Among anthropologists, memory ethnography—the reconstructive descrip- tion of a more vibrantly functioning sociocultural world of the past based on interview material from survivors in the present—has long been considered an ersatz scholarly enterprise. Yet such an ethnographic project is reformulated here by coauthors Andrea L. Smith and Anna Eisenstein as an investigation of contemporary American modes of “collective memory,” a Durkheimian concept developed by Maurice Halbwachs most notably in his posthumously published La mémoire collective (1950). But Rebuilding Shattered Worlds emerges not by studying public monuments and ritual commemorations, as did the Durkheimians, but by aggregating the historical consciousness of survivors, people who had been scattered fifty years earlier by so-called urban renewal in the small Lehigh Valley town of Easton, Pennsylvania.

Smith, a professor of anthropology at Lafayette College, located on Easton’s tonier and topographically elevated north side, developed this project with Eisenstein, now a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Virginia, by recruiting to their ethnographic team many undergradu- ates to mingle and engage at get-togethers, in visits to people’s homes, and large old-neighborhood reunions. Students approached the research subjects like inquiring grandchildren (and great-grandchildren) interested in the older generation’s experiences of their now-vanished neighborhood.

The memory ethnography exemplified by Franz Boas was carried out among Native Americans who had survived various depredations of the North American settler states and their agents and who were aggregated in ethnic jumbles onto reservations and thus politically and economically marginalized.

As Smith and Eisenstein detail, by contrast the multiethnic, multiracial dwellers in Easton’s “Syrian Town,” already socioeconomically marginalized by the 1960s, were bulldozed out of their tract of land at the downtown confluence of the Delaware and Lehigh rivers, their functioning community completely disaggregated and erased in the name of urban renewal, its residents ordered to relocate—some multiple times—wherever they could find housing. Re- building Shattered Worlds is their story or, rather, their many stories that converge on a collective biography of a physically vanished but memorialized neighborhood.

The compact presentation of the results of the ten-year project is divided into six chapters. The first chapter, “Ethnography of the Expelled,” discusses the rationale and the methods, in particular the focus on stimulating narratives of remembrance as a kind of verbal archaeology of a disappeared community. Next, “The Language of Blight” is good investigative journalism, reconstructing how Easton officialdom between 1957 and 1977 armed itself with the usual plethora of studies kept secret from the residents and their advocates so as to target the neighborhood for removal. The city used the mid-century modernist language of social “blight” to justify seizing property by eminent domain and ultimately eradicating this working-class, multiethnic and multiracial area entirely.

Chapters three through five are the heart of the ethnography, quoting liberally from transcripts of autobiographical narratives of former neighborhood dwellers. We may see in the aggregate a kind of “distributed autobiography” of Syrian Town, much as the “distributed cognition” within a community of practice rests on the fragmentary, overlapping knowledge of each of its members that can be reassembled by a researcher to create a model of the plenum—here, an implicitly shared model of the prototype Syrian Town dweller of the postwar, pre-renewal era.

Chapter three, “Narrating Diversity,” focuses on people’s consciousness of demographic identities within the neighborhood, commenting on the dense presence in interviews of ethnonyms by which relevant groups knew and classified each other: “Syrians” (Lebanese Christians), “Jews,” “Italians,” “Irish,” and “Afro-Americans” (itself a label indicating an era). Such descriptors contrast Syrian Town residents in perceived class position with the spatially distant, non-ethnically characterized inhabitants of the elevated lands of College Hill. It also demonstrates that while relative poverty united the neighborhood’s inhabitants, each group did have residential and commercial enclaves after all that constituted a patchwork within the overall social landscape.

Chapter four, “Voices from the Past,” develops the concept of “temporal heteroglossia,” a characteristic the authors discern in the transcript material. This invokes an insight of the literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, for whom differences (“hetero-”) in the styles in which different types of people speak (“-glossia”) in a language community, and especially in the way in which they narrate experiences and events, reveal much about the social worlds—and here, the space-time of autobiographical nostalgia—in which they now live. Indeed, the ethnographic investigation drew people into focusing on the time and place of pre-removal Syrian Town, so that its former inhabitants are in a sense imaginatively transposed back then and there—Bakhtin termed this a narrative “chronotope”—as they bring another life to life in the narrating moment. Their memories are couched using all manner of time-bound cultural terms from the remembered neighborhood, many now disappeared names of locations and buildings, and even what literary scholars term “narrative present tense” forms reimagining that fifty-year-ago lived experience.

But autobiographical memory is never discursive in the abstract; in chapter five, “The Material of Memory,” Smith and Eisenstein discuss the memorabilia—photographs, newspaper clippings, and more—that recuperate the subjective experiences of Syrian Town for its former residents, and that people curate in scrapbooks and other collections. These memorabilia proved essential in jogging memories during ethnographic reunions. Referencing several anthropological studies of historical consciousness, this chapter shows that it is Syrian Towners’ recollection of the places of childhood and young adult activities that is central to their subjectivity. They recall the habitual uses of space for activities they can now locate with specific place-names, specific, affectively laden points on a pre-removal map: for Syrian Towners this creates a subjectivity in the ethnographic horizon of autobiography through which the old neighborhood as a collective social fact of groupness—notwithstanding any realities of ethnic and racial divisions within—comes once more into focus, a Brigadoon-like vision in the mind’s eye.

The concluding chapter, “Nostalgia as Engine of Change,” takes on both a critical and a hopeful tone. Comparing the city of Easton’s obliteration of Syrian Town to projects undertaken elsewhere during official America’s mid-twentieth-century urban-renewal enthusiasm, the human costs emerge as common factors: organic urban cultures that sustain the way of life of inhabitants of politically and economically marginal, ethnically and racially marked neighborhoods are swept away; as in Easton, people are sent to the suburbs—to them, a “geography of nowhere” in Kathleen Stewart’s words— or ghettoized in racialized public housing. The public economic payoff and civic benefits of many of these projects, as in Easton, have been elusive, no matter the grandiose visions touted by political elites and profit-seeking real- estate developers who whipped up public enthusiasm for them.

But in the particular case of Syrian Town, as the authors point out, the very project of memory ethnography seemed to lead to a kind of consciousness-raising among the dispossessed who reflected autobiographically, a sharpening of their political subjectivity vis-à-vis the ruling classes mediated by and in the very exercise of recuperating the situated life of the pre-renewal neighborhood they experienced. The authors suggest that amid all the nostalgia of neighborhood reunions, there is a kind of determined agency evidenced in the keenness with which former residents have continued to seek out the experience of telling their stories—witnessing, one might say—to the young, new cohorts of Lafayette College students, for whom such testimony might shape political consciousness in the future.

This review first appeared in Biography, Volume 41, Number 2, Spring 2018, pp. 452-455.