History,tradition, and memory among the Basques

This article explores the historical commemoration, the Alarde of the Spanish-Basque town of Hondarribia, re-enacted for almost 400 years. It is a social account of the past portrayed through a history of local militarism and a history of commemorative performance. Since 1996, controversy has divided local inhabitants concerning wider female-inclusion in the male-dominated event, separating the town into factions, traditionalists (asserting traditions remain the same) and feminists (advocating broader female involvement). Theoretical concerns include examining traditions and their gradual transformations over time, rather than as episodic change; that interpreting the past can be competitive over rights of belonging; that history may be influenced by different agencies of gender, kin ties, memory, politics, and social experience; that people do not purposefully ignore the passage of time but may be protecting communal harmony; that commemorative rites are more than embodied performances; and that history can be a multiple, contested, and lived experience.     

In defence of oblivion: the case of Dunwich,Suffolk

This article examines the way in which the town of Dunwich, Suffolk, once the capital of a Saxon kingdom and the sixth largest town in England, has constructed its identity from its long history of experiencing coastal erosion. Now as a small village, Dunwich has built a cultural heritage industry devoted to presenting absence to its visitors and residents, through many diverse forms: historiography, archaeology and the material culture displayed and commodified in the Dunwich Museum. Local pride in this history of disappearance runs strong, as was demonstrated when a proposed monument to the lost town was rejected by village residents. Connecting this sense of identity both to critical investigations into the nature of loss, transience and disappearance, as well as to the future of local and global environmental processes, this article considers whether a site whose construction of loss-as-identity should be allowed to survive past its natural lifespan – especially one that, given the process of erosion involved, can be measured. If the dominant cultural logic at a site tends towards absence rather than presence, I here ask what justifications exist for forestalling that identity in the name of conservation and preservation.     

Remembering the German Past in the Czech Lands: A Key Moment Between Communicative and Cultural Memory

The objective of this paper is to document the ongoing shift from communicative to cultural memory of war and post-war events in the Czech Republic by using an example of a local struggle about a memorial for German inhabitants of a Czech town killed in June 1945. Thanks to an anthropological and social geographical approach based on interviews, family memory research, observations, and analysis of archive materials, it is possible to reconstruct the local and international sources of the post-1989 collective memory of the German past in Central Europe. This memory is still in constant conflict with the pre-1989 version of Czech national history which had contemptuously marginalized its German component. The communicative memory of the German past has entered the public space and tries to become a permanent part of the Czech cultural memory, but it is not a straightforward process, mainly due to the continuously strengthening nationalistic framing of memory within Central Europe.     

A sweet and amnesic present: the postcolonial landscape and memory makings in Cape Verde

The construction of memory in landscapes is a complex process which is embedded in webs of political and economic power. Often history is twisted and bended to better serve the current interests of the hegemonic forces at play. In this paper I attempt to explore how memory is at work in three different sites in Santiago Island, Cape Verde: an old fort and a historical town; a concentration camp; and a global resort. The three sites participate in the erasure, maintenance and creation of memory in different ways, forging new forms of collective identity, which are embedded in local as well as global forces and processes. Through an analysis of the changes taking place on these sites, this paper suggests that while the country lives on foreign aid and attempts to embrace neo-liberal practices, it fails not only to provide basic services to the population but to engage critically with its history and geography.     

Narrative Identity and Trauma: Sebald’s Memory Landscape

Narrative identity is said to consist of a few key reference points—places, events, peoples, ceremonies, rites, ideas, and values—that translate into sites of memory that are representative of a person’s or a community’s past. In this essay I explore the role of traumatic memories in the formation of collective identity, the national or transnational sites of memory that are officialized by the state. I argue that collective traumas need to be counterbalanced by personal memories that can diminish their pain and thus enable people to regain their lost sense of being at home. To demonstrate this claim I discuss the twentieth-century traumas that have affected European identity by and through the life stories of W. G. Sebald’s characters in The Emigrants (1992) and Austerlitz (2001), which combines the collective and the personal narrative identity. I conclude that the performative aspect of the past needs to be translated into personal forms of commemoration that surpass the official memory archive, which task requires a comprehensive and sensitive understanding of those traumas at both the individual and collective levels.     

Territory and the governmentalisation of social reproduction: parliamentary enclosure and spatial rationalities in the transition from feudalism to capitalism

Recent applications of Foucauldian categories in geography, spatial history and the history of town planning have opened up interesting new perspectives, with respect to both the evolution of spatial knowledge and the genealogy of territorial techniques and their relation to larger socio-political projects, that would be enriched if combined with other discursive traditions. This article proposes to conceptualise English parliamentary enclosure–a favourite episode for Marxist historiography, frequently read in a strictly materialist fashion–as a precedent of a new form of sociospatial governmentality, a political technology that inaugurates a strategic manipulation of territory for social change on the threshold between feudal and capitalist spatial rationalities. I analyse the sociospatial dimensions of parliamentary enclosure’s technical and legal innovations and compare them to the forms of communal self-regulation of land use customs and everyday regionalisations that preceded it. Through a systematic, replicable mechanism of reterritorialisation, enclosure acts normalised spatial regulations, blurred regional differences in the social organisation of agriculture and erased the modes of autonomous social reproduction linked to common land. Their exercise of dispossession of material resources, social capital and community representations is interpreted therefore as an inaugural logic that would pervade the emergent spatial rationality later known as planning.     

Introduction to Webs of Memory,Frames of Power: Collective Remembering in the Archaeological Record

Over the past few decades, archaeologists have increasingly viewed collective memory as critical to the establishment and legitimation of power relations. For societies in the past and present, collective memory can be drawn on to clarify group identity, justify or subvert hierarchies, invent traditions, and define behaviors. The contributors to this special issue focus on the process of remembering, how it produced multiple archaeologically visible understandings of the past, and how these viewpoints impacted power-laden social negotiations. To better elucidate this process, this introduction situates the concept of collective remembering within recent materialist frameworks that emphasize the integration of human and nonhuman actors into webs of interaction. We suggest that by viewing collective memory from the standpoint of interactions, multiple viewpoints can be recognized. We argue in turn that accounting for the diverse actors invested in memory production provides archaeologists a means to delineate how the past becomes a site of contested values that social groups are constantly reworking to define membership, justify social hierarchy, and validate resistance.     

Mundane mobilities,banal travels

Participatory approaches have become a critical and somewhat normalised methodology in geography for working in a positive and constructive way with Indigenous communities. Nevertheless, recent literature has seldom examined the sustainability of participatory projects or looked critically at their ongoing impacts. Since the early 2000s, Nibutani, an Ainu community in Hokkaido, Japan, has developed several participatory projects led by a non-Indigenous professional. The projects have involved community members working to revitalise and promote local Ainu culture. Over the last decade, some positive outcomes from the projects have been observed; for example, the younger generation has had opportunities to engage intensively in learning local Indigenous knowledge and skills. The projects have also helped some participants to develop a stronger sense of ethnic identity and gain empowerment. Still, the power transfer from the talented non-Indigenous leader to community members has been limited and Nibutani has yet to realise a sustainable project structure. Also, community members have multiple perspectives in regard to the direction of participatory projects and their impact. I discuss these issues in Nibutani's participatory projects based on my observations and interviews and suggest that Indigenous geographies need to undertake follow-up evaluations of participatory projects.     

Insurgency,heritage and the working class: the case of the Theatre of Union Nº6 of the Coal Miners of Lota,Chile

This paper examines the construction and preservation history of the Theatre of Union Nº6 of the Coal Miners in Lota, Chile, a city whose identity has been redefined due to changes in the capitalist economy, becoming known as an ‘ex-coal mining community’. Drawing on insurgent planning theory and through a political, economic and social analysis of the history of this national monument, the paper explores how grassroots heritage movements, grounded on their historical memory of social struggle, question authorised voices in the field, influencing the production and definition of their urban heritage. The strategies used by these groups are discussed in the context of the emergence of social movements at the beginning of the twentieth century, the influence of the Modern Movement in Chile as a symbol of social justice, and the communities’ current preservation efforts. Through interviews, participant observations, archival research and analysis of the physical built environment, I argue that moving across ‘invited’ and ‘invented’ spaces of participation, Lotinos are capable of disrupting hegemonic conceptions of heritage, using it for their own social, cultural and economic purposes and creating opportunities for a more inclusive and democratic cultural process.     

Locating processes of identification: studying the precipitates of re-memory through artefacts in the British Asian home

Memory has been figured as an important process of placing and locating people and communities, both geographically and socially. Memory has also been significant in research on people who are not part of a formal record of history. This memory work includes a focus on black identity, especially in the work of Toni Morrison and Paul Gilroy. This paper seeks to examine the relevance of memory and re-memory for the social geographies of the South Asian population in Britain. In the first section I examine visual and material cultures as mechanisms for memory, especially their role in figuring diasporic positioning, and identity politics. These memories are in the form of testimonies and biographical narratives. In the paper I have argued for the relevance and value of re-memory in understanding the narratives of British Asian heritage in the everyday domestic environment. Re-memory is an alternative social narrative to memory as it is a form of memory that is not an individual linear, biographical narrative. Re-memory is a conceptualization of encounters with memories, stimulated through scents, sounds and textures in the everyday. 'Home possessions' constitute precipitates of re-memories and narrated histories. These are souvenirs from the traversed landscapes of the journey, signifiers of 'other' narrations of the past not directly experienced but which incorporate narrations of other's oral histories or social histories that are part of the diasporic community's re-memories. Collectively, visual and material cultures are identified as precipitates of these re-memories in the form of historical artefacts of heritage and tradition.     

Schooling in the University Town: The Racial Capitalist Foundations of Education

This article focuses on how educational institutions are crucial sites for understanding how racial capitalism and anti-Black violence are reproduced. Centring Chapel Hill, home of the University of North Carolina (UNC), and its neighbouring town of Carrboro as a university town built by racial capitalist and anti-Black practices, I analyse how the university functions as a social reproductive force that structures the town and its local public education system. Building on my ethnographic research, Black studies literature, and Black geographic thought, I argue that the university partakes in the political, economic, and ideological restructuring of a community that enables hierarchical differences to be produced in schools in terms of how success is rooted with liberal notions of the individual and proximity to whiteness. Paying attention to these relationships challenges us to think about the need for the total eradication of oppression in all forms to truly have liberated educational spaces.     

仪式活动视角下的集体记忆和象征空间的建构过程及其机制研究——以南京大学校庆典礼为例

仪式活动是集体记忆、象征空间与地方认同建构源头,因其研究有助于揭示城市各空间尺度内的公共生活竞争的内在机制,因此已成为西方文化地理学的重要研究命题;但此类以仪式活动为视角,揭示集体记忆、象征空间建构过程及其机制的研究,在国内极少。鉴于其研究重要意义,文章以南京大学校庆典礼为例,运用文献研究、田野考察、访谈等多种定性与定量方法,探讨了自上而下的仪式活动,即校庆建构集体记忆、象征空间、地方认同的过程及其机制,为校园特别是新校园或扩建校园的纪念物建设与规划提供科学依据。     

The social life of ruins: sites of memory and the politics of a Zimbabwean periphery

This article explores conflicts over a series of ruins located within Zimbabwe's flagship National Park. The relics have long been regarded as sacred places by local African communities evicted from their vicinity, and have come to be seen as their ethnic heritage. Local intellectuals' promotion of this heritage was an important aspect of a defensive mobilization of cultural difference on the part of a marginalized minority group. I explore both indigenous and colonial ideas about the ruins, the different social movements with which they have been associated and the changing social life they have given the stone relics. Although African and European ideas sometimes came into violent confrontation – as in the context of colonial era evictions – there were also mutual influences in emergent ideas about tribe, heritage and history. The article engages with Pierre Nora's notion of ‘sites of memory’, which has usefully drawn attention to the way in which ideas of the past are rooted and reproduced in representations of particular places. But it criticizes Nora's tendency to romanticize pre-modern ‘memory’, suppress narrative and depoliticize traditional connections with the past. Thus, the article highlights the historicity of traditional means of relating to the past, highlighting the often bitter and divisive politics of traditional ritual, myth, kinship, descent and ‘being first’. It also emphasizes the entanglement of modern and traditional ideas, inadequately captured by Nora's implied opposition between history and memory.     

History, Memory, and Identity in Modern Singapore: Testimonies from the Urban Margins

In 2006–2007, I interviewed elderly Singaporeans on theirexperiences of resettlement from an urban kampong (village)to emergency public housing after a great fire in 1961. I learnedmuch about the lives of semiautonomous dwellers in an unauthorizedsettlement and the individual and social transformation followingtheir rehousing. My informants also highlighted what the experiencesmeant to them and their identity in a modern city-state. Thispaper treats the testimonies as both source and social memoryand seeks to avoid the essentialism into which many social historians,oral history practitioners, and memory scholars have fallenin their approach toward the craft. As a source of social history,when used in conjunction with other historical sources, thereminiscences are patently useful for understanding the roleof public housing in transforming a marginal population intoan integrated citizenry. This enables the writing of a new socialhistory of postwar Singapore that departs from the discursiveofficial accounts of urban kampong life and of the 1961 inferno.At the same time, the oral history also underlines powerfulsocial and political influences on individual memory, beingmarked by nostalgia for the kampong and ambivalence toward theimagined character of younger Singaporeans. Statements on therumors of government-inspired arson in the 1961 calamity, however,constitute a significant countermyth in contemporary society,revealing a more critical side to the social memory.     

嵌入、认同、责任：地方社区中的旅游小企业

围绕旅游小企业根植于地方社区的社会理性本质,本文借助嵌入理论探讨旅游小企业经济活动背后社会责任行为的成因。研究发现：①旅游小企业主的地方认同对企业社会责任行为有着显著的正向影响;②旅游小企业主的社区嵌入对地方认同有着显著的正向影响;③旅游小企业主的地方认同在社区嵌入对企业社会责任影响中扮演着显著的中介作用;④旅游小企业主的地方身份特征在社区嵌入对地方认同的影响中起着显著的调节作用,社区嵌入中获得更多社会资源的外来小企业主比本地小企业主对地方认同的影响更强。本文揭示了旅游小企业社会责任的地方空间特征,形成了地理学人—地关系研究的新方向,并为社区嵌入管理和商业环境塑造等工作提供了实践启示和建议。     

Custom and habit(us): The meaning of traditions and legends in early medieval western Britain.

This paper discusses some well–known legends and hagiographic stories, and explores the context of their production and consumption. From an examination of Welsh foundation legends and Cornish hagiographical accounts, we focus on the methods by which versions of history were used in the Middle Ages to provide a context for fundamental changes in the way in which society was organised. It is found that, far from abandoning traditional versions of history, accounts of the past were promoted that sought to couch newer territorial notions of organisation within existing constructions of identity and mediations with the past. In an examination of the production and reception of these popular stories, we attempt to relate the legends to the generation of communal identity and memory. Consequently, drawing on Bourdieu's notion of habitus, we argue that pre–existing beliefs and customs were an important part in the development of newer institutional structures. Rather than initiating new practices that had no grounding in any particular past, institutional developments gained social currency by being inherently grounded in existing facets of cultural identity. In essence therefore, changing societal and institutional structures were unintentionally couched in the language and understandings of existing structures, so that in many ways a concept of continuity was at the very heart of actual change.     

Social integration at a frontier and the creation of Mississippian social identity in southwestern Virginia

ABSTRACT

Frontier areas are poor in labor but rich in land. To be successful, frontiers must attract people and socially integrate them using both low- and high-level social integrative mechanisms, which can range from basic work groups to elaborate feasts. Craft production can be a useful means of accomplishing low and high levels of social integration because it can be done as part of a work group but for special purposes, such as exchange. In the process of social integration, social identity specific to the types of crafts produced and their uses emerges. This paper examines a Mississippian frontier site, Carter Robinson, and discusses evidence for the production and use of ceramics and shell beads as integrative mechanisms at the Southern Appalachian Mississippian frontier area. Through the use of these types of mechanisms I argue that both a communal social identity and an identity of social inequality were created at Carter Robinson which resulted in the production and reproduction of Mississippian identity.     

Zionism and Irish Nationalism: Ideology and Identity on the Borders of Europe

This paper is a comparative cultural history of Zionism and Irish nationalism, focusing on themes of race, gender and identity. It seeks to highlight the strong similarities of both nationalist projects: to show how Zionists and Irish nationalists were both heavily invested in state-building projects that would disprove European racist stereotypes about their respective nations and yet, paradoxically, were also part of the general history of European nationalism. Both Zionism and Irish nationalism sought to create idealised images of the past and claimed to be rebuilding a glorious ancient society in the future as a means of escaping a degraded present. Both movements saw language revival as a key means of carrying out this ‘return to history’. And both emphasised martyrdom as a way to build up prideful ideals of devotion to the nation and used sport, militaries and agriculture as forms of nationalist social engineering. Despite their claims to the contrary, neither national movement was truly unique.     

The National Gallery of Victoria’s Colony and Difficult History

A recent exhibition staged by the National Gallery of Victoria Australia can be regarded as an expression of the international difficult histories boom. In large part, its representation in Colony of Australia’s black history is in keeping with the Manichean accounts that have come to dominate in the realm of popular culture and is a function of its decision to represent the past in forms that are primarily memorial and performative rather than historical and pedagogical. I argue that any serious attempt to come to grips with this nation’s difficult Aboriginal history requires its settler peoples to rethink rather than merely reject previous settler accounts of the past, and I contend that this task demands the practice of both scholarly history and local Aboriginal community history, which provide more complex accounts of the past.