what is being sub-
sumed under that term refers, quite simply, to
facts of communication between individuals”
(1989, p. 38). The “facts of communication
among individuals” to which Connerton refers
are best analyzed through a Peircean (Peirce
1974) approach to the interpretation and
circulation of signs. This orientation suggests
that the study of collective memory may be
enhanced by a focus on embodied performance
and ways that social actors’ quotidian somatic
practices link to the past through the habitus
(Bourdieu 1977, Abercrombie 1998, MacPhee
2004, Wirtz 2007, Yafeh 2007, Schielke
2008). Considering work from this perspective
suggests that collective memories are also op-
erative in ritual singing, dancing, drinking, and
trancing (Abercrombie 1998, Lassiter 2002,
Wirtz 2007, Schielke 2008), in ancestral rites
in private family spaces (Kwon 2006) as well
as in cooking, eating, and physical practices
associated with bygone days (MacPhee 2004,
Yafeh 2007) that occur in the unmarked fabric
of everyday life.
3
This perspective on the production of social memory
complements the well-developed, parallel analysis of the
constitutive function of verbal art and performance in lin-
guistic anthropology (Hymes 1981, Bauman 1984, Briggs &
Bauman 1992, Graham 1995, Caulkins 2009).
 AN41CH21-French ARI 16 August 2012 17:46

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might
be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to the editors of the Annual Review of Anthropology for their critical comments
about my preliminary ideas and insightful guidance in shaping their further direction. I thank
the following colleagues who graciously participated in my panel, The Semiotics of Social Mem-
ory: Remembering and Forgetting Conflict in Europe, at the 2009 American Anthropological
Association meetings in Philadelphia: Judy Irvine (discussant), Maria-Pia Di Bella, Jillian
Cavanaugh, C. Broughton Anderson, Chantal Tetreault, Damien Stankiewicz, and Douglas
Caulkins. Their innovative work has influenced the contours of my own. I thank Claire Bran-
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:337-353. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

gian for her enthusiasm and interest in this project as it relates to collective memory, violence,
and democracy in Latin America.

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www.annualreviews.org • The Semiotics of Collective Memories 353

 AN41-FrontMatter ARI 23 August 2012 12:10

Annual Review of
Anthropology

Contents Volume 41, 2012

Prefatory Chapter
Ancient Mesopotamian Urbanism and Blurred Disciplinary Boundaries
Robert McC. Adams ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 1
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:337-353. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

Archaeology
The Archaeology of Emotion and Affect
Sarah Tarlow ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 169
by Leslie Aiello on 06/26/15. For personal use only.

The Archaeology of Money

Colin Haselgrove and Stefan Krmnicek ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 235
Phenomenological Approaches in Landscape Archaeology
Matthew H. Johnson ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 269
Paleolithic Archaeology in China
Ofer Bar-Yosef and Youping Wang ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 319
Archaeological Contributions to Climate Change Research:
The Archaeological Record as a Paleoclimatic
and Paleoenvironmental Archive
Daniel H. Sandweiss and Alice R. Kelley ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 371
Colonialism and Migration in the Ancient Mediterranean
Peter van Dommelen ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 393
Archaeometallurgy: The Study of Preindustrial Mining and Metallurgy
David Killick and Thomas Fenn ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 559
Rescue Archaeology: A European View
Jean-Paul Demoule ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 611

Biological Anthropology
Energetics, Locomotion, and Female Reproduction:
Implications for Human Evolution
Cara M. Wall-Scheffler ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !71

vii
 AN41-FrontMatter ARI 23 August 2012 12:10

Ethnoprimatology and the Anthropology of the

Human-Primate Interface
Agustin Fuentes ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 101
Human Evolution and the Chimpanzee Referential Doctrine
Ken Sayers, Mary Ann Raghanti, and C. Owen Lovejoy ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 119
Chimpanzees and the Behavior of Ardipithecus ramidus
Craig B. Stanford ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 139
Evolution and Environmental Change in Early Human Prehistory
Richard Potts ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 151
Primate Feeding and Foraging: Integrating Studies
of Behavior and Morphology
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W. Scott McGraw and David J. Daegling ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 203

Madagascar: A History of Arrivals, What Happened,
and Will Happen Next
Robert E. Dewar and Alison F. Richard ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 495
by Leslie Aiello on 06/26/15. For personal use only.

Maternal Prenatal Nutrition and Health in Grandchildren

and Subsequent Generations
E. Susser, J.B. Kirkbride, B.T. Heijmans, J.K. Kresovich, L.H. Lumey,
and A.D. Stein ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 577

Linguistics and Communicative Practices

Media and Religious Diversity
Patrick Eisenlohr ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !37
Three Waves of Variation Study: The Emergence of Meaning
in the Study of Sociolinguistic Variation
Penelope Eckert ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !87
Documents and Bureaucracy
Matthew S. Hull ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 251
The Semiotics of Collective Memories
Brigittine M. French ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 337
Language and Materiality in Global Capitalism
Shalini Shankar and Jillian R. Cavanaugh ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 355
Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures
and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates
David Zeitlyn ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 461
Music, Language, and Texts: Sound and Semiotic Ethnography
Paja Faudree ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 519

viii Contents
 AN41-FrontMatter ARI 23 August 2012 12:10

International Anthropology and Regional Studies

Contemporary Anthropologies of Indigenous Australia
Tess Lea ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 187
The Politics of Perspectivism
Alcida Rita Ramos ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 481
Anthropologies of Arab-Majority Societies
Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 537

Sociocultural Anthropology
Lives With Others: Climate Change and Human-Animal Relations
Rebecca Cassidy ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !21
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The Politics of the Anthropogenic

Nathan F. Sayre ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !57
Objects of Affect: Photography Beyond the Image
Elizabeth Edwards ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 221
by Leslie Aiello on 06/26/15. For personal use only.

Sea Change: Island Communities and Climate Change

Heather Lazrus ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 285
Enculturating Cells: The Anthropology, Substance, and Science
of Stem Cells
Aditya Bharadwaj ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 303
Diabetes and Culture
Steve Ferzacca ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 411
Toward an Ecology of Materials
Tim Ingold ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 427
Sport, Modernity, and the Body
Niko Besnier and Susan Brownell ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 443

Theme I: Materiality
Objects of Affect: Photography Beyond the Image
Elizabeth Edwards ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 221
The Archaeology of Money
Colin Haselgrove and Stefan Krmnicek ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 235
Documents and Bureaucracy
Matthew S. Hull ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 251
Phenomenological Approaches in Landscape Archaeology
Matthew H. Johnson ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 269

Contents ix
 AN41-FrontMatter ARI 23 August 2012 12:10

Language and Materiality in Global Capitalism

Shalini Shankar and Jillian R. Cavanaugh ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 355
Toward an Ecology of Materials
Tim Ingold ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 427
Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent
Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates
David Zeitlyn ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 461

Theme II: Climate Change

Lives With Others: Climate Change and Human-Animal Relations
Rebecca Cassidy ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !21
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:337-353. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

The Politics of the Anthropogenic

Nathan F. Sayre ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !57
Ethnoprimatology and the Anthropology of the
by Leslie Aiello on 06/26/15. For personal use only.

Human-Primate Interface
Agustin Fuentes ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 101
Evolution and Environmental Change in Early Human Prehistory
Richard Potts ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 151
Sea Change: Island Communities and Climate Change
Heather Lazrus ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 285
Archaeological Contributions to Climate Change Research:
The Archaeological Record as a Paleoclimatic and
Paleoenvironmental Archive
Daniel H. Sandweiss and Alice R. Kelley ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 371
Madagascar: A History of Arrivals, What Happened,
and Will Happen Next
Robert E. Dewar and Alison F. Richard ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 495

Indexes

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 32–41 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 627

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 32–41 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 631

Errata

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Anthropology articles may be found at

http://anthro.annualreviews.org/errata.shtml

x Contents
 ANNUAL REVIEWS
Connect With Our Experts

New From Annual Reviews:

Annual Review of Linguistics
Volume 1 • January 2015 • http://linguistics.annualreviews.org

Co-Editors: Mark Liberman, University of Pennsylvania and Barbara H. Partee, University of Massachusetts
The Annual Review of Linguistics
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Complimentary online access to Volume 1 will be available until January 2016.

by Leslie Aiello on 06/26/15. For personal use only.

TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR VOLUME 1:

• Advances in Dialectometry, • Quotation and Advances in Understanding Syntactic
Systems,
• Bilingualism, Mind, and Brain, • Semantics and Pragmatics of Argument
Alternations,
• Bringing Machine Learning and Compositional • Sign Language Typology: The Contribution of Rural
Semantics Together, Sign Languages,
• Correlational Studies in Typological and Historical • Suppletion: Some Theoretical Implications,
Linguistics,
• Taking the Laboratory into the Field,
• Cross-Linguistic Temporal Reference,
• The Indo-European Homeland from Linguistic
• Diachronic Semantics, and Archaeological Perspectives,
• Ditransitive Constructions,
• Events and Situations, • Vagueness and Imprecision: Empirical Foundations,
• Genetics and the Language Sciences,
• Variation in Information Structure with Special
Reference to Africa,
• How Nature Meets Nurture: Universal Grammar
and Statistical Learning,
• Language Abilities in Neanderthals,

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