Showing papers in "Memory Studies in 2011"

Flickr and the culture of connectivity: Sharing views, experiences, memories

Abstract: Photo sharing sites such as Flickr are commonly regarded either as spaces where communal views and experiences evolve as a result of picture exchange, or as visual archives where sharing pictures in the present naturally leads to a collective interpretation of the past. This article proposes regarding Flickr as a social media platform annex database that enables the construction of infinite connections. Platforms such as Flickr are firmly embedded in a culture of connectivity, a culture where the powerful structures of social networking sites are gradually penetrating the core of our daily routines and practices. What is often called ‘collective memory’ or ‘cultural heritage’ in relation to digital photo sharing sites is largely the result of data linked up by means of computer code and institutional protocols.

7/7 and connective memory: Interactional trajectories of remembering in post-scarcity culture

Abstract: The 2005 London bombings is both marked by and is a marker of a post-scarcity memorial-media boom. There is a new contagion of the past driven by a memorial culture unstoppably equipped with the availability, portability and pervasiveness of digital devices, enabling the instant aggregation and archiving of everything. The ‘digital’, it can be said, insinuates itself in the past. In such circumstances, what are the prospects for the development and maintenance of individual memories? And, how can we consider such questions beyond the traditional dichotomous models of memory that assume memory as an orientation to something once complete and residual, and thus always already partial and in decline?This article employs a concept of ‘connective memory’ as a sensitizing tool to highlight the moment of connection as the moment of memory. Through examining the archival (institutional) and individual remembrances of the London bombings, I treat ‘memory’ as a trajectory of connections that contribute to but also ...

A shock to thought: Curatorial judgment and the public exhibition of ‘difficult knowledge’:

Abstract: Many institutions of social memory have moved away from a singular emphasis on affirming presentations of patriotism, triumph and great deeds toward an appreciation of the potential for aggression ...

Memory, power and resistance: The anatomy of a tripartite relationship

Abstract: The need to examine the individual response to collective memory narratives has been continually emphasized in the nascent discipline of memory studies.This article examines the relationship between collective memory, power and resistance. In so doing, it seeks to establish a typology of mnemonic resistance, that is, to ascertain the modes by which collective memory may be resisted by the individual or a minoritarian, repressed group. The author contends that this resistance is two fold, dependent on both individual resignification, and the nature of collective memory itself, which, unwittingly, because of its necessarily nebulous character, the not inconsequential influence of both individual reception and generational change in its construction and reception, facilitates its own subversion. Collective memory, therefore, is always negotiated at the interface between the imposition of a public dominant narrative and the reaction of the private individual.

Is memory a natural kind

Abstract: Though researchers often refer to memory as if it were a unitary phenomenon, a natural kind, the apparent heterogeneity of the various ‘kinds’ of memory casts doubt on this default view. This article argues, first, that kinds of memory are individuated by memory systems. It argues, second, for a view of the nature of kinds of memory informed by the tri-level hypothesis. If this approach to kinds of memory is right, then memory is not in fact a natural kind.

The London bombings: Mobile witnessing, mortal bodies and globital time:

Abstract: Most cultural theorists argue that time in the digital and globalized media era is accelerating, with the future and past collapsed into an extended present. This would seem to be the case with the 2005 London bombings: mobile witnessing through the use of mobile camera phones provided co-present personal communicative memory of the events by survivors and witnesses. This was rapidly transformed by mainstream media organizations into mediated witnessing which within days was being reassembled as part of a process of commemoration through online memorials. More than five years on from the terrorist attacks, however, there is an unevenness in the trajectories of mobile witnessing over time in what may be termed the ‘globital memory field’. As well as compression and speed, ‘globital time’ is folded to intersect with ‘slow’ and ‘long’ time that is very much part of each citizen’s lifeworld and subsequently is an important dimension within any process of commemoration, conflict resolution and justice.

Memorial functions: Intent, impact and the right to remember:

Abstract: Studying memorial practice offers a revealing vantage point into changes in attitudes towards the past and with observers referring to ‘memorial mania’ it is an opportune moment to do so. Two main ...

Website of memory: The War of the Pacific (1879–84) in the global age of YouTube:

Abstract: This article is an examination of the comments attached to a video upload on YouTube of a Chilean television mini-series on the War of the Pacific (1879–84), one of Latin America’s rare internation...

Embodiment and living memorials: The affective labour of remembering the 2005 London bombings

Abstract: The 2005 London bombings have been the subject of numerous commemorative practices, ranging from public silence to the Hyde Park memorial. In this article we discuss a less well-studied commemorative practice that we term, following Esther Hyman, a ‘living memorial’. This type of commemoration differs from other memorials in that it functions by making connections at the level of life rather than that of symbols. It constitutes an ‘affect economy’ in which the affective labour of participants weaves thick relations of care and emotion that accomplish a salvation of the commemorated person or event. Drawing on interview data from people who have created and maintained living memorials, we show the centrality of the body and embodied acts of caring as central to how commemoration is enacted. Such commemoration may ultimately involve the erasure of the story of what is commemorated, but not the embodied relations in which the remembered lives inhere directly.

Defacing memory: (Un)tying Peru’s memory knots:

Abstract: Lika Mutal, the artist behind one of Peru’s only monuments that attempts an encompassing homage to the victims of their internal war (1980–2000), invited me to walk through the Ojo que llora (The Eye that Cries) (see Figure 9.1) in Lima in March 2008. Some 32,000 stones collected from the Chancay sea on Peru’s central coastline—of which 26,000 bear the name, age, and year of death or date of disappearance of a victim—mark a river-like pathway that spirals in toward an obelisk-shaped rock with an embedded smaller sacred stone (the “eye”) that continuously sheds “tears.” This central rock—intended to represent “the core inside of each person”—holds special significance: it represents “Mother Earth (Pachamama or Madre Tierra) who cries for what has happened to her children” (Cardenas, 2006). The serpentine paths are meant to resemble the meanderings of rivers; in particular, the artist had in mind the River Huallaga in the Amazon basin and the thousands of victims disappeared in it (ibid.). The quietness of the monument in the otherwise bustling city and the solemnity of the names and ages of victims weighs heavily. Reflection is paramount. To leave, one must wind one’s way back through the paths of names, and thus continue contemplation. The design forces one to walk slowly; one cannot rush through this memorial site.

Beyond the sadness: memories and homecomings among survivors of "ethnic cleansing" in a Bosnian village'

Abstract: The 11 new marble headstones erected at the small village cemetery at the outskirts of Hegici in late July 2007 outnumbered the number of people who had returned to the village. Only the dates of death engraved on the white headstones revealed that most of the people buried that day died together on the same day in July 1992. The small congregation of some 50 people, made up of surviving relatives and neighbours coming from afar, mourned in dignity and prayed for the souls of the victims of the massacre. Through ethnography of a collective funeral for the victims of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in a small Bosnian village, and reflexive narrative analysis of the past and present realities of the survivors, this article explores the complex relationship between memory, place and reconciliation in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Memory dispositifs and national identities: The case of Ned Kelly:

Abstract: Enduring cultural memories are never made by politicians, monuments or individual media representations alone, although both media and politics (or power relations) are essential to their existence; they are formed and develop through a tangle of relations that reaches back and forth across time. Although questions of media, temporality and power have all been crucial to the field of memory studies, little work has been done on exactly how these elements interact to form memories that shift over time and what work they do in terms of identity formation and negotiation. Using the case of Australian outlaw Ned Kelly and the idea of a memory dispositif, this article will explore some of these types of relations and how they function to assemble complex and contradictory group identities.

Backwards and forwards in space and time: Recalling dance movement from long-term memory

Abstract: Recall of complex non-verbal motor sequences, such as contemporary dance, provides insights into the structure and mechanics of human memory – specifically, cues and associations in long-term memory (LTM). In this study, four dancers recalled material – eight exercises in the form of short dances – that they had not performed for between three and 31 years. The dancers initially recalled the exercises in silence, although each one had been learned to a particular piece of music. The exercises were recalled either immediately or after an unfilled delay and using self-motion or a mannequin. Recall rates were similar across immediate and delayed conditions; self versus mannequin motion had little impact on the length of material recalled. Qualitative data indicated that music and dancer movement were important cues to LTM; transitions were sometimes forgotten; images associated with movement recall were kinaesthetic, verbal, visual and auditory. The results are consistent with accounts of LTM for other temporal arts and suggest activation of multimodal associates and images.

Virtuality in systems of memory: Toward an ontology of collective memory, ritual,and the technological

Abstract: In recent years, ‘collective memory’ has been used to describe the organization of a group identity that either supplements or replaces identity categories. Despite the apparent emphasis on the ‘collective’, most theories of collective memory rely explicitly on ontological models derived from modes of thought that privilege the psychic memory of individuals rather than collective phenomena. This article sketches the beginnings of an ontological model for collective memory that defines collective memory as an active process via which collectivities are produced through embodied movements that serve to differentiate entities from a larger environment. While not the only form of movement, the article examines the role of material technologies in the shaping and transformation of embodied rituals, consequently transforming how collectives are produced through memory as embodied actions.

Exposure to life-writing as an impact on autobiographical memory

Abstract: This article combines narrative and genre theory with recent studies of memory processing and reporting to propose that contact with published biography and autobiography, both direct and indirect, has an influence on autobiographical narrative, memory and self-formation. Exposure to durable and pervasive modes of life-writing, transmitted culturally, provides frameworks for meaning-making that normalize certain narrative structures and shape the content and organization of autobiographical memory. This article traces the transfer of conventions found in life-writing genres in recently reported autobiographical memory studies, to argue that further consideration should be given in empirical research contexts to the impact of cultural and educational factors on memory.

Dynamics of memory: Commemorating the 2005 London bombings in British television news:

Abstract: This article seeks to examine coverage of the 2005 London bombings’ first year anniversary commemorations vis-a-vis reportage of the attacks as a breaking news story. Adopting a multimodal discourse analysis approach, informed by both qualitative and quantitative methods, the study explores the thematic relationship between the two sets of coverage. Although our results show a number of dynamic processes at work, a key finding is the strong tendency for new themes to appear in the commemorative story. Our analyses also highlight the cathartic function that the event’s anniversary itself seemingly fulfils. Such empirical insights have important implications for the ways in which (catastrophic) past events are commemorated through the mass media, especially through the medium of television.

Commemoration and processes of appropriation: The Italian Communist Party and the Italian Resistance (1943–48)

Abstract: Scholarship on collective memory often conceives struggles over the past as directly dependent on the structure of interests in the present. However, temporal constraints affect the way the past is...

Being there is everything

Abstract: This article explores ideas of public memory, commemoration and ritual in the commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall at Brandenburg Gate. The article proposes a novel theory of commemoration as interpassive ritual. It brings together accounts of ideology, psychoanalysis and memory. Commemoration is discussed as a moment of intensified public memory in which ideology and the unconscious are deeply embedded. Chief theoretical sources here are Edward S. Casey, Robert Pfaller and Slavoj Žižek. The article explores the role of ideology in commemoration and the potential of subjects to escape subjection through interpassive rituals. In the article’s second half, the historical events of 1989 are recalled in order to understand why a German subject would seek to enjoy a commemoration of the Berlin Wall’s fall.

Painful memories: Chronic pain as a form of re-membering

Abstract: Advances in scientific research enable chronic pain to be understood as a form of body memory. Inquiring into chronic pain can expand our understanding of the processes of memory and, in particular, can illuminate configurations of modern and postmodern memory as they are constructed and mediated through mundane, concrete and corporeal experiences.

Imagining the face of a nation: Scotland, modernity and the places of memory:

Abstract: Relationships between modernity and national identity raise issues of how place is remembered morally and visually. This article considers aspects of cultural output in Scotland during the 1930s. While the romantic, rural emphasis of travelogue imagery evaded urbanization, the important literary nationalists Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid produced nightmare visions of a country defiled by industrialization and imperialism. Against this, the pioneering film-maker John Grierson celebrated modernity as a process of continuity rather than rupture through an ongoing inheritance of national values. Their differing evaluations of alienation and belonging have contributed to stereotypes of place that figure iconographically in the national consciousness as sites of memory, thereby eliding the experience of non-iconographic places while compromising the ways in which individual accounts may be recollected through the modern social imaginary.

The roots of collective memory: Public knowledge of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson:

Abstract: Claims that Thomas Jefferson fathered the children of Sally Hemings, a slave at Monticello, have received support over the past 35 years from revisionist biographies, DNA testing and other evidence. The claims have also been communicated to the general public through novels, films and other popular media. Both those persuaded by the claims and those critical of them assume that collective memory of Jefferson has been changed importantly, and that a considerable portion of the American public accepts the changes, which also include a new focus on Jefferson’s views and actions regarding slavery more generally. But collective memory at the individual level requires some degree of collective knowledge, and after reviewing the nature of memory of Sally Hemings at the cultural level, we explore the extent to which knowledge and belief about a Jefferson—Hemings liaison and Jefferson’s paternity has spread through the American population. We also consider differences in knowledge by race, education, gender and bi...

The other side of the story

Abstract: When people chose to share stories with me during my fieldwork, in the Australian Central Desert community of Alpurrurulam, it was common for the story to be prefaced with the idiom ‘I’m gonna give...

Book review: La repubblica del dolore. Le memorie di un’Italia divisa

Abstract: generic character of the victims of the Shoah; this universalizing vision minimized the specificity of the Jewish genocide and contributed to maintaining for decades the idea of a community subjected passively to its extermination (p. 229). Antonella Salomoni’s contribution in Chapter 15 is helpful in correcting this vision and unveiling new sources that document Jewish resistance. Another inspiring topic, the ‘meat question’ is tackled in Dariusz Jarosz and Andrea Pető’s essays. Jarosz’s Chapter 11, titled ‘A Socio-political History of Meat in the Popular Republic of Poland’, provides a detailed description of the forms of popular protests against the shortages of meat imposed by the regime. He assumes that they influenced strong movements of resistance, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. This focus on non-conventional topics (food, consumption, domestic issues) and sources (for example, rumours and jokes) impart inedited perspectives on disciplinary forms of power, as Pető observes in Chapter 12 (p. 198). In the only contribution of this volume to explicitly address gender, she invites us to consider the transformation of gender roles induced by Communist politics and warns against the institutionalization of discrimination occurring through a certain use of language (p. 199). We can hope that developments in social history, as a recent counterpart of political history, will shed light on unconsidered episodes in the history of these countries, in particular those involving minorities or discriminated groups. Sergueï Krasilnikov’s study of marginal groups in the Stalinist society in Chapter 10 contributes to this decentred perspective. The last part of the book, essays by Sonia Come, Mona Foscolo, Krysztof Persak, Orgest Azizaj, and an interview with Thomas Linderberger, address the ongoing process of renegotiation of history. In Chapter 23 Orgest Azizaj tackles the political and epistemic stakes of the opening of archives in Albania. Evoking the dilemma raised by the acknowledgement of false sources, he sees fake ‘as a moment in politics and production of fake as a form of exercise of power’. His reflections in this essay coincide with the general tone of the volume and help to resume what it points out: the politicization of the past is inevitable, as well as the fetishization of its traces; authors support a historiographic approach based on comparative studies and a plurality of sources that can analyse and limit these risks. They invite us to pay attention to micro-events and the social aspects of life under Communism in order to decentre the focus on political structures and power institutions that characterized historiography in the Cold War period. A good example of this shift is Thomas Linderberger’s proposition in Chapter 19 to use the archives of repressive organizations – the Stasi in this case – to investigate other social aspects of history (p. 282). Following this line, the most interesting proposals in my opinion contemplate archives not only as the primary source for history writing – though this aspect is evidently crucial in providing a better understanding of the Communist period – but as a catalyst for reflections on their proper use and interpretation, highlighting the challenges documenting history inevitably has to confront.

On Mothers and Spiders: A face-to-face encounter with Argentina’s mourning:

Abstract: In the wake of Argentina’s dictatorship (1976—83), this article revisits the activism developed by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo as a singular experience of live architecture. Over the last 30 years, this group of women has become the figure of an endless trauma, much like a monument, that has colonized the landscape of the central square of Buenos Aires in the name of the 30,000 missing. Assuming an experimental ontology that blurs the boundaries between the living and the non-living, I argue that the stubbornness attached to the Mothers’ performance could be grasped in tune with Spider, a massive installation designed by the artist Louise Bourgeois. As Spiders, the Mothers have captured the viewers in their webs while transforming the personal losses into a collective experience of grief. Ultimately, the affective entity co-enacted by the Mothers—Spiders can teach us how memory is experienced and transmitted in the tremors of the spectatorial body, both as a shelter and a trap.

‘You do know it’s only got one bathroom’: biography, wine and small stories

Abstract: A house writes its story through an amanuensis. In the memory landscape of place a house sits still in time while everything else moves around it. It is a space that elicits stories: an instrument of mnemonic contact.The small stories of a winemaking community emanate from the nub of the house. They construct a biographical narrative that links the past to the present. In this article we offer the framework of linguistic ethnography as a way to pin definable method to indefinable memory. Language conveys meaning by constructing the narrative. And it is through the narrative process that the search for personal identity and a sense of belonging begins.

Editorial: Remembering the 2005 London bombings: Media, memory, commemoration:

Abstract: Full text of this item is not currently available on the LRA. The final published version may be available through the links above.

Past and present pasts: Historical labours in modern China

Abstract: Ideological and practical concerns inform the shaping of collective memory in present historical labours, but the legacy of narratives inherited from earlier generations also produce certain restrictions on how history may be envisioned and transmitted in the present. In this article I trace the labour of historical forgetting, invention and remembrance performed in modern China by the May Fourth Movement and the Chinese Communist Party, addressing how this legacy affects currently held views of past, present and future. I argue that China is today witnessing a remarkable and problematic shift in its appraisal of history and tradition, as its guiding trope of history, historical materialism, is undergoing crisis while challenged by a competing vision of a Chinese cultural renaissance.