Depth by a Thousand Cuts: Ghost Populations and the Force of Remaining Unforgettable

Keywords: Human origins, genealogy, genomics, epistemology, cosmopolitics
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 33

Abstract

Thinking across the epistemic spaces of human origins science, and into the wormhole that joins living molecular diversity to the stratal and fossil archive, this paper peers into the spaces, temporalities, and affinities conjured in an encounter with so-called “ghost populations”—archaic humans known only through statistical inference. While popular and scientific representations of human origins and relatedness, and of the story or journey of Wynterian “Man” around which they gather, portray human genealogy as a smooth space of becoming, formed in a singular and progressive act of discovering, replacing, settling, and “peopling” the Earth, ghost populations loom up from the unknowability of the past and gesture differently toward the multiplicity of human becomings. These present absent figures crease and fracture a smooth geographic imaginary of earthly inheritance and destiny. As such, and against the attempt to capture, catalog, and place the placeless whom we’ve failed to remember, I argue that it is instead their force of remaining unforgettable, Agamben’s “exigency of the lost,” that gives ghost populations their peculiar ethical and epistemological charge. In feeling and responding to this charge, ghost populations challenge us to slow down our efforts to know, represent, and map human pasts and humans past. Moreover, in their disorientation of how the relation between past and present human geographies is sensed and thought, ghost populations might further help us to look down into, and live more responsibly with, the limits of knowledge and representation at the heart of all questions of origins and relatedness.