The Archive of Loss (original) (raw)
Related papers
Narrating & Living with Loss: Towards an Ethnography of Grief
AUC Knowledge Fountain, 2023
Through this paper, I seek to approach grief through how it is lived, the nexus between loss, and the sought-for physical abstractions through memory, objects, and materials to live with/despite such a loss. This paper is a phenomenological and ethnographic research project on the curatory rituals and practices that individuals employ in keeping lost loved ones alive in their everyday. I explore grief through a multidisciplinary and multimodal conceptualization rather than simply through cultural and social practices such as burial and mortuary rituals. The research follows the grief narratives of different individuals in Egypt in inquiring about the objects, memories, practices, rituals, and the mnemonic effect embedded within these varying elements. The research scopes grief and living with loss through psychology and psychoanalysis but, most significantly, ethnography and anthropology. Through this phenomenological approach, I analyze the relevant anthropological theories to these narratives through allusion to time, temporality, affect, the state and bureaucracies, memory, and objects. My central questions are: what is symbolically immortal for different individuals in coping with the loss of their loved ones? How is memory constituted, kept, narrated, and concealed to honor such losses, and what are the varying roles that objects and materials play in the networks of relations surrounding deaths? As I draw closer to my conclusion, I attempt to answer, “What is constitutive of loss when you lose everything with it?” I find that the most generative way to study grief is through a phenomenological approach to centralize each person’s experience and the meticulous ways of living with loss, as connoted by those who have lived and understood it. Thus, for me, experiences and narratives of loss have become at the heart of studying ‘grief.’ The materiality and cosmological manifestations of such loss contend with one another; ultimately, reliance on the unique path for living with loss is as unique as a fingerprint. Each person narrates their grief differently and, by extension, lives through it differently. This project serves to centralize people’s experiences and narratives in navigating their lives with loss, how love is reprimanded from such loss and restructured or imbued in different ways. As an ethnographer and observer of grief, I find that nothing should be conclusive to such grief. At the heart of this struggle, we must always find ways outside of closed narratives and closed spaces to invite and sit and observe our grief, honor our losses, and live life despite and because of these losses. My personal losses and grievances have propelled me to write, research, and approach this topic. My autoethnography is interwoven through and with the multiple narratives that I include. I mainly include my story through my fieldnotes, Anthropoetry, and poesis. I honestly and wholeheartedly cannot concur that I present a profound understanding or analysis of grief and believe it is contrary to my inclination to write this to say that one can do so. I wrote this to speak one truth to existence: narratives comprise these pains and can hold our understanding of anything within this world. Personal narratives, whether mine or that of the group of lovely individuals who have been a part of this process, are at the forefront of my paper. It is nothing without them, and everything it is, is because of them.
Loss, Grief & Bereavement.docx
This essay describes contemporary cultural practices related to death, dying and bereavement in Judaism, Mayan Indian and Christian traditions. Twelve types of loss that a client might experience. Three influential innovators of loss and grief theory: Bowlby, Kübler-Ross and Worden. The four tasks of grieving by Worden. Three complicated grief reactions: delayed grief, masked grief and chronic grief. And the importance of rituals and experiential activities in response to loss.
Texte zur Kunst, 2022
"But if it is difficult to embrace such changes, then perhaps it might be better to mourn them. Might acknowledging feelings of loss – loss not only of particular objects of art history but of the field’s long-standing identity – help ease resistance to potentially threatening changes?"
Loss, Grief and Bereavement Coping with Loss and Grief
University of Nairobi, 2018
A new dawn has come in our lives, and we must be willing to face the reality of our lives. Part of that reality is the imminence of death. Death can be confusing, especially with the advancement of medicine, science, and technology, as well as various attempts to make meaning and sense of our world. Ultimately, when death occurs, people may oscillate between feelings of sadness and anticipation, especially when there is a lot of pain and suffering, and hence, our love and commitment to our loved ones are juxtaposed with relief from pain. The interrelationships in our lives affect us all. The fact that death takes away our loved ones can be a panacea for disaster. The purpose of this presentation is to assist persons in coping with loss and grief.
2018
This Master's degree is dedicated to my father and mother, Doctor Isidro G. Pentzke M.D and Mercedes A. Pentzke. Thank you for giving me the best example for success. Without your guidance, motivation and strength throughout the years, my success would have been harder to reach. Thank you for all your love, support and encouragement. Without these key elements, my will and strength would have suffered. All my achievements in my life have been a direct influence of your support. A Many thanks to my advisers, Oliver Wasow, Ben Sloat and Stuart Steck who guided me throughout my Program. Also, thanks to my committee members, who offered guidance and support. Thanks to Lesley University for providing me the opportunity to be among like-minded scholars. I would also like to give a special thank you to Elyssa Gerena, who read my numerous revisions and kept me on track along the way. Finally, thanks to the rest of my family, and numerous friends who endured this long process with me, always giving support and love. Without your support and encouragement my time in this program would have seemed longer.
Passing Away Unspeakable Losses.pdf
Written in the immediate aftermath of apartheid's fall and the early days of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this essay considers the life of one woman who continued to pass racially. At a time when South Africans were summoned to begin the work of national mourning, a woman named Poppie (real name withheld) remained disguised within apartheid's racial taxonomies. Not subversive, her life nevertheless asks to be thought of, to be listened to. Her 'passing away' could not be construed as political or even an attempt at subverting the power granted to racism's phantasmic projections. Yet her 'choice' was determined by the daily realities of apartheid ideology and practice. How to listen to this life? And whither shame?
Memory and the Management of Change, 2017
Terminus and TransiTion We have dealt thus far with definite social and spatial configurations and contexts. We have seen that changes within or between them can cause disruption in the pattern of our experience, which then places unusual demands on the practices of vernacular remembering and their role in the maintenance of coherent emplaced stories of specific groups and communities. At the same time, particular memories and congregations of memories of our relations with close others over the course of time, along with the places and spaces in which we belong, provide us with the material from which we can construct and sustain what seem, at least for certain periods of time, to be temporally stable imaginative architectures through which we are able to manage other shifts, changes and transformations. In this chapter our case study explores the very limits of our capacity to manage life transitions. With death being irrevocable and its resulting loss appearing absolute, we're faced with the most challenging of such transitions. As we consider what this entails, we find that memory and remembering are inextricably entangled in the experience of grief and mourning. In face of the finality of death, we can only turn to memory in addressing the yawning absence it creates. We turn inevitably to memory as we try to hold onto the abiding significance and lasting virtues of the person who has passed, and reflect on what was special and singularly meaningful in the story of her or his life. This chapter attempts to unravel the paradoxical dance between the painful task of CHAPTER 5