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- Convenors:
-
Michalis Kontopodis
(Universiteit van Amsterdam)
Vincenzo Matera (University of Milano)
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- Discussants:
-
Joel Candau
(University Côte d'Azur)
Elizabeth Tonkin (Queen's University, Belfast)
- Format:
- Workshops
- Location:
- 13
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 August, -, -, -, Thursday 28 August, -, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Ljubljana
Short Abstract:
Memory and identity are tied by strong mutual relations. Furthermore, it is quite impossible to examine memory and identity without referring to imagination. Remembering goes always together with forgetting and memories are always already connected with images of the future.
Long Abstract:
Memory and identity are tied by strong mutual relations. If we agree that memory is the capacity to preserve traces of past experience that can be accessed through recall, and that identity is the sense of continuity of self through time, we can grasp one meaningful memory-identity relation in <i>protomemory</i>, i.e. everything which is memorized (embodied): habitus, procedural or implicit memory, body techniques, etc., and another in <i>metamemory</i>, that is the representation that each individual has of his own memory and, on the other hand, what he narrates about it as well as what he feels, since emotions play a crucial role not just in building the memory-identity relation but also with regard to the products of imagination. Indeed, it is quite impossible to examine memory and identity without referring to imagination, both for theoretical (i) and empirical (ii) reasons: (i) there are multiple ways of performing pasts, presents and futures by way of interrelating them. In this sense, remembering goes always together with forgetting and memories are always already connected with (collective) visions of the future; (ii) in contemporary societies, where complex phenomena are mediated by communication technologies, global geopolitical transformations and the fall of ideological references, identity-making would necessarily involve both memory and imagination.
Our workshop aims at investigating these issues; the key themes include but are not limited to: semiotic-material aspects of the creation/destruction of cultural artefacts and collective identity, time and memory in visual arts and mass media, everyday remembering/forgetting, memory and uncertainty in institutional praxis, memory and the emergence of novelty), sensorial memory, nostalgia, genealogy, and cultural heritage (monuments, memorials, museums). The Workshop consists of three interrelated sessions, which will conclude in a general discussion. We strongly therefore recommend to all participants to participate in all sessions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 August, 2008, -Elizabeth Tonkin (Queen's University, Belfast)
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on emotions, I consider how anthropologists may need to (re-)present findings so as to evoke appropriately the imaginative processes involved, from experience to publication, for themselves, their informants and ensuing audiences. .
Paper long abstract:
Imagination is central to the production of anthropological findings, from original experience to 'writing up'. My examples are of emotions, as conveyed by informants through action or recall, experienced also by researchers - and changing over time - and that finally must be transmuted into a form enabling appropriate evocations by readers and audiences.
From Malinowski on, anthropologists attempting new theoretical perspectives have had to develop new genres of narrative appropriate to their choice of ethnography and its analysis. How should we present findings centred on emotions? I consider some different possibilities, with examples including some from radio and TV.
Michalis Kontopodis (Universiteit van Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
In my paper I study how a student's past is communicated, materialised, organized and institutionalised and how the enactment of past memories is related to enacting particular views of the future.
Paper long abstract:
It is quite impossible to examine memory without referring to imagination. There are multiple ways of performing pasts, presents and futures by way of interrelating them. Thereby the action which interrelates pasts, presents and futures is both semiotic and non-semiotic. It is through the interaction of humans and non-humans (photos, documents, buildings) that memories are 'generated,' presents are 'assembled,' and futures are 'witnessed.' This interaction between humans and non-humans can be creative leading to absolute novelty and at the same time ritualize this very novelty into a closed system or an oppressive regime. How is the progress of a student documented and memorized at school? How is remembering and forgetting of one's school performance related to one's future? What is the role of writing and of using documents, files and other materialities by such processes? Are there settings which enable more or less open ways of interacting with one's past and with one's future? How is past memory related to identity & imagination? In my paper, I address these questions, drawing on the analysis of discursive and non-discursive action in a secondary school for students of socio-cultural minorities where I carried out a one-year ethnographical research. I use this example to study how a student's past is communicated, materialised, organized and institutionalized and how the enactment of past memories is related to enacting particular views of the future. The study examines an alternative approach on memory, identity and imagination based on ‚difference' (Deleuze) and on ‚virtuality' (Bergson).
Katja Hrobat Virloget (University of Primorska)
Paper short abstract:
The paper researches the relation between memory of village communities, imagination and the landscape. Local collective memories about the distant beginnings retain only what has been materialized in the local landscape. Through imagination the archaeological remains connect into a coherent system of collective memory and identity of a village community, while non-materialized events are sunk into oblivion.
Paper long abstract:
Insofar it wants to be preserved, memory cannot do without a certain support; in the form of personality, objects or in the materiality of space. Collective memory depends on the symbolism of space, from where it also draws its history and identity. The landscape embodies the tradition of predecessors, through which the local community is bound to the place which it inhabits, and explains their existence 'since the times immemorial' (Halbwachs 1971; 2001; Fabietti, Mattera 1999). Local landscape can also be understood in the sense of lieu de memoire, as a symbolic place, in which the images, abundant with meanings for a certain community, are condensed (Nora 1984). Through the sensing of place (Basso 2002), people encounter material objects in which the past is embodied, which allow for unconscious remembering and re-engagement with past experience to a greater extent than language or speech (Rowlands 1993). The landscape is perceived in terms of an event, cultural perception, which includes the practice of remembering (Ingold 2000; Casey 1996).
The main questions are: How is collective memory about the distant past constructed at the local/regional level of the landscape? How does collective memory function in relation to "its materialization" and toward distance in time? How is the Christian collective construction inscribed and preserved in the local landscape and how does it gain in authority in relation to pagan mythical structures? The interdisciplinary research between ethnology and archaeology is founded in extensive fieldwork in the villages of Karst, the region along the border between Slovenia and Italy.
Maria Leticia Ferreira (Universidade Federal de Pelotas)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I discuss the conection between memory and imagination based on a study about a pomeranian comunnity in the town of São Lourenço, southern Brazil. The pomeranian ethnic group that for long time was ignored, nowadays is overvalued through a local policy of "past invention".
Paper long abstract:
The town of São Lourenço do Sul is located in the south of Brazil, by the river São Lourenço do Sul and was a site populated by european immigrants in the 19th century. These immigrants were portuguese,germans and the Pomeranians. For a long time the town presented itself as german, although in fact that was a multiethnic society. Regarding pomeranians, there was a feeling of shame, for the fact that they didn't speak portuguese nor german, and the category used to classify them was of "settlers", in other words, coarse mood peasants.
In 2004, with a new local governement , a recover work of the pomeranian ethnic group in the region begins, and together festivities, rituals, elements of cookery, they are all rescued and in a short period the local population wacthes itself inside a great "theater of memory", and some cultural traces that were kept in the ordinary life, become cultural heritage.
The political speech approaches a "rescue of the identity of this people, valuing the tourism as a source of economy.... the search for the past with the eyes on the future" (O Lourenciano, p.2, 2008).
Our research consists in verifyng the impact of these interventions in this society, and how it accepts this heritaged past as true, an invented past, shaped in the present.
Michel Rautenberg (Université Jean Monnet)
Paper short abstract:
The general frame of this presentation is an epistemological reflection upon the means to identify and describe social imagination. Thanks to emblems, narratives and steretypes that have been produced in the "new city" of Villeneuve d'Ascq, France, we aim to show how is built this town's identity.
Paper long abstract:
The general frame of this presentation is an epistemological reflection upon the means to identify and describe social imagination. Our main hypothesis is that a good way to know social imagination is to discover thr Strereotypes and Emblems which organize it. Our main theoritical ressources will be the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld and the historian Bronslaw Bacsko who proposed the concept of "idea image" (idée-image in French) .
So as to deep into our hypothesis, we shall take the example of the city Villeneuve d'Ascq, near Lille, in the north of France, where we enquired a few years ago. This city was created in the Seventy by the decision of the French government. Quite a lot of the inhabitants, and especially the seniors citizens, share some images and more or less mythical narrations of the history of the city, its identity. These images and narratives cross what we can read in local newspapers, and what we heard when enquiring the architects and politicians who created the city. But they also have quite a lot of specificities. Among those images and narratives, we shall tell about the mythical story of its birth, the link between people who came from all over the country and the well known friendly personality of the North's inhabitants, the enlistment of the "pioneers" in public life. Nowadays, we often hear that the town's identity can't be understood without paying close attention to these specificities.
Kaja Sirok (University of Nova Gorica)
Paper short abstract:
Monuments express and contain »interpretations of the past«. But not all memories are uniform and the past can be - as we are going to show - constructed, /vizualized/ and reconstructed in different ways.
Paper long abstract:
Can the past be visualized? How are contested pasts imprinted in border areas?
My presentation shows the politics and the consequences of the tensions and conflicts between individual and collective memories of the population in the border towns of Gorizia (It) and Nova Gorica (Slo). In particular, it aims to understand and analyze differences in construction and narration of (contested) memory and the politics of commemorations of new national festivities in border region - Il Giorno del ricordo and Dan priključitve Primorske.
The examples will focus on the dynamics of different interpretations of the past and employment of elements of identity building, as well as on the contested feelings of people in the border area. The members of the two groups decided to accept the »memory division«, even to the point of allowing different versions of events to become part of various forms of public memory - which in many cases implies forgetting certain events and emphasize others in order to legitimize one's identity in the border area.
The analysis of the contested border memories will be focused on the impact that long-standing historic processes, as well as recent developments and events have on the construction of the other in the region and on the processes of identity building in the border area. Particular attention will be given to the »visual memory« (monuments and its symbols, the denomination of the streets...), which contributes to the consolidation of the identity in its linkage to the territory.
Christos Varvantakis (Athens Ethnographic Film Festival)
Paper short abstract:
Romancing the future, imagining the past: The dismantlement of the Palast der Republik, and its monumental character, provides the ground for this paper to discuss imagination and the perception of historical time.
Paper long abstract:
The Palast der Republik was the parliament building of the former German Democratic Republic and an entertainment center for its folk. It is currently being dismantled in a lengthy procedure that will last for a period of three years. The extended present of the buildings removal comes in the center of this paper's interest, which intends to examine the ways in which the building becomes memory as it de-materializes. Throughout the presentation, the monumental characteristics of the dismantlement and it's physiognomy as a monument to temporality will be discussed.
Anne-Lise Middelthon (University of Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
Contemporary discourses of food and health links the illness and suffering of today to the eating and feeding of the past. When disaster strikes memories and images of the past’s incorporations are transformed into images of incorporating the disaster.
Paper long abstract:
In contemporary Western societies, food is instrumentalized so as to find its main function as a means to achieve health related goals. This process of pharmacologization links the illness and suffering of today to the eating and feeding of the (remotest) past, and the incorporations of today to the (potential) suffering and illness of the (farthest) future. Embedded in the discourse on health and food one finds statements like: "What is killing you now is what you ate - or did not eat - 30 years ago". "What makes you child suffer today is what you ate while being pregnant". When disaster strikes memories and images of the past's incorporations are transformed into images of incorporating the disaster. The paper will inquire into this process including its implications for sense of self or subjectivity. Semiotics in the Peircean tradition will inform the investigation. Emphasis will be on semiosis; the generation of interpretants including their retrospective alteration.
Alexander Korolkov (Konstfack)
Paper short abstract:
How do we construct the definition of the situation based on template matching schemes within our system? This paper examines the relationship between memory and imagination as mediators and facilitators for "present constructs".
Paper long abstract:
The past and the future change as we change our uses for them in the present. We notice objects depending on their usefulness for us at the current moment. Thus, it's interesting to explore how your current identity is expressed through what you notice and how complex dilemmas might occur if you have to operate in several clashing identities, simultaneously.
Memory brings the past into the present and imagination brings the future into the present. Thus, our performance at any point is tied to a previous experience due to the mental models that navigate us through "the perceived present". We usually rely on our previous experiences and categorization to assess contextual information we are faced with. This helps us to associate particular fragments of our identity with situational contexts by means of applying template-matching schemes developed through habituation.
One of the interesting processes related to "collaboration" between memory, identity and imagination is the following sequence. We are constructing present performances through abstracting some crucial elements from the current context, "filtering" them through the past mental models and recombining them to form the definition of the situation in advance (prior to its execution). Then, we control the conduct of the other through navigation of the output construction within the defined front stage and backstage.
Anne Kathrine Larsen (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Paper short abstract:
A number of historical plays are staged annually on selected (outdoor) sites in Norway, much through the efforts of local amateurs. Although historical in content, their message is contemporary and modern. These plays both retrieve and create memories, and it will be discussed why such dramatizations are so omnipresent today.
Paper long abstract:
During the last few decades there has been an enormous increase in locally based historical plays in Norway. These are staged by amateurs, although professionals may hold important positions both on and behind the stage. The dramas have their origin in actual or invented historical events located to the area, and the stage is carefully selected to create an aura of authenticity to the performance. The environment creates dramatic scenery as they are mostly staged outdoor, and the audience frequently have to make an effort to travel to the site of the performance.
Although these dramas claim to represent actual or typical historical events, their underlying message is contemporary and modern. They may be marketed as timeless and/or of current interest. As they are staged annually or biannually, they constitute a regular ritual performance in the community. At the same time, minor changes are allowed for from year to year, which are widely discussed and appraised by the audience and others.
This presentation will deal not only with how the past is preserved and expressed through these plays, but how they also become mediums for creating memories for the future. They are often part of annual village festivals where local identity is in focus, and it will be of pertinence to consider the wider dramas surrounding the actual plays. In conclusion, it will be discussed why historical plays and related kinds of acting out, such as dramatisations at cultural museums and even in churches, are so popular and omnipresent today.
Gabriella D'Agostino (University of Palermo)
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on some passages of life histories collected duryng my fieldwork in Asmara and Massaua and based on the ‘memory of Italy’, I study the representation of the past in order to reveal the shaping of the subjective experience by the 'colonial discourse' in Eritrea.
Paper long abstract:
Focusing on some passages of life histories collected in Asmara and based on the 'memory of Italy', I study the representation of the past in order to reveal the shaping of the subjective experience by the 'colonial discourse' in Eritrea. If the main aim of my essay is the understanding of the play of interactions between individuals and collectivity, one more important element I take into account is 'memory' seen as a "social selection of remembering" (Halbwachs). I try to connect the social position and narrative role of single members (of the Eritrean society) to the meaning it takes the 'going back to the past' for them as individuals belonging to a group (an Eritrean, a Mestizo, an Italian) in relation to the past and the present. The consequence is that the logic dominant/dominated is inadequate to explain the internal articulations of the colonial context and that the focus must be shifted on individual and collective systems of expectations and on the negotiations of meaning resulting from a "past always to be recovered" and a "present always to be rebuilt".
Catarina Pereira (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper is focused on how a collective memory is being conveyed and apprehended through things among Portuguese Muslims of Indian-Mozambican origin, currently living in Lisbon.
Paper long abstract:
How is a collective memory conveyed and apprehended through things? Can the past be re-lived and re-produced through material and sensorial memories? How do these material and sensorial memories provide new mnemonic repertories for the forthcoming generations to imagine their past and future? With these questions, I have been undertaking a Ph.D research among Portuguese Muslims with Indian-Mozambican background, currently living in Lisbon.
In this research, I have been considering the particular colonial and postcolonial past contexts, in which these people have lived in Mozambique, and their migration processes to Portugal from the 70's onwards. Moreover, I have also been taking into account 9/11 events in these people's identity strategies, and their muslimness constant redefinitions.
These overall processes have also been understood within the global setting landscape, where different objects and things - including mediascapes - circulate, and are available to be used and sensory apprehended, enabling users to connect to their past experiences, and to imagine new worlds (Appadurai 1998; Edwards et al. 2006; Wright 2004).
In this paper, I will be presenting preliminary data from my research, for which I have been carrying out a "sensuous ethnography of things" (Stoller 1989), both in public and private places. Furthermore, I have also been undertaking a family biographical research, based on individual in-depth interviews applied to six family households. Through these methodologies, I hope to be able to explore the inter-generational processes of transmitting embodied and sensory family memories, and its contradictions and tensions in the context of global modernity.
Maya Melzer-Geva (Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines adaptation processes of the stigmatized immigrant Georgian community to the Israeli society. The ethno-historical research reveals, through focusing on a public museum exhibition, the construction of a past of tolerance and fraternity as part of a dynamics of struggling for recognition and mutuality in the present.
Paper long abstract:
The Georgian immigration suffered since the 1970's from marginalization, mainly through a negative public image created in the media and in everyday communication. This paper focuses on an exhibition held in a recognized public museum, in which a particular version of the community's history and culture was selected, and other versions silenced, in order to influence public opinion and improve the community's image. The exhibition was initiated by the intellectual elite of the Georgian community. The past was employed to present a collective identity and negotiate marginalization and exclusion, dent into the mainstream cultural monolithic center and promote mutual legitimation. The performance of the past was constructed according to interests at the present, and hopes and aspirations of an imagined future. Intra-communal processes of inquiring identity by memorizing vis-à-vis the exhibits is viewed as part of the dynamics. The exhibition served in the research as a micro-cultural symbolic arena for examining the actual interactions in the wider context, as well as a macro-cultural event while it was taking place and on a historic continuum of inter-cultural dynamics. I examine the unofficial motto of the exhibition: "There's no anti-Semitism in Georgia" - it's presented reasons and manifestations - as explained during and after the exhibition. The analysis will relate to overt and covert messages meant to design a "unique" profile: expressing a wish to belong and be respected by commemorating relations of amity in the past, and emphasizing European cultural influence in order to create a "non-Asiatic" identity.
Paolo S. H. Favero (University of Antwerp)
Paper short abstract:
The paper addresses questons of myth, historical memory, nationhood and imagination in contemporary Italian public culture by referring back to one of Italian funding folk myth, i.e. the one of "Italians good people".
Paper long abstract:
In the past 15 years Italy has 'discovered' itself to be a country of immigration. Parallel to this it has also become an allied in the America-led "war against terror". I suggest that it is in the conjunction of these two major phenomena that Italy has, in the recent few years, sought a way to (re)formulate, and put forth with strenght, a sense of nationhood, one that has historically never fully been accomplished, but that is now widely supported by the 'mundane' field of popular culture (i.e. in popular televisions shows, football events, etc.).
Based on fieldwork among (mostly South Asian) migrant artists in Rome and taking off from the analysis of one of the most prototypical Italian national myth, i.e. the one of "Italians good people" (i.e. the historically resilient myth of Italians as a good charitable people) this paper aims at critically addressing the way in which a new sense of nationhood is being produced in contemporary Italian public culture in an interplay of memory, imagination, history and entertainment.
Marzia Varutti (University of Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I argue that museums in China are actively participating in a process of nation-building aimed at inscribing minorities in the framework of the Chinese nation through the selection of ethnic minorities' memories and features of identity.
Paper long abstract:
Through an exploration of the museum representation of ethnic minorities in museums in Kunming, Yunnan Province of China, I hold that museums are actively participating in a process of memory and identity engineering as, through images and narratives, museums support collective imagination about ethnic minorities' identities and past.
I take as a departing point of my reflection the assumption that the modalities of representation of ethnic minorities in public museums are revelatory of the agency of the Chinese government in manufacturing the image of ethnic minorities - an image that is made to resonate on collective metamemories.
Drawing from the comparative analysis of displays of ethnic minorities material culture in the museums of Kunming, I will show how the identities of ethnic minorities are conveyed through a selective process of i) remembering and emphasizing specific cultural elements, ii) forgetting other elements, and lastly, iii) modifying the perception of their relation to the Han majority. I develop these three points drawing from direct observations, and theoretically building upon critical approaches to the museum representation of the cultural Other in China.
I argue that museum representational practices of ethnic minorities' identities and past reveal the ambivalence of a process of nation-building that, given the ideological crisis of the Communist régime, relies on the manufacturing of collective memories and identities to fuel a sense of belonging to the Chinese nation and support a vision of its future that ultimately appears crucial to its very permanence.
Virginie Vinel (University Franche-Comté)
Paper short abstract:
La communication montre comment la mémoire du point du vue féminin contribue à complexifier l’imaginaire de la sidérurgie lorraine. Les femmes de cette vallée reconstruisent une mémoire multiple, celle d'un quotidien difficile, de leurs activités peu reconnues, mais aussi une mémoire qui rencontre l'histoire de la seconde guerre mondiale et de l'émigration.
Paper long abstract:
La communication rend compte d'une recherche réalisée auprès d'une quarantaine de femmes, âgées de 50 à 80 ans, résidant dans une vallée sidérurgique en déclin en Lorraine (France). Suscitée lors de récits de vie, reconstruite dans le temps de la recherche, la mémoire de ces femmes reflète une image multiple d'un univers vu jusqu'à présent sous l'angle de l'ouvrier du haut-fourneau. Ces femmes rapportent les souvenirs des tâches quotidiennes, longues et rudes jusqu'en 1960. Elles parlent aussi des activités associatives qu'elles ont contribué à créer. Elles relatent les emplois qu'elles ont occupés, souvent disqualifiés et oblitérés par l'omniprésence de l'image de l'ouvrier sidérurgique. Leur mémoire tisse les fils de l'histoire, celle de la seconde guerre mondiale qui a obligé certaines à fuir leur pays, d'autres à stopper leur scolarité ; elles rapportent aussi les temps et vécus de l'émigration que beaucoup d'entre elles ont expérimentée. Cette mémoire du point du vue féminin contribue donc à complexifier l'imaginaire de la Lorraine sidérurgique. Elle reflète l'hétérogénéité de l'identité de cette région, construite sur des vagues de migrations, déchirée par les guerres, mais aussi élaborée différemment que l'on soit homme ou femme.