Luna's Moustache

The task of awakening the past to the concerns of the present is of course the avowed concern of every historian. But with Ambeth, this act of communing with the dead weight of the past tends to focus on an obsessive, one might even say fetishistic, delight in the details of everyday life. This brings us to (one of the qualities) of Ambeth's essays: the careful attention they devote to the common, the overlooked, the ordinary, what we might think of as the splendid basura of the archives: the sari-sari, the tira-tira, the anu-ano, as well as the diumano of the past... In other words, Ambeth sees history not only as a set of documents to be decoded but as an entire array of objects to be fondled and felt. Yet rather than order these objects into a static, museum-like classifactory system, he lets them simply hang, suspended between speculation and and spectatle. In this way, his concern with the everyday and the ordinary yields a veritable historical sensorium that restores to the past its haunting, not-quite-dead-nor-alive quality.