{"id":2141,"date":"2016-12-19T08:35:51","date_gmt":"2016-12-19T07:35:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/politicasdelamemoria.org\/2010\/05\/474-zoe-crossland-2\/"},"modified":"2022-02-01T21:05:19","modified_gmt":"2022-02-01T20:05:19","slug":"474-zoe-crossland-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/politicasdelamemoria.org\/en\/2016\/12\/474-zoe-crossland-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Zoe Crossland"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Zoe Crossland is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University. Her main theoretical interests lie in semiotic archaeology, and archaeologies of death and the body. She works in historical archaeology and the archaeology of the contemporary past, focusing particularly on nodes of controversy where conflicting sets of beliefs and practices converge. In particular, she is interested in the ways in which negotiations and conflict between actors are mediated through material conditions. To fully understand the extent to which archaeology may analyze such conditions, she works in two radically different areas of research.<\/p>\n

Madagascar<\/h5>\n

Her research in Madagascar is concerned with archaeologies of encounter in the highlands. \u00a0One aspect of this research traces the introduction of Protestant Christianity into Madagascar by British missionaries at the start of the 19th century. Here she focuses on the potential dislocation that was experienced when one way of living, learned through a lifetime’s experience within specific material and social conditions, was challenged in a confrontation with a radically different understanding of how to act effectively and morally, the ways in which people attempted to resolve and make sense of this dislocation, and the new and unanticipated formations that were created as a result. She is currently completing a book which explores the semiotics of encounters in highland Madagascar, provisionally entitled: “Encounters with Ancestors: archaeologies of recognition and loss in highland Madagascar”.<\/p>\n

Forensic Archaeology and Charles Sanders Peirce’s Semeiotic<\/h5>\n

My second area of research focuses on the production of the excavated body. Here I draw on the semeiotic of C. S. Peirce to explore the signs of the body and of exhumation, considering how archaeologists constitute themselves and others through embodied material engagement with the world. Through exploring the language and orientation of forensic archaeology towards the excavation of human remains, this research works towards a fuller appreciation of the situated and material semiotic relationships through which archaeology is composed, in order to better understand how we construct meaning from excavated material remains.<\/p>\n

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Main publications:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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