Patina: A Profane Archaeology

Description

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the world reacted with shock on seeing residents of this distinctive city left abandoned to the floodwaters. After the last rescue was completed, a new worry arose—that New Orleans’s unique historic fabric sat in ruins, and we had lost one of the most charming old cities of the New World. In Patina , anthropologist Shannon Lee Dawdy examines what was lost and found through the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. Tracking the rich history and unique physicality of New Orleans, she explains how it came to adopt the nickname “the antique city.” With innovative applications of thing theory, Patina studies the influence of specific items—such as souvenirs, heirlooms, and Hurricane Katrina ruins—to explore how the city’s residents use material objects to comprehend time, history, and their connection to one another. A leading figure in archaeology of the contemporary, Dawdy draws on material evidence, archival and literary texts, and dozens of post-Katrina interviews to explore how the patina aesthetic informs a trenchant political critique. An intriguing study of the power of everyday objects, Patina demonstrates how sharing in the care of a historic landscape can unite a city’s population—despite extreme divisions of class and race—and inspire civil camaraderie based on a nostalgia that offers not a return to the past but an alternative future. Review: A new way to look at your world - Shannon Dawdy offers a way of looking at place and time that changes one's perspective. It gets at the heart of how we interact with our history and how we behave in our environment today. New Orleans is a model because it contains - and loses - so much, is so dynamic ecologically while the human beings cling to their life boats of memory and, I'll say it, desire. If she didn't pin down all her work with her large world of academic references and her own impressive list of sites she has worked on, this would be a great read for everyone. But it still maintains great readability along with the academic tetherings; everyone should give it a thoughtful, ultimately enjoyable and enlightening, read. Review: Overflowing - Karl Popper wrote that aiming at simplicity and lucidity is a moral duty of all intellectuals and that lack of clarity is a sin. If so, Shannon Lee Dawdy’s “Patina”, has both saintliness and sin. Her descriptions of archeologic excavations, interviews and public records are straightforward, informative and engaging. However, her asides based on her notions of the space-time continuum, psychoanalysis and 19th century economics baffle and befuddle. Contravening the law of supply and demand, she cites Marx to posit that the value of a commodity can only be reliably measured by the labor-time that went into its manufacture. In explaining physical patina, she cites Husserl, who “…. argued that time understood as a steady sequence of linear events is a highly abstracted representation of what our consciousness experiences as a sensual flux of echoes, cycles, and retentions, akin to multipart music. In the phenomenological view, the content of experience matters more than the form of timekeeping (seconds, days, years).” One wonders if the molecules on the oxidized surface of houses and antiques are properly acquainted with this definition. Readers willing to dig through the crust of such academic meanderings, will be rewarded by her descriptive passages on the remains of saintly old churchyards, the sinful “House of the Rising Sun”, the devastation of Katrina, and the inextinguishable beliefs in local ghosts which provide insight into the zeitgeist of the city. While the book has limited appeal to a general audience, those with an academic bent and a taste for extended metaphor will find it has much to like.