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Deviating from foundational assumptions regarding the semiotic and performative role of material objects, mementos of traumatic pasts are conceptualized as resisting mnemonic re-presentation and inter-objectivity. In keeping with trauma discourse, souvenirs of deathworlds are depicted as incapable of encapsulating sublime suffering or breaching the wall of silence between survivors and descendants, failing to constitute a material legacy. Rather than act as conduits for ‘continuing bonds’ with the past and the dead, survivors are expected to disentangle the self from souvenirs of difficult pasts facilitating separation and recovery. Ethnographic interviews with descendants depict the way discursive framing elides the semiotic potential of domestic material traces of the Holocaust and parent–child–object relations engendering intimate inter-corporeality and embodied memory. Object relations are central in the passage between life- and deathworlds, allowing survivor families to sustain the lived memory of the past in everyday life. Findings problematize the discourse of genocidal suffering that overshadows micro-moments of lived experience.

26:T554,

This essay engages with recent work on an unusual, yet fascinating theme: absence. Two edited collections have recently been published that deal with the topic: An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss (Bille et al., 2010) and The Matter of Death: Space, Place and Materiality (Hockey et al., 2010). These books explore an almost counterintuitive aspect of absence: its material culture. Indeed, absence has a materiality and exists in – and has effects on – the spaces people inhabit and their daily practices and experiences. Drawing on the discussions in these two books and on other recent developments in the study of absence, this essay considers the relational ontology of absence, conceiving absence not as a thing in itself but as something that exists through relations that give absence matter. Absence, in this view, is something performed, textured and materialized through relations and processes, and via objects. We therefore need to trace absence. This entails following and describing the processes through which absence becomes matter and absence comes to matter. It means to map out, locate and follow the traces of absence and understand absences as traces, that is, as residual, incomplete, elusive, ambiguous, yet material entities.