Turning over Stoke-on-Trent (pottery): Ritual, affect and haunting

Abstract

This article is one of a series of explorations of the curious, ordinary-extraordinary practice of turning over pottery by people in/from Stoke-on-Trent. This is the widely practised habit of turning over a piece of ceramic ware, in situations away from home, to examine its origins. While on the surface, this practice is ostensibly to check the backstamp (the maker’s mark) that identifies its origins, I argue that it has a number of deeper meanings and resonances. What those who are not local often only understand as a question of antique provenance or value, my work shows that this practice carries with it broader meanings of the material culture of pottery-in-use, complex conceptions of the locality, as part of wider socio-cultural narratives of Stoke-on-Trent. In this article, I address the critical, theoretical context in which this turning over practice might also be understood as marking, feeling and resisting socio-historical change. Drawing on both qualitative, empirical data and interdisciplinary theoretical work on affects, ritual/material culture and hauntology, the article suggests the complex and often conflicted role that turning over plays is part of a response to de-industrialisation in Stoke-on-Trent. In recognising this specific micro-practice in this context of cultural troubling/haunting, the article proposes object-focused rituals may operate homologically to ‘turn over’ locality.