Between Memory Sites and Memory Networks

Abstract

How do societies remember their past? And how did they do so before the age of computers, printing, writing? This book takes stock of earlier work on memory in the fields of history and the social sciences. Our collection also takes a new look at how past and present social groups have memorialized events and rendered them durable through materializations: contributors ask how processes and incidents perceived as negative and disruptive are nonetheless constitutive of group identities. Papers also contrast the monumentalizing treatment given to singular events imbued with a hegemonic meaning to more localized, diverse memory places and networks. As case studies show, such memory scapes invite divergent, multivocal and subversive narratives. Various kinds of these imagined geographies lend themselves to practices of manipulation, preservation and control. The temporal scope of the volume reaches from the late Neolithic to the recent past, resulting in a long-term and multi-focal perspective that demonstrates how the perception of past events changes, acquires new layers and is molded by different groups at different points in time. As several contributions show, these manipulations of the past do not always produce the anticipated results, however. Attempts at “post-factual history” are countered by the socially distributed, but spatially and materially anchored nature of the very process of memorialization.

Content