October 28, 2010

Recommended by Karin Sanders, Professor of Scandinavian.

The Uncanny

"Bog bodies ought to have been hidden, but nevertheless came into light. Locked in the space between the familiar and the unfamiliar, they would seem to be poster children for Freud’s theory on the uncanny. Yet Freud was uninterested in the bog body phenomenon; indeed he fainted when Jung insisted on bringing them into conversation. Nevertheless, his concepts resonate on a number of levels with bog bodies both as a physical phenomenon and as part of their cultural afterlives. And in a chapter on the archaeological uncanny I seek to understand how Freud’s reaction towards bog bodies may be tied to his civilization critique at large."

Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind

"Draaisma describes the development of prosthetic memories over time from wax tablet via various pre-photographic machines—such as those known to produce “physionotraces”—to photography proper, and eventually to computer memory. This led me to think about how the bog offers its own kind of prosthesis that shares the metaphoric and alchemic associations we have with such memory tools. Because bog bodies are made in nature, it may seem counterintuitive to exercise the nomenclature of prosthetics—the artificial extension or replacement of something original and missing—about that which is very much natural and very much in existence. Draaisma’s book made me ponder the question of memory and artificiality in ways different than what I had originally imagined."

Regarding the Pain of Others

"I engage a number of theories on photography in the book. Sontag’s insistence that when photography 'bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible' it is often criticized if it seems 'too much like art' turned out to be particularly relevant for some of the photographed bog bodies I worked with. I ended up arguing, however, that onlookers of bog body photographs appear to escape the embarrassment of ‘indecent’ aesthetic objectification. Nevertheless, Sontag’s points about ethics and aesthetics prompted me to think harder about how distance in time can be said to have lifted disturbing actualities from bog body photographs."

Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide

 "Bal proposes that a cultural analysis must find its 'basis in concepts rather than methods.'  My explorations of the various forms bog bodies take in literature and visual representation resemble the sort of cross- disciplinary traveling that Bal has outlined.  The point she makes—that the object at hand becomes animated and malleable when looked at through the concepts of cultural analysis, and not through one particular or inherent methodology—resonates with my own experience of traveling the muddy fields and 'digging' out bog bodies."

The Historian's Craft

"Bloch’s unfinished study The Historian’s Craft suggests that the drive and genesis behind engagement with archaeological matters rests in the entertainment value and aesthetic pleasure we get when we are drawn into the 'unquestionable fascination of history.' The archaeological imagination and fascination, which wrap the remains of bog people, is often tied, I found, to the magnetic pull of the unfamiliar familiarity that Bloch describes.

The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved

 "Glob’s archaeological study plays a key role in the history of bog body reception and in the archaeological imagination that is attached to bog bodies. It is the indisputable ur-text, a site from which fiction writers, poets, and visual artists have culled material for representing and re-configuring the cultural afterlives of bog bodies. Seamus Heaney, for example, used Glob’s book as source and inspiration for his early bog poems. I first read the The Bog People in Danish when I was a teenager and lived outside Copenhagen.