The Things We Bring with Us

In a world full of violent, traumatic, and tragic rituals, objects, and histories, three authors reckon with the ethics of moving forward. On this panel, Molly Farneth, Laura Levitt, and Karen Guth respond to one another's recent books. Each author has analyzed examples of dominating power and its effects in contemporary life and society. And each has found ways of describing a positive vision for communities responding to the tragedies and violent circumstances in which they are caught up. Drawing on work in feminist and religious studies on care, practice, and performance, these authors offer outstanding contributions to a range of theoretical and practical projects reckoning with difficult pasts and developing possible futures. The panel offers an opportunity for Farneth, Levitt, and Guth to discuss the vivid examples that sparked their books, the similarities and differences in their disciplinary motives, and their answers to a pressing contemporary question: what will we—and what should we—bring with us from the past to a present in which tragedy, violence, and trauma remains? Rituals Molly Farneth's *The Politics of Ritual* begins with the story of a group of people who transformed rituals of Jewish mourning by doing them in the street, for a non Jew. On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, this group prayed the Mourner's Kaddish for Eric Garner in December of 2014. Farneth takes this instance as a paradigm of ritual transformation, but not only that. For, as she describes, rituals are always doing politics, in the sense that they distribute social goods. "They help determine who is included and excluded from a group, who occupies which roles and has what powers within it, which habits and virtues are cultivated, and which beliefs, passions, and stances are shared...they can be democratic when they involve collective action that aims to correct arbitrary exclusions and to redistribute goods to those to whom they are due in and around those communities." For this reason, Farneth argues, ritual theory is also political theory, and rituals have more power and promise than ritual theory has yet described. Even as religious rituals have sometimes contributed to exclusion, violence, and trauma, they have also been used toward just inclusion, undoing violence, and communal flourishing. They are some of the things that we bring with us, and that we should. Objects Laura Levitt's *The Objects that Remain* pursues the objects collected by the police on the occasion of her rape in 1989 - the sheets that had been on her bed and the sweatpants she had been wearing. This powerful reckoning with the material of her own traumatic history raises questions about the ethics of Holocaust memorialization and the objects that remain from other traumatic histories. Her interest in the book is in how engagement with these kinds of material remains of trauma can offer a different vision of justice in the wake of traumatic legacies, and a fuller, more intimate vision of how witnessing the material remains of what is horrible can be a critical part of doing justice to those histories. Weaving scenes of the care taken by fabric conservators at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum with practices of evidence collection and storage after sexual violence, Levitt raises profound new questions about the concept of “evidence” of traumatic pasts and its role in constructing the present and future. Histories Karen Guth's *The Ethics of Tainted Legacies: Human Flourishing after Traumatic Pasts* confronts the problem of continuation after revelations of past violence—or after new attention to violent pasts, known to its victims but newly “discovered” by other parties. Beginning from the examples of sexual violence perpetrated by the comedian Bill Cosby and the Christian ethicist John Howard Yoder, Guth considers how traumatic pasts “live on,” and how they should. Where the work of bad actors lives on, “the task is to acknowledge the importance of the work and its formative effects—an influence that cannot simply be revoked—without risking the perpetuation of its evil effects.” Framed by questions of celebration or cancelation, contending with traumatic pasts can too quickly ignore how much of the past we bring with us. Framed as a project of legacy, contending with traumatic pasts can be a practice of reinterpreting the present toward greater human flourishing. The panel will be structured as a conversation among the authors, beginning with each author commenting on the work of another: Farneth on Guth, Guth on Levitt, Levitt on Farneth. Fannie Bialek will chair a conversation among the authors and then invite the audience into discussion. The conversation will be of particular interest to scholars of memory, ritual, care, and social practice, among other topics, and will suggest important new connections among these three celebrated recent works.