Touching from a Distance: Alienation, Abjection, Estrangement and Archaeology

The archaeology of the contemporary past involves making the familiar unfamiliar, interrogating the overlooked or infra-ordinary. While this is often conceptualized in terms of a methodology of distancing or alienation, this paper argues that, on the contrary, estrangement from the everyday requires a close engagement, a transgression of boundaries (however, in the process we should avoid replacing one normalizing discourse with another); that, once the mysterious is found in the quotidian, it is necessary to cultivate it. There are reasons to hope that the materiality of things can help us achieve this.