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Cultural memory and the Construction of Identity brings together scholars of folklore, literature, history, and communication to explore the dynamics of cultural memory in a variety of contexts. Memory is a powerful tool that can transform a piece of earth into a homeland and common objects into symbols. The authors of this volume show how memory is shaped and how it operates in uniting society and creating images that attain the value of truth even if they deviate from fact.
Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage focuses on the importance of memory and heritage for individual and group identity, and for their sense of belonging. It aims to expose the motives and discourses related to the destruction of memory and heritage during times of war, terror, sectarian conflict and through capitalist policies. It is within these affected spheres of cultural heritage where groups and communities ascribe values, develop memories, and shape their collective identity.
This book bridges theoretical gaps that exist between the meta-concepts of memory, place and identity by positioning its lens on the emplaced practices of commemoration and the remembrance of war and conflict. This book examines how diverse publics relate to their wartime histories through engagements with everyday collective memories, in differing places. Specifically addressing questions of place-making, displacement and identity, contributions shed new light on the processes of commemoration of war in everyday urban façades and within generations of families and national communities. Contributions seek to clarify how we connect with memories and places of war and conflict. The spatial and narrative manifestations of attempts to contextualise wartime memories of loss, trauma, conflict, victory and suffering are refracted through the roles played by emotion and identity construction in the shaping of post-war remembrances. This book offers a multidisciplinary perspective, with insights from history, memory studies, social psychology, cultural and urban geography, to contextualise memories of war and their ‘use’ by national governments, perpetrators, victims and in family histories.
Memory is as central to modern politics as politics is central to modern memory. We are so accustomed to living in a forest of monuments, to having the past represented to us through museums, historic sites, and public sculpture, that we easily lose sight of the recent origins and diverse meanings of these uniquely modern phenomena. In this volume, leading historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers explore the relationship between collective memory and national identity in diverse cultures throughout history. Placing commemorations in their historical settings, the contributors disclose the contested nature of these monuments by showing how groups and individuals struggle to shape the past to their own ends. The volume is introduced by John Gillis's broad overview of the development of public memory in relation to the history of the nation-state. Other contributions address the usefulness of identity as a cross-cultural concept (Richard Handler), the connection between identity, heritage, and history (David Lowenthal), national memory in early modern England (David Cressy), commemoration in Cleveland (John Bodnar), the museum and the politics of social control in modern Iraq (Eric Davis), invented tradition and collective memory in Israel (Yael Zerubavel), black emancipation and the civil war monument (Kirk Savage), memory and naming in the Great War (Thomas Laqueur), American commemoration of World War I (Kurt Piehler), art, commerce, and the production of memory in France after World War I (Daniel Sherman), historic preservation in twentieth-century Germany (Rudy Koshar), the struggle over French identity in the early twentieth century (Herman Lebovics), and the commemoration of concentration camps in the new Germany (Claudia Koonz).
The study of the cultural landscape has gained momentum in recent years, revealing new insights to geographers, archaeologists, sociologists and architects. The cultural landscape is often viewed as an emblematic site and thus a key player in the heritage process. This book explores the overlapping and often complex relationships between identity, memory, heritage and the cultural landscape. It provides an overview of new approaches in the study of these relationships, combined with evidence from Ireland, England, Scotland and the United States. These case studies demonstrate the significance of the past in the contemporary construction of identity narratives and draw attention to the powerful role of monuments and parades as sites of cultural heritage. The focus then shifts to the way in which heritage has become politicized for various ends, demonstrating the changing perception of particular heritage sites and buildings, and the role that this has played in constructing and reconstructing particular identities.
The revival of interest in collective cultural memories since the 1980s has been a genuinely global phenomenon. Cultural memories can be defined as the social constructions of the past that allow individuals and groups to orient themselves in time and space. The investigation of cultural memories has necessitated an interdisciplinary perspective, though geographical questions about the spaces, places, and landscapes of memory have acquired a special significance. The essays in this volume, written by leading anthropologists, geographers, historians, and psychologists, open a range of new interpretations of the formation and development of cultural memories from ancient times to the present day. The volume is divided into five interconnected sections. The first section outlines the theoretical considerations that have shaped recent debates about cultural memory. The second section provides detailed case studies of three key themes: the founding myths of the nation-state, the contestation of national collective memories during periods of civil war, and the oral traditions that move beyond national narrative. The third section examines the role of World War II as a pivotal episode in an emerging European cultural memory. The fourth section focuses on cultural memories in postcolonial contexts beyond Europe. The fifth and final section extends the study of cultural memory back into premodern tribal and nomadic societies.
The collapse of the Soviet Union forced Russia to engage in a process of nation building. This involved a reassessment of the past, both historical and cultural, and how it should be remembered. The publication of previously barely known underground and émigré literary works presented an opportunity to reappraise «official» Soviet literature and re-evaluate twentieth-century Russian literature as a whole. This book explores changes to the poetry canon - an instrument for maintaining individual and collective memory - to show how cultural memory has informed the evolution of post-Soviet Russian identity. It examines how concerns over identity are shaping the canon, and in which directions, and analyses the interrelationship between national identity (whether ethnic, imperial, or civic) and attempts to revise the canon. This study situates the discussion of national identity within the cultural field and in the context of canon formation as a complex expression of aesthetic, political, and institutional factors. It encompasses a period of far-reaching upheaval in Russia and reveals the tension between a desire for change and a longing for stability that was expressed by attempts to reshape the literary canon and, by doing so, to create a new twentieth-century past and the foundations of a new identity for the nation.
Memory and Identity in the Learned World offers a detailed and varied account of community formation in the early modern world of learning and science. The book traces how collective identity, institutional memory and modes of remembrance helped to shape learned and scientific communities. The case studies in this book analyse how learned communities and individuals presented and represented themselves, for example in letters, biographies, histories, journals, opera omnia, monuments, academic travels and memorials. By bringing together the perspectives of historians of literature, scholarship, universities, science, and art, this volume studies knowledge communities by looking at the centrality of collective identity and memory in their formations and reformations. Contributors: Lieke van Deinsen, Karl Enenkel, Constance Hardesty, Paul Hulsenboom, Dirk van Miert, Alan Moss, Richard Kirwan, Koen Scholten, Floris Solleveld, and Esther M. Villegas de la Torre.
First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
This book provides an introduction to the concept of cultural memory, offering a comprehensive overview of its history, forms and functions.