Premium
Histories of a Burnt House: An Archaeology of Negative Spaces and Dispossession
Author(s) -
Angelo Dante
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1111/aman.12868
Subject(s) - scholarship , materiality (auditing) , humanities , scrutiny , ethnography , art , gentrification , ethnology , history , anthropology , archaeology , art history , sociology , aesthetics , political science , law , civil engineering , engineering
ABSTRACT The last few decades have witnessed the emergence of an unprecedented interest in the archaeology of the contemporary past. Here, building on that scholarship, I present a diachronic analysis of a fire that partially destroyed a late nineteenth‐ or early twentieth‐century house in the city of Arica, Chile. Combining historical, archaeological, and ethnographic methods, I produce the frame for a biographic storytelling that lets the house tell about its life and take center stage in the fabrication of notions like morality and belonging, attesting to the production of social space. I contend that the house and its materiality have historically played a decisive role in the production of the mechanisms of dispossession and the displacement of its inhabitants through a negative portrayal. I conclude with some thoughts about how archaeology's privileged viewpoint of contextual historical scrutiny provides nuanced insights about the repercussions of current phenomena of gentrification and heritage making.