ABSTRACT
Things may not only stand for what once was (or an idealised version thereof); they are also fundamental to connecting with it. In part, this is because they might be integral to memories, knowledge or relationships concerning the past. But displaced things are not simple containers of others’ associations. They work actively as both comforting reminders and painful mementos of what has been lost and endured. The chapter considers this through the notion of suffering, asking why and how this might be productively used in thinking about displaced things. Representational things are not only outside the realm of the everyday and the ‘real’ (as the previous chapter addressed); they are also actively transitional, in between here and there, now and then, between the present and the pre-displacement past. Temporal continuities, or feelings of them at least, are not just a result of accident or the passage of time; rather, they are something that the displaced work hard to create and sustain. The displaced may also develop ways of being and doing in everyday life that enable them to feel more familiar with, and at ease in, their current situation and surroundings: this turns the chapter to an examination of habit and why – for things as well as people – it is both consoling and painful in displacement. The chapter then addresses what, after Victor Turner, I call the subjunctive mood of things – a mood of fear, hope and longing, of what-ifs – and concludes with a discussion of how Turner’s communitas may be experienced by things.
