Sticky Places: Persistence and Relationality

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The goal of this session is to explore the factors underlying persistent places, specifically thinking beyond resource availability or representationalist notions of meaning bestowed by humans. In this paper, I outline the theoretical ideas and concepts that underlie this symposium. I argue that all places exist as relational fields, and persistence comes from the emotional experiences and relationships cultivated in a particular place. Persistence, then, is not only about meaning given to a place, but about those qualities, relationships, and effects that lead to its longevity. Importantly, the relationships that generate persistence involve a plethora of non-humans, as well as relationships and experiences across time and space, as places become linked in ontological ways of knowing the world. Additionally, while persistence implies a fixedness, I suggest instead that it is a kind of stickiness, or better yet an accumulation of things, practices, experiences, memories, emotions, and more that are generated from these relationships. What are the ways in which places gather up relationships? How does permanence fit into relational archaeologies? Thinking about persistence has implications for how we think about places over time, extending to heritage management, Indigenous rights, and how we think about the environment generally.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41637.0