The “becoming-past” of places

Abstract

I want to thank you for the honor of being asked to give this lecture in memory of Edward Westermarck. Westermarck had a long-term interest in articulating the generalizations of moral philosophy with the complications of ethnographic and historical particulars. The present paper, although very different in orientation and aim, takes up the analysis of some classic philosophical topics of interest in contemporary anthropology—namely spacetime, place, and memory—attempting to make self-evident how they are constituted as experiential forms only in and through the sociocultural complexities of a specific lived world. Among the diverse anthropological and related approaches to place, space, and time, much attention has recently been given to places as tangible mnemonics for spatially presencing the past or for mediating history in the experience of the present. In this paper, however, I shift from these perspectives to an exploration of the becoming-past-of-places: Considering disappearances and appearances of new places in a people’s lived place-world, I ask how these processes were configured in certain spatiotemporalizing practices in pre-Civil War, nineteenth-century New York. Interrelations being formed between the past, present, and future, placemnemonics and forgetting will then reemerge within this processual viewpoint. By “spatiotemporalizing practices,” I refer, on the one hand, to a particular nexus of common descriptions and related commentaries on observable changes in the city that we find in newspapers, magazines, speeches, and other everyday sources of the era. I think of these accounts as elements in what Bakhtin (1984: 6) calls a