Harmful presence, ignorant absence: The hauntings of UC Berkeley

TY - ABST

T1 - Harmful presence, ignorant absence: The hauntings of UC Berkeley

AU - Anbert, Lærke Cecilie

PY - 2023/3

Y1 - 2023/3

N2 - On the wall of the Anthropology Building at the University of California, Berkeley, small indentations mark where the letters spelling the last name of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber used to hang. In 2020, Kroeber and four other buildings’ names, were removed following debates on the racist legacies of the buildings’ namesakes. Situated in the same building lies the university’s Anthropological Museum whose archives hold around 9,000 ancestors of Indigenous communities. The museum is currently experiencing renewed attention from campus communities about the repatriation of ancestors that is required by law, but has not yet been fulfilled. In this paper I investigate the absence of the building names, and the presence of the ancestors as interconnected, linked by student activism on campus. Student activists globally, have called for attention to be directed at knowledge production and belonging and how structural racism is embedded on campuses (Alderman and Reuben 2020; Dancy et al. 2018; Stewart-Ambo and Yang 2021). In this paper I home in on the denamings of buildings and the (lack of) repatriation of ancestors at UC Berkeley by understanding these debates in the absence of the people whose legacy or remains are actually discussed. The denamings mark the absence and the hauntings of the formerly celebrated namesakes, whereas the ancestors are brought into focus in continuous debates about how to heal from the settler colonial (past) of the university. Building on 5 months of ethnographic fieldwork at UC Berkeley, and inspired by the framework of hauntology (Bozalek et al. 2021; Derrida 1994) I investigate how names of buildings and ancestors haunt the campus by forcefully redirecting debates towards social justice.

AB - On the wall of the Anthropology Building at the University of California, Berkeley, small indentations mark where the letters spelling the last name of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber used to hang. In 2020, Kroeber and four other buildings’ names, were removed following debates on the racist legacies of the buildings’ namesakes. Situated in the same building lies the university’s Anthropological Museum whose archives hold around 9,000 ancestors of Indigenous communities. The museum is currently experiencing renewed attention from campus communities about the repatriation of ancestors that is required by law, but has not yet been fulfilled. In this paper I investigate the absence of the building names, and the presence of the ancestors as interconnected, linked by student activism on campus. Student activists globally, have called for attention to be directed at knowledge production and belonging and how structural racism is embedded on campuses (Alderman and Reuben 2020; Dancy et al. 2018; Stewart-Ambo and Yang 2021). In this paper I home in on the denamings of buildings and the (lack of) repatriation of ancestors at UC Berkeley by understanding these debates in the absence of the people whose legacy or remains are actually discussed. The denamings mark the absence and the hauntings of the formerly celebrated namesakes, whereas the ancestors are brought into focus in continuous debates about how to heal from the settler colonial (past) of the university. Building on 5 months of ethnographic fieldwork at UC Berkeley, and inspired by the framework of hauntology (Bozalek et al. 2021; Derrida 1994) I investigate how names of buildings and ancestors haunt the campus by forcefully redirecting debates towards social justice.

M3 - Conference abstract for conference

T2 - Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society 2023

Y2 - 21 March 2023 through 23 March 2023

ER -