A stone that feels right in the hand: Tactile memory, the abduction of agency and presence of the past

Abstract

This article is a theoretical and ethnographic exploration of the possibility of ‘touching the past’. Drawing on fieldwork from Newfoundland, Canada, and in conversation with Gell’s Art and Agency (1998), it focuses on the process of abduction whereby, in their discovery and handling, pieces of stone become artefacts that index the presence of an absent other. It is argued that through this tactile process of becoming an artefactual index, the distinction between past and present is momentarily dissolved, enfolded into the fit between stone and hand, giving rise to the possibility of historical sensation and the feeling of pastness.