The cultural biography of a Western Australian war memorial

In common with other western countries, there is resurgence in war commemoration in Australia indicating a serious pursuit of identity and a national story on a collective and personal level. A widespread academic and popular interest in war memory and material culture such as war memorials has emerged. War memorials often find their way on to heritage registers. This paper advances cultural biography as an approach to determine the significance of war memorials arguing that this may give a deeper understanding of its community meaning than present methods. Emerging in archaeology cultural biography considers the way that social interactions between people and objects over time create meaning. Using the Katanning war memorial statue in Western Australia as a case study, this paper argues that a cultural biographical approach may uncover a deeper cultural significance resulting from a focus on relationships than from the traditional focus on the memorial as object.     

War Dead and the Restoration of Military Cemeteries in Eastern Europe

This article examines the rebuilding of World War II cemeteries and mass graves. It compares the cult of the war dead in Germany, Romania and Russia and analyses examples of restorations of war cemeteries by these countries in Moldova. This reveals how the former war allies and adversaries now collaborate, as well as their attempts to overcome the political and ideological divides of recent decades through the reburial and remembrance of the war dead. The search for the war dead occurred at a time when each of these countries was “coming to terms” with its recent totalitarian past and, at the same time, was looking for recognition in a new international context. The convergence of the private and the political in the remembrance of the dead led at times to reconciliatory discourses and at others to a restatement of the “sacredness” of the past or of exclusivist national ideals.     

战争纪念馆游客旅游动机对体验的影响研究——以南京大屠杀纪念馆为例

本文设计了“学习及好奇”、“责任与义务”、“社会因素”、“个人情感体验”、“教育体验”5个潜变量,构建了战争纪念馆游客旅游动机对体验影响的结构关系模型,并以国家4A级旅游区南京大屠杀纪念馆为例,探讨了此类旅游动机对体验的作用机理。研究结果表明：（1）“责任与义务”是游客访问战争纪念馆的主要动机,也是与传统旅游的根本区别之一,与“个人情感体验”及“教育体验”有较高的路径系数（0．97,0．48）;（2）被动地参观战争纪念馆不利于游客体验的提高,从市场营销角度看,应该强调游客积极主动的参与,强调游客“责任与义务”方面的动机;（3）游客参观南京大屠杀纪念馆几乎没有对死亡感兴趣的动机,因此战争纪念馆旅游不完全属于黑色旅游研究范畴;（4）旅游动机及体验是区分特殊兴趣旅游的主要标志,未来需从特殊兴趣旅游（如战争纪念馆旅游）角度进一步探索旅游体验的本质。     

Historicizing the present: Brussels attacks and heritagization of spontaneous memorials

This research article traces the process of transition from spontaneous to ‘official’ memorialisation of the 2016 Brussels terrorist attack by questioning which factors trigger the heritagization process of spontaneous memorials and their contents. With a view to critically assess the significance of heritage values in relation to terrorism, this article scrutinises how these values are grasped, narrated and articulated by the local authorities, government and archival institutions in the preservation, conservation and heritagization of spontaneous memorials. There is an emphasis on the two facets of heritagization: how meanings attached to a memorial and its objects are created and expressed by the community of bereavement, and how the transformation of places, practices, objects into diverse forms of ‘heritage’ evolves. This article brings a new perspective on the heritagization of spontaneous memorials, seen as important in determining how a traumatic event such is a terrorist attack will settle in the collective memory on the long term, by becoming historicized.     

South African War (1899–1902) Memorials in Britain: A Case Study of Memorialization in London and Kent

Abstract

Mass public commemoration of war dead is often held to be a twentieth-century phenomenon, with its genesis in the Great War. This article argues for a pre-history occasioned by commemoration of the South African War (1899–1902) that built on shifts in the form and function of war memorials that had begun in the middle of the nineteenth century.     

Shrine diplomacy: Turkey’s quest for a post-Kemalist identity

ABSTRACT

Shrines are many things to different people: war memorials, places of pilgrimage and even venues for shared festivities. The Sultan Murad shrine complex in Kosovo was raised to commemorate the strategic Ottoman victory at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. Over the past decade, however, it has assumed significance for Turkey as at no other time in the Republic’s history. Not only is it a key part of state visit itineraries, it also hosts dignitaries of various kinds, tourists and even schoolchildren from Turkey. Taking inspiration from historical and anthropological studies on shrines and memory, this paper dissects the significance of the Sultan Murad I shrine complex in Kosovo to contemporary Turkish foreign policy imaginaries. The shrine allows us to explore the wider motifs and symbols used in presenting the state’s attachment to physical spaces outside of its borders.     

Memorial gardens as dramaturgical space

Abstract

Since the end of the First World War British and Allied military cemeteries and memorial sites have been designed within a carefully controlled Imperial aesthetic. The emotional and historical capital of these sites has made objective judgement difficult; the burden of martial memory has made innovation in design almost impossible. This paper examines how the Dominion forces – notably Canada – achieved a distinct nationalism in their war memorials after the Great War. By focussing on two recent Canadian memorial sites – in London and France – the paper speculates on the ways in which artistic and military precedent informs the construction of monuments of conflict. The study concludes by looking at the recent public enthusiasm for floral and other temporary memorials which have challenged the rhetoric of official mourning.     

Landscapes of triumphalism,reconciliation, and reclamation: memorializing the aftermath of the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862

The Dakota-U.S. War of 1862 resulted in the largest mass public execution in U.S. history and the forced exile of Dakota people from their homeland. Drawing on work on memorials and commemoration in cultural geography, we explore how events in the immediate aftermath of the conflict have been remembered and marked in the landscape of southern and central Minnesota. Through three case-studies we show how various material practices and discourses of remembrance have emerged in different communities at different times and on different scales. While markers and statuary commemorating Taoyateduta (Chief Little Crow) in the town of Hutchinson represent a triumphalist discourse, memorials at the site of the mass public hanging of 38 Dakota warriors in Mankato have sought reconciliation and mutual forgiveness between European Americans and Dakota people. Unlike these permanent site-specific memorials, the biennial Dakota Commemorative March physically retraces the 150-mile forced march of Dakota women, children, and elders in 1862 and involves the ceremonial placing of wooden markers at every mile along the route—a large-scale commemorative practice that goes beyond reconciliation to promote the formulation of a collective “counter-memory”, reclaim Dakota culture, and decolonize their traditional and sacred homeland.     

‘Making Change’ in the memorial landscape to the Dakota–US War of 1862: remembrance,healing and justice through affective participation in the Dakota Commemorative March (DCM)

The Dakota–US War of 1862 led to the removal and exile of Dakota people from their ancestral homeland. Integral to this process was the forced march of 1,700 women, children and elders from the Lower Sioux Agency to Fort Snelling, Minnesota. Despite the siting of numerous memorials related to the war and its aftermath, few mark the forced march and its legacies. Since 2002, however, the seven-day Dakota Commemorative March (DCM) has been held biennially to remember and honour Dakota ancestors on the original forced march. Following a brief overview of extant place-based memorials at sites along its path, we draw on documentary sources to explore the significance of the DCM as a distinctive Dakota intervention in the commemorative landscape. Through a process we call ‘affective participation’ – an intense bodily, emotive and transformative engagement in an event – participants on the DCM not only seek to remember but also strive towards healing and justice in the present and the future. Our hope is to expand the focus of current geographical work on discrete site-based memorials to consider the social- and cultural-geographical significance of alternative (particularly Native) forms and scales of commemoration.     

Awake anon the tales of valour: the career of a war memorial in St. Catharines,Ontario

Memorials cultivate a common understanding of the past that is communicated through the celebration of select people, places or events. Because memorials are located in public space and crafted from time‐defeating materials, the process of commemoration is inherently political. Scholars have studied this process to discover the agendas that inform the ideological content of memorials, but rarely how this content is received by its audience. This question is especially pertinent when memorials outlast the generation and the ideology that created them. This study attempts an answer by exploring the career of one memorial: the monument in St. Catharines, Ontario, dedicated to Private Alexander Watson, a casualty of the Battle of Batoche (1885). It finds that the monument's significance was transformed by political, cultural and historiographical shifts. While its local audience has forgotten its specific message, its generic intent to honour fallen soldiers is still recognized.     

Speaking for the dead: the memorial politics of genocide in Namibia and Germany

This paper discusses the politics of the material commemoration of mass crime, with a focus on the Ovaherero and Nama descendants of the victims of a 1904–1908 mass ethnic killing in German Southwest Africa. My approach to monuments emphasises their place as artefacts that mark changes of regime after war or revolution, and as focal points of resistance to state regimes of commemoration. Tracing the material forms of memorialisation in Germany reveals the significance of both a ‘remembrance culture’ of the Holocaust and, at the same time, resistance to recognition of the Ovaherero/Nama genocide. In Namibia, the success of the Ovaherero/Nama activist campaign in Germany prompted the government to shift positions and take up the cause of genocide remembrance, asking Germany to officially recognise that its actions constituted genocide, to issue a formal apology and to pay reparations. By framing the mass violence of imperial Germany in terms of its enduring legacy in heritage, Ovaherero and Nama activists and their supporters were able to cross into different geographies of commemoration and bring distant wrongs, without living witnesses, into the present.     

Gender,race, militarism and remembrance: the everyday geopolitics of the poppy

This article offers a feminist analysis of how British military violence and war are, in part, made possible through everyday embodied and emotional practices of remembrance and forgetting. Focusing on recent iterations of the Royal British Legion’s Annual Poppy Appeal, I explore how the emotionality, and gendered and racial politics of collective mourning provide opportunities for the emergence of ‘communities of feeling’, through which differently gendered and racialised individuals can find their ‘place’ in the national story. I aim to show that in relying on such gendered and racial logics of emotion, the Poppy Appeal invites communities of feeling to remember military sacrifice, whilst forgetting the violence and bloodiness of actual warfare. In so doing, the poppy serves to reinstitute war as an activity in which masculinised, muscular ‘protectors’ necessarily make sacrifices for the feminised ‘protected’. The poppy is thus not only a site for examining the everyday politics of contemporary collective mourning, but its emotional, gendered and racialised foundations and how these work together to animate the geopolitics of war.     

The Reformed Elect: Wealth, Death, and Sanctity in Gloucestershire, 1550–1640

The cleansing of the parish space in the sixteenth century provided opportunities for the laity to state the case for their own sanctity within the spaces formerly occupied by the didactic imagery of the Elect. Pietistic superiority in death, rendered in stone with reference to a popular ideal set forth in the Ars Moriendi elevated the moneyed over the living congregation. This paper compares the emphases of memorials in Gloucestershire, England, with that of selected Ars Moriendi texts in order to comprehend how wealthy patrons farmed themselves as a novel focus for popular adoration and what they hoped to achieve by doing so.     

Nationalism and war commemoration – a Latin American exceptionalism?

Recent scholarship on collective memory and nationalism in Latin America argues that – in sharp contrast to Europe – war commemoration has been of little importance to the memory work of states in the region. The article challenges this claim. A comparative‐historical analysis of school textbooks and school ceremonies in twentieth‐century Mexico, Argentina and Peru reveals that the commemoration of major civil and international wars was central to official national narratives in these countries. The article further identifies important qualitative changes in war commemoration over time, especially with respect to how commemorative discourses portrayed agency and assigned responsibility for military victories and losses. These changes are situated within broader transformations of nationalism and new alignments in the politics of nationhood and memory.     

Was bedeutet “Entschuldigung”? Die Überlebenden medizinischer NS‐Verbrechen und die Max‐Planck‐Gesellschaft

The Meaning of “Apology”: The Survivors of Nazi Medical Crimes and the Max Planck Society. Around the turn of the twenty‐first century a new practice in international politics became established: representatives of political, economic and religious organisations apologised for the historical and political crimes of their own collectives, addressing the victims or the victims' descendants. At a public event in Juni 2001, a formal apology of this kind was made by the president of the Max Planck Society (MPS), who had previously launched an extensive programme of research into the National Socialist history of what was then the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. The majority of the eight invited survivors of human experimentation in Nazi concentration camps refused forgiveness. Instead, they called for the MPS not to content itself with historical research and analysis, but to ensure the continued remembrance of the victims and their suffering. Starting from this 2001 ritual of repentance, the paper examines the participants' diverse views of how to deal with the medical crimes of National Socialism, and asks about possibilities of going beyond historical retrospection to fulfil the imperative of remembrance.     

New light; friendly soil: affective–discursive dimensions of Anzac Day commemorations in Aotearoa New Zealand

This paper investigates affective–discursive dimensions of nation‐building via commemorations of nationhood within Aotearoa New Zealand to ask about how these assemblages construct feeling trajectories for citizen participants. We report auto‐ethnographic analyses of participation in specific Anzac Day war remembrance events that occurred in the capital city Wellington. Analyses point to the ways in which engagement in the choreographies of commemoration constructs varied emotion‐laden subject positions for participants and how these psycho‐social differences index and evoke contrasting memorial politics. We conclude that while the differences in affective ambience at different events may prompt citizens towards nationalistic or more conciliatory identity politics, the ceremonies create space for participants to feel and enact diverse affective practices.     

Affamer les prisonniers de guerre: entre mythes et réalités, 1914–54

Since the end of the nineteenth century, prisoners of war must be taken in care by their guardians, in terms of food. Sometimes this food is not good enough and leads to cases of starvation. Considering ideological conditions as well as material and chronological evolutions, this paper tries to explain how the prisoners are very often hostages in hands of their guards and how starvation can be an ideological tool.     

The Nation as a Community Born of War? Symbolic Strategies and Popular Reception of Public Statues in Late Nineteenth-Century Western European Capitals

The genesis and development of Western European nationalism is widely connected to the notion of the nation as emerged from war. This paper focuses on that cultural combination in terms of the symbols and programmatic rhetoric employed in commemorative rituals surrounding public statues—mainly in honour of military personnel—in late nineteenth-century Paris, London and Berlin. As the experience of a total war lay still ahead, the national heroes elevated on plinths besides existing war memorials were not intended to express personal mourning or to manage bereavement. They were erected as morally charged expressions of specific national ideals. Based on a sample of some twenty public statues in Paris, London and Berlin, this paper identifies three strategies of intentional manipulation: compensating for military defeat by alternative interpretive patterns in France, overwriting the competing claims of different conceptions of nationhood in Prussia-Germany, and legitimising the nation-state on an imperial scale in Britain. Comparison of these three cases substantiates the claim that there were three ‘special paths’ for legitimising the nation through war, each dependent on historical contingencies (such as the trauma of defeat or experiences of victory). In all three cases, however, the experience of war served as a means of justifying national claims to power while omitting all reference to the inner make-up of each nation. At the same time, adequate historical assessment of metropolitan public statuary requires that public reception as well as official symbolism and rhetoric be taken into account. Responses to the statues indicate that the widespread popular appeal of national war myths was far from automatically achieved. Instead of fostering cohesion, the reception of cult figures occasionally came up against political controversies that served as factors limiting national propaganda.     

Early Christian Grave Monuments and Ecclesiastical Developments in 11th-Century Sweden

THE EMERGENCE of churchyards is one of the most significant transformations of the landscape during the conversion to Christianity. This article examines changes in burial and commemorative practices during the 11th century, based on early Christian grave monuments. These are the first examples of churchyard memorials in central Sweden, yet at the same time they also form an integral part of the late Viking-Age runestone tradition. This article presents an analysis of their temporal, regional and contextual backgrounds, tracing developments in the early ecclesiastical landscape. It is concluded that different regional designs of rune-carved funerary monuments are related to substantial differences in the Christianisation process, reflecting variation in early ecclesiastical organisation and providing insight into how the conversion process was related to social and political structures.