‘I Saw a Nightmare . . .’: Violence and the Construction of Memory (Soweto,June 16, 1976)

The protests on June 16, 1976 of black schoolchildren in Soweto against the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in their schools precipitated one of the most pro‐found challenges to the South African apartheid state. These events were experienced in a context of violent social and political conflict. They were almost immediately drawn into a discourse that discredited and silenced them, manipulating meaning for ideological and political reasons with little regard for how language and its absence—silences—further violated those who had experienced the events. Violence, in its physical and discursive shape, forged individual memories that remain torn with pain, anger, distrust, and open questions; collective memories that left few spaces for ambiguity; and official or public histories tarnished by their political agendas or the very structures—and sources—that produced them. Based on oral histories and historical documents, this article discusses the collusion of violence and silence and its consequences. It argues that—while the collusion between violence and silence might appear to disrupt or, worse, destroy the ability of individuals to think historically—the individual historical actor can and does have the will to contest and engage with collective memory and official history.     

Autoconstruction 2.0: Social Media Contestations of Racialized Violence in Complexo do Alemão

Activists and journalists in Complexo do Alemão, Rio de Janeiro are using social media to intervene in the violence that shapes their communities. In this article I draw on critical urban and digital media theory to understand how militarized policing, the spatialization of race, and discourses of criminalization influence favela populations. I examine how these discursive and material violences are motivating residents to autoconstruct new digital communities. Through digital autoconstruction, journalists and activists are using social media technologies to safely direct mobility, to witness police violence, and to unsettle socio‐spatial imaginaries of endemic crime. As such, they are deploying digital practices to disrupt material, epistemological, and discursive mechanisms of social control. These actions show that digital technologies are always‐already embodied and take shape through material histories, such as those of racialized state violence. Journalists and activists in Complexo do Alemão ultimately demonstrate that targets of violence are not simply victims of digital and violent surveillance, but are active in creating new digital relationships of care across diverse scales, transforming these technologies in the process.     

Recovering social memories from the past: the 1884 novel Ramona and tourist practices in turn‐of‐the‐century southern California

Scholars studying social memory have identified a priority for future work: using the study of documented social memories to understand constructions of the past and social identities in the present. Recovering such lived, individual engagements with social memory is challenging when those engaging the memory are deceased, yet that is what this article attempts to do: Through fine‐grained study of archival traces, I explore the lived practices of tourists in an attempt to understand how the immensely popular 1884 novel Ramona changed the way people thought about southern California's past, creating a new, Ramona‐inspired social memory for the region. In so doing I suggest that those interested in recovering social memories (like these) from the past use such detailed analysis, paying close attention to even the tiniest of details.     

Building Bridges of Memory: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Cultural Politics of Maternal Memories

In this article, I explore the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo as a site through which social memories are transmitted and connected to the realities of Argentina’s present. The conjuncture or disjuncture between people’s direct and individual memories of the past, their memory of the society’s collective past, and the “official” history can be used as a prism for seeing how power, and resistance, work through and reinforce a complex political economy. By giving testimony and re‐contextualizing the events of the dictatorship, the Mothers have been able to challenge the historical narratives of the state and construct competing ones. Furthermore, the present‐day activism and goals of the Mothers, as individuals and as a collective, are based on political commitments that have arisen in great part out of maternal relationships and maternal memories. Their maternal memories have led to a re‐signification of neoliberalism as a type of structural violence.     

Remembrance of Things Passed: Memory,Body and the Politics of Feasting in New Ireland,Papua New Guinea1

This paper explores the connection between body and memory for the people of the Lelet Plateau of central New Ireland. Through an examination of the processes by which memories of mortuary feasts are created and circulated, I draw attention to the embodied nature of memory as a central facet in the politics of feasting. The approach taken here differs from other prevailing approaches to the body and memory in its exploration of the ways in which memories are created through and within the body, rather than seeing the body, or things representing the body, as signs that are utilised for remembering. In particular, I examine the forms of sorcery which target the participants' bodies, making them experience diarrhoea as a mnemonic process. It is through this that a significant memory of the feast is created, one which stands out notably from numerous other memories, and is the means by which remembrance of the event is transformed into fame for the host.     

Promise and challenge of European Memory

Abstract

This introduction identifies the ubiquitous, but controversial, public and academic debate on European Memory as a key for articulating assumptions and expectations about an enhanced process of European integration via references to Europe’s past. The authors outline contradictions that constitute this discourse by pointing to its inherently conflictive potential and carve out the implicit and explicit normative assumptions of European Memory. Albeit acknowledging differences in memories of twentieth-century mass violence, references to European Memory promise to overcome the conflicts inherent in the historical experiences of such violence. Confronting this bias, this special issue postulates an understanding of European Memory as a discursive reality rather than a normative ideal. European Memory becomes manifest whenever actors refer to ‘Europe’ in their interpretations of the past. Further developing an understanding of ‘entangled memory’, the contributions of this special issue share a common interest in the universalizing potential of references to European Memory. They demonstrate how mnemonic practices may lose contextual references and link or even transfer to other memories in order to articulate claims of relevance on a European level.     

Destruction,mitigation, and reconciliation of cultural heritage

Attacks on built cultural heritage often occur during times of armed conflict. Many such acts are not collateral damage, but rather are deliberate and ideologically driven assaults intended to eradicate the adversary’s identity and collective memory. They represent ‘urbicide’ and ‘identicide’. The victims typically attempt to mitigate the loss, frequently by reconstructing the lost historic place and thereby restoring tangible evidence of their identity. Reconstruction, however, is itself an ideological act and a destructive activity, since it erases memories of the violence and removes physical evidence. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation has commemorated several cultural heritage sites that have been destroyed and subsequently reconstructed, by inscribing them on the World Heritage List. Although this ensures the perpetuation of their memory, it may distort the original purpose of the list as a celebration of ‘outstanding universal value’. Beyond commemoration, a desired outcome is reconciliation. True reconciliation requires the release of anger and pain, so that memories of the violence may be retained without a desire for retribution. This article looks at a selection of acts intended at destroying cultural heritage, including some that did not occur during war, and examines means and motives for achieving mitigation and reconciliation.     

Mayan Cognition,Memory and Trauma

The argument of this article is organized around the following general themes: understanding representational “exaggeration” for signifying indigenous others; assessing the differences for the social agency of recollection, especially in relation to lawyer‐oriented depositions and researcher‐oriented interviews; analysing the cognitive aspects of surviving the Guatemalan genocide and examining the cognition of discrimination among Mayan‐immigrants in South Florida. Empirical data for this essay is based upon oral histories of three Mayan‐immigrants currently living in Palm Beach County, Florida, and archival data from legal depositions in the 1980s and 1990s of five Mayan‐immigrants in Martin County, Florida. Important aspects of this paper analyse the historical consequences of the Guatemalan Civil War during the 1980s and the role of social memory, episodic trauma, semantic trauma and the ontological effects of violence. In addition, notions of differing forms of time in relation to trauma are introduced as “synchronic trauma” and “diachronic trauma”.     

Memory,Trauma, and the French-Algerian War: Michael Haneke's Caché (2005)

This article examines Michael Haneke's 2005 film Caché and its treatment of the October 1961 massacre in light of recent scholarship about memory and trauma. It argues that the film demands of its viewers a complex, critical position, requiring us not merely to passively re-witness the traumatising events of 17 October, but to take on as spectators a more active role in the work of remembering. The article examines narrative and visual elements in the film in order to demonstrate how Caché illustrates and questions how film and other media forms contribute to the working through of collective trauma and, in so doing, function as potential ‘sites of memory’.     

Memory and Non-Place: Visual Testimonies of Japanese American Internment During World War II

This article addresses the little-known history of Japanese Latin American internment during WWII. Classified as ‘illegal aliens’ and ‘enemy aliens’, 2,264 Japanese Latin Americans were stripped of citizenship from their home countries, denied rights in the United States, and ultimately deprived reconciliation due to their undocumented status. Using the traces of this history as a case study, I explore the strategic memories Japanese Latin Americans create about non-place – spaces of statelessness or states of exception – that allow them to make claims about state violence committed against them under these conditions, and, second, argue that demands for justice against political violence entail not only bringing light to erased histories but also developing engaged acts of reception that account for survivors’ claims to the memories of non-place. Visual testimonies, such as the Denshō Digital Archive and the short documentary Hidden Internment: The Art Shibayama Story (2004), affectively connect a viewer/listener to the memory of trauma, to an inexpressible haunting, and thus are critical platforms for creating a collective memory between survivors and the digital generation of postmemory.     

Memory and the everyday landscape of violence in post-genocide Cambodia

This paper addresses the politics of memory in post-genocide Cambodia. Since 1979 genocide has been selectively memorialized in the country, with two sites receiving official commemoration: the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide Crimes and the killing fields at Choeung Ek. However, the Cambodian genocide was not limited to these two sites. Through a case study of two unmarked sites—the Sre Lieu mass grave at Koh Sla Dam and the Kampong Chhnang Airfield—we highlight the salience, and significance, of taking seriously those sites of violence that have not received official commemoration. We argue that the history of Cambodia's genocide, as well as attempts to promote transitional justice, must remain cognizant of how memories and memorials become political resources. In particular, we contend that a focus on the unremarked sites of past violence provides critical insight into our contemporary understandings of the politics of remembering and of forgetting.     

Remember and never forget

In this article we try to analyse the relationship constructed between the memories of individuals and collective memory. This analysis is based on the confrontation of two types of sources: on the one hand the Yisker‐biher or “books of memories”; devoted to several hundred Jewish communities of the Diaspora (mostly in Poland), and on the other, autobiographies of Jews, both written (selected among the many published in the last ten years) and oral. Both kinds of texts are part of a literature of memorial and of mourning which makes use of analogous procedures and themes. Despite the diveristy and the irreducible uniqueness of each lived experience, the individual accounts all recount basically, the same trials: uprooting, migration, persecution, exile and impossibility of mourning. The authors of the autobiographies, in their role as spokespeople for others, who are no longer alive to bear witness, contribute not only to transmit individual memories, but also to reconstitute a collective memory. Inversely, collective memory takes its substance from individual memories, and bases its rhythm and movement upon them. These exchanges, in the form of chiasmes, creates a memory which is both unified and multiple, where individual memories reproduce general categories which subsume them and give them meaning.     

Collective Remembering in Archaeology: a Relational Approach to Ancient Maya Memory

Drawing on a case study from the Maya site of Actuncan, Belize, this article presents collective remembering as a way to conceptualize the relational construction of memory by ancient societies. Emphasizing the process of remembering allows archaeologists to investigate how memory divides as well as unites. Over time, the interactions between humans and between humans and their landscape that take place as part of everyday life produce memories of the past that are inaccurate and inconsistent between individuals. In particular, people who interact frequently, either due to geographic proximity or similarity in socioeconomic status, tend to form mnemonic communities—communities based on a similar understanding of the past—that may serve as identity markers differentiating them from other groups. At Actuncan, the community’s past was collectively remembered across times of prosperity and subjugation. First, the site was a Late and Terminal Preclassic seat of an early divine king who built a monumental ceremonial center. Second, when the site was subjugated during the Early and Late Classic periods, the ceremonial center fell out of use, but the site’s commoner households remained continuously occupied. Finally, in the Terminal Classic period, the site’s residents reestablished Actuncan as a local seat of authority following the Classic Maya collapse. The community’s use of the Preclassic monumental core during the Terminal Classic period indicates that the memory of the site’s Preclassic apogee served to legitimize their Terminal Classic authority. However, the Preclassic past was remembered in a manner consistent with contemporaneous cultural forms and the site’s recent past of subjugation.     

Violent place-making: How Kenya's post-election violence transforms a workers' settlement at Lake Naivasha

Violent events significantly influence the identity of places. Post-conflict areas evoke specific meanings and emotions, and the narratives of violent events have profound effects on the individual and collective interpretations of the venues of violence. This paper addresses the interdependent relationship between violence and place, considering the structural and multi-scalar conditions of a relational and discursive making of places. By linking them with an empirically grounded analysis of the materialisation of violence, we follow Gearóid Ó Tuathail's (2010) call for a more grounded study of place-specific causes for violent conflict. We focus on an empirical example – the post-election violence in Kenya 2007/08 – and look into one of its venues, a poor and heterogeneous workers' settlement at Lake Naivasha in Kenya's Rift Valley. Considering the specific socio-political setting in Kenya, we first examine the factors that explain why the violence broke out at that place in particular. We combine an exploration of the structural conditions that determined the violence, and which still regulate social life at present, with a presentation of the individual accounts of people directly or indirectly involved in the violence in Naivasha. We then investigate how the experience of violence has influenced the imaginations of the place, and whether these localised imprints of violence in Naivasha continue to regulate social and spatial (re)organisation after the events themselves. The study reveals that politically instigated societal divides continue to exist, and that memories of the violence induce intensified processes of segregation in the surveyed settlement during times of political uncertainty.     

Politics and social violence in developing democracies: Theory and evidence from Brazil

How do the political institutional features of developing democracies influence how violence occurs? Building on research showing that ‘hybrid democracies’ are more prone to social violence, this article argues that elite competition for power in the context of limited institutional oversight plays an important role in explaining violence. The framework here presents possible mechanisms linking subnational political dynamics and rates of social violence in poorly institutionalised contexts. It highlights how political competition, concentrated political power, and constraints on cooperation can create opportunity structures where violence is incentivised and the rule of law is undermined. This is examined empirically using sub-national homicide data from over 5000 Brazilian municipalities between 1997 and 2010. Findings suggest violence is greater in contexts that are highly competitive – where political actors face credible challenges and have a more tenuous grip on power – and those where power is highly concentrated – where political actors have held power for longer periods or face limited credible challenges. Findings also suggest violence varies depending on whether interactions between state and municipal government are likely to be constrained or cooperative; and are consistent with literatures emphasising the importance of structural explanations of social violence. In light of on-going democratic transitions across the globe, the article highlights the value of understanding links between institutional context, contentious politics and social violence.     

Trajectories of Memory: Documentary Film and the Transmission of Testimony

The author argues that in the burgeoning new literature about social memory anthropologists have not yet contributed all that they might. In particular, little has been written from an anthropological point of view about memory and film. The article seeks to examine the possible roles of documentary film in memory transmission. During the twentieth century, film and video became increasingly important vehicles of memory, while the digital revolution has made video such a pervasive medium in the new century that it will become more and more vital as a source of historical evidence and reflection. While the evidence presented by visually recorded interviews certainly requires critical evaluation, there is no reason to suppose that recorded interviews are any less reliable than texts; they may in fact offer clues that a text cannot. Some of the most interesting films of memory are the work of independent filmmakers engaged in a courageous personal quest to break officially imposed silences. The article examines the potential of film to preserve memories as trace—that is, as a form of historical evidence; as event—testifying itself being a performative act which generates its own meanings and demands a dialogical engagement with/by an audience; and as trajectory—for individual memories must be transmitted in order to become social. As they are launched into the flow of collective memory, they have a chance to endure over time, multiplying available perspectives on the past. Films of memory are thus part of the struggle against the forgetting of past injustices, and ultimately have the potential to contribute to shifts in our interpretations of history.     

Building Bundles,Building Memories: Processes of Remembering in Adena-Hopewell Societies of Eastern North America

Over the past 20 years, archaeologists have grown increasingly interested in exploring the relationships between humans and things. In part, this focus on materiality has been fueled by the integration of modern philosophical perspectives and considerations of non-Western ontologies and the New Materialisms. In North America, much emphasis has been placed on exploring the relational aspects of American Indian ontologies in the past and present. In this article, I build upon these perspectives by integrating memory as an important infrastructure through which these relationships are cast and maintained. I refer to these memory-based practices as processes of remembering. I argue that identifying these discursive memory processes provides an opportunity to refine how we understand objects like bundles and the social process of bundling—one way archaeologists have framed complex human/thing relationships. I use an Adena-Hopewell burial mound from the Middle Woodland period in Eastern North America (ca. 200 BCE–CE 500) as a case study to illustrate how societies during this era were, at least in part, organized and sustained through the rituals involved in revising bundles of ancestors, objects, and memories of human action. I argue that bundling assemblages of the past managed social dissonance by stabilizing or transforming perceptions of kinship in social coalitions.     

Calling 911: intimate partner violence and responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era

For most of United States’ history, the state did not intervene in violence perpetrated within the home or intimate relationships. Women experiencing intimate partner violence had little recourse from state institutions for security or legal justice. This article’s inquiry centers on two policing practices – preferred arrest and evidence-based prosecution – that emerged in the 1980s to redress the state’s long history of ignoring intimate partner violence. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how these two policing practices affect the experience of citizenship for intimate partner violence survivors by showing how the state creates a distinction between ‘cooperative’ victims who support the arrest and incarceration of their abusers and ‘uncooperative’ who do not. To develop this argument, I conceptualize the policing and prosecution response to intimate partner violence as a social contract of rights and responsibilities that mediates the relationship between the state and women who experience intimate partner violence. By illustrating how the state discursively constructs ‘uncooperative’ victims as irrational, this article utilizes a feminist geographic analytic to examine the everyday discursive and material technologies that the state employs to reregulate responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era.     

Addressing structural violence through US reconciliation commissions: The case study of Greensboro,NC and Detroit,MI

Across the United States, communities encumbered by violence, economic injustice, legacies of oppression and continued social, economic, and political marginalization are increasingly turning toward truth and reconciliation commissions (TRC) to address and remedy persistent inequality. While modeled after the international truth movement, TRCs in the United States are often not state-sanctioned and characterized by fundamental differences that beg the question: How are peace and justice dialectically linked to, and flow from geographic specific understandings of violence? Drawing from the TRC experiences of Greensboro (NC) and Detroit (MI), this paper examines the way communities that were burdened with a history of violence are turning toward TRCs as viable vehicles for addressing violence and inequality in contemporary US society. This paper furthers our understanding of the geographic ruptures violence creates in communities and the often hidden realities that the legacy and memory of violence has for oppressed people in the United States.     

Violence,Social Differentiation and the Self

The article considers aspects of violence in everyday life among the Tiwi of Melville and Bathurst Islands. It briefly compares the role of violence in bureaucratically and juridically mediated forms with self-help and social regulation in Aboriginal societies, focussing on the expressive or performative aspects of violence in everyday interaction. Myers' discussion of violence among the Pintubi posits a dialectical polarity of relatedness and differentiation, corresponding with the affective poles of compassion and anger. This is compared with Sansom's account of semi-ritualized forms of violence in Aboriginal fringe-camp life, where a point of commonality in Myers' and Sansom's approaches is found: this consists of the attunement of action, of violence, self-violence and destructiveness to the witnessing public. In Tiwi life too, conflict is dynamically shaped by actors' attempts to impinge upon, to seek to arouse and in some cases to manipulate, compassion or concern in the witnessing group as defence or as a form of moral attack. Open, dramatic ‘appealing’ violence, often in the form of a more or less controlled loss of self-control, seeks to parry indirect interpersonal tension and antagonism, to reassert or restore social distance and protect or privilege important relationships from intrusive demands. However, these violent appeals in rhetorical threat, in self-violence, destructiveness or sometimes in dramatic suicidal gestures also invariably indicate extreme personal difficulty displaced into open forms of confrontation. The article proposes that the generative moment of violence for social differentiation be sought in an examination of dynamic interrelationships between individual life-history, inner group processes and their articulation with external social forms.