Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays

WELCOME TO THE MEMORY INDUSTRY. In the grand scheme ofthings, the memory industry ranges from the museum trade to the legal battles over repressed memory and on to the market for academic books and articles that invoke memory as key word. Our scholarly fascination with things memorable is quite new. As Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins have noted, "collective memory" emerged as an object of scholarly inquiry only in the early twentieth century, contemporaneous with the so-called crisis of historicism. Hugo von Hofmannsthal used the phrase "collective memory" in 1902, and in 1925 Maurice Halbwachs's The Social Frameworks of Memory argued, against Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, that memory is a specifically social phenomenon. But outside of experimental psychology and clinical psychoanalysis, few academics paid much attention to memory until the great swell of popular interest in autobiographical literature, family genealogy, and museums that marked the seventies. 1 The scholarly boom began in the 1980s with two literary events: Yosef Yerushalmi's Zakhor: jewish History and jewish Memory (1982) and Pierre Nora's "Between Memory and History," the introduction to an anthology, Lieux de me'moire (1984). Each of these texts identified memory as a primitive or sacred form opposed to modern historical consciousness. For Yerushalmi, the Jews were the archetypal people of memory who had adopted history only recently and then only in part, for "modern Jewish historiography can never replace an eroded group memory." For Nora, memory was an archaic mode of being that had been devastated by rationalization: "We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left." Despite or perhaps because of their elegiac tone and accounts of memory as antihistorical discourse, these works found an amazing popularity and were quickly joined by others. In 1989 the translation of Nora's influential essay in a special issue of this journal and the founding of History and Memory, based in Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, showed the crystallization of a self-conscious memory discourse. A decade later the scholarly literature brims with such titles as "Sites of Memory" or "Cultural Memory" or "The Politics of Memory. "2 The emergence of memory as a key word marks a dramatic change in linguistic practice. We might be tempted to imagine the increasing use of memor as the natural result of an increased scholarly interest in the ways that popular and folk cultures

On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse

Introduction Part I. Theoretical Explorations: 1. Compromise and closure: a theory of social dynamics 2. The making of modern communities Part II. State Building and Ethnic Conflict: 3. Who owns the state? Ethnic conflicts after the end of empires 4. Nationalism and ethnic mobilisation in Mexico 5. From empire to ethnocracy. Iraq since the Ottomans Part III. The Politics of Exclusion in Nationalised States: 6. Racism and xenophobia 7. Nationalising multi-ethnic Switzerland.

Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity

Islam has acquired new forms of visibility over the last two decades as it has made its way in the public avenues of both Muslim and European societies. New faces of Muslim actors using both secular and religious idiom are appearing in public life; the terms of public debate are being transformed by the eruption of religious issues; Islamic films and novels are becoming popular subjects of cultural criticism; new spaces, markets, and media are opening up in response to the rising demands of recently formed Muslim middle classes. Islam carves out a public space of its own as new Islamic language styles, corporeal rituals, and spatial practices emerge and blend into public life. On the one hand, public Islam testifies to a shift in the orientation of the Islamic movement from macropolitics toward micropractices, and on the other hand, it challenges the borders and the meanings of the secular public sphere. As Islam makes a move into national public spheres, the consensual principles and homogeneous structure of the national public spheres are unsettled, but so are those of the Islamic movement. Indeed two different phases of contemporary Islamism can be distinguished.1 The first phase, starting at the end of the 1970s

Islam in Public: New Visibilities and New Imaginaries

The past remains essential - and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man's attitudes to his past, David Lowenthal revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs. He shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture. History embraces nature and the cosmos as well as humanity. The past is seen and touched and tasted and smelt as well as heard and read about. Empathy, re-enactment, memory and commemoration overwhelm traditional history. A unified past once certified by experts and reliant on written texts has become a fragmented, contested history forged by us all. New insights into history and memory, bias and objectivity, artefacts and monuments, identity and authenticity, and remorse and contrition, make this book once again the essential guide to the past that we inherit, reshape and bequeath to the future.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/2325548X.2017.1315261

The Past Is a Foreign Country - Revisited

Jeux d'échelles : la micro-analyse à l'expérience

Penser par cas

La nouvelle histoire

If the frequency of specific key words in book titles, series or journal editions are an indicator of the shift within a discipline, transnational history has certainly arrived. Next to other key t...

Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History

Comment nait une langue nationale ? La Revolution francaise a ete confrontee d'emblee au probleme linguistique, des lors que, fondant un ordre politique et social neuf, elle entendait rallier a son projet des masses patoisantes. Entre les projets federalistes de 1790 et les mesures jacobines de destruction decidees en 1793-1794, l'enquete sur les patois de l'abbe Gregoire tient une place strategique. Sous les yeux des correspondants de Gregoire, pouvoirs, savoirs et croyances bougent ensemble. Dangereux et fascinant, le monde du patois est pour eux le proche mais l'autre. Dans la geographie des Lumieres, un monde impense surgit : la campagne. Qu'est ce peuple a qui la Revolution assigne desormais la mission de faire l'histoire ? Cette campagne, a la fois jardin des origines et noire reserve de l'animalite ? Comment mobiliser un savoir local au service d'un dessein politique : le triomphe du francais, qui doit etre celui de la Nation et de la Raison ?
Paris dicte le geste qui retranche dans la marginalite et bientot le folklore les cultures regionales. Date de premiere edition : 1975.

Jacques Revel

Papers

Jeux d'échelles : la micro-analyse à l'expérience

Penser par cas

La nouvelle histoire

Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History

Une politique de la langue : la Révolution française et les patois : l'enquête de Grégoire