Historical voices, collective memory and interdiscursive trauma in the legal order

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-200
Author(s):  
Gregory Matoesian ◽  
Kristin Enola Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Criminal Trial ◽  
Cultural Trauma ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Legal Identity ◽  
Legal Strategy

This study examines how collective memory and cultural trauma inhere in the multimodal interplay between macro structures of space-time and microcosmic action. Using a criminal trial as data, we show how collective memories and cultural sentiments function in the multimodal details of poetic oratory and emotionally charged speech to frame evidence, construct legal identity and shape the interpretation of testimony. Legal actors integrate language, gesture and gaze to shift the plane of legal reality into a sacred performance, a solemn and co-operative ritual that contains thoroughly unveiled allusions to the assassinations of President John F Kennedy and Senator Robert F Kennedy. In so doing, lawyers and witness co-construct an emergent space for jurors to step into history and connect to national tragedy as a socio-legal strategy.

CONTEXTUALIZING PALIMPSEST OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY IN AN URBAN HERITAGE SITE: Case Study of Chahar Bagh, Shiraz - Iran

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leila Mahmoudi Farahani ◽  
Marzieh Setayesh ◽  
Leila Shokrollahi
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Active Part ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Urban Heritage ◽  
Heritage Site ◽  
Historical Sites ◽  
A Site ◽  
Historical Centre

A landscape or site, which has been inhabited for long, consists of layers of history. This history is sometimes reserved in forms of small physical remnants, monuments, memorials, names or collective memories of destruction and reconstruction. In this sense, a site/landscape can be presumed as what Derrida refers to as a “palimpsest”. A palimpsest whose character is identified in a duality between the existing layers of meaning accumulated through time, and the act of erasing them to make room for the new to appear. In this study, the spatial collective memory of the Chahar Bagh site which is located in the historical centre of Shiraz will be investigated as a contextualized palimpsest, with various projects adjacent one another; each conceptualized and constructed within various historical settings; while the site as a heritage is still an active part of the city’s cultural life. Through analysing the different layers of meaning corresponding to these adjacent projects, a number of principals for reading the complexities of similar historical sites can be driven.

Memory Practices in History Education about the 1947 British India Partition

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meenakshi Chhabra
Keyword(s):  
Secondary School ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
History Education ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Collective Violence ◽  
British India ◽  
Complex Dynamic ◽  
History Textbook ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Memory Practices

This article is an epistemological reflection on memory practices in the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of collective memories of a historical event involving collective violence and conflict in formal and informal spaces of education. It focuses on the 1947 British India Partition of Punjab. The article engages with multiple memory practices of Partition carried out through personal narrative, interactions between Indian and Pakistani secondary school pupils, history textbook contents, and their enactment in the classroom by teachers. It sheds light on the complex dynamic between collective memory and history education about events of violent conflict, and explores opportunities for and challenges to intercepting hegemonic remembering of a violent past.

scholarly journals Re-living a Common Future in the Face of Ecological Disaster: Exploring (Elements of) Guarani and Kaiowá Collective Memories, Political Imagination, and Critiques

Human Arenas ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Normann
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Growth Models ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
Green Growth ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Mato Grosso ◽  
Ecological Disaster ◽  
The Face ◽  
Group Interviews

AbstractHow to re-member a fragmented world while climate change escalates, and green growth models reproduce coloniality, particularly in Indigenous territories? What can be the concrete contributions from different scholarly disciplines to a broader decolonial project? These questions are debated by decolonial scholars who call to re-think our practices within academic institutions and in the fields that we study. This article contributes with a decolonial perspective to sociocultural psychology and studies on Indigenous knowledges about climate change. Through ethnographic methods and individual and group interviews, I engage with indigenous Guarani and Kaiowá participants’ knowledges and practices of resilience opposing green growth models in the Brazilian state Mato Grosso do Sul. Their collective memory of a different past, enacted through narratives, rituals, and social practices, was fundamental to imagine different possible futures, which put in motion transformation processes. Their example opens a reflection about the possibilities in connecting sociocultural psychology’s work on collective memory and political imagination to the broader decolonial project, in supporting people’s processes of re-membering in contexts of adverse conditions caused by coloniality and ecological disaster.

KA'KAW POTS AND COMMON CONTAINERS: CREATING HISTORIES AND COLLECTIVE MEMORIES AMONG THE CLASSIC MAYA OF XUNANTUNICH, BELIZE

2010 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa J. LeCount
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Classic Maya ◽  
Community Identity ◽  
Domestic Consumption ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Public Offerings ◽  
Natural Cycles ◽  
Lowland Maya

AbstractReconstruction of foodways at the Lowland Maya center of Xunantunich, Belize, illustrates how commensality is fundamental to the construction of multilayered identities. Collective memory and linear histories form the foundation of identities because they are the mental frameworks people use to construct shared pasts. At Xunantunich, community identity was expressed though pottery and practices associated with the preparation of foods for domestic consumption and public offerings. In a world of natural cycles centered on family reproduction, horticultural activities, and yearly ceremonies, these symbols and rituals structured the lives of all people and embodied within them a collective memory of community. Linear histories were recorded in images and texts on drinking paraphernalia that were likely used for toasting honored individuals, ancestors, or gods during commemorative rites. These inscriptions and bodily practices marked individuals and their houses as people and places of prominence with separate identities.

Memory as State Behaviour

2021 ◽  
pp. 87-119
Author(s):  
Kathrin Bachleitner
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Yom Kippur War ◽  
State Behaviour ◽  
Emotional Trigger ◽  
Oil Crisis

This chapter shows how collective memory channels a country’s international behaviour. To that end, it first lays out the nexus between memory and state behaviour put forward by the temporal security concept. It then goes on to distinguish it from international relations’ classical realist and ontological security approaches and their predictions on state behaviour. To keep their temporal security intact, countries are assumed to enter into an ‘in-between-time’ conversation with their ‘significant historical others’. Through the emotional trigger of shame, policymakers avoid potential disconnects with their country’s ‘narrated self in the past’, thus bringing their courses of action in line with collective memory. To illustrate this process, the empirical case study looks at the reaction of West Germany and Austria to two wars in the Middle East. It contrasts their support for either of the warring parties during the Six Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War and international oil crisis of 1973. The qualitative analysis demonstrates that West Germany and Austria’s different collective memories of the Nazi legacy channelled their behaviour along diverse reasonings to support either the Israeli or the Arab side.

Memory as National Values

2021 ◽  
pp. 120-148
Author(s):  
Kathrin Bachleitner
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
National Values ◽  
Conscious Choice ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter places collective memory at the source of a country’s values. In that regard, it enquires into the nature of normative obligations arising from memory. Based on moral-philosophical considerations, it finds normativity in the ‘processes surrounding memory’ described in the temporal security concept. Over time, the relationship between collective memory, identity, and behaviour generates a ‘duty to act’ for countries in the sense of ‘ought’. This last and most diffuse impact of collective memory unfolds and persists into the long run. Through it, collective memory, entirely outside the realm of conscious choice, channels behaviour towards one good course of action. To illustrate this, the empirical study picks up the case countries, Germany and Austria, at a late point in time. In 2015, large numbers of refugees arrived at their borders during what became known as the ‘European refugee crisis’. In this ‘critical situation’, both countries were required to react and thus position themselves vis-à-vis the highly normative issue of asylum. With the help of a content analysis of official speeches, the case study demonstrates how German and Austrian politicians came to identify different versions of what a good response entails based on their country’s diverse collective memories.

American origins: Political and religious divides in US collective memory

2019 ◽  
pp. 175069801985606 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy K Yamashiro ◽  
Abram Van Engen ◽  
Henry L Roediger
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Independent State ◽  
Positivity Bias ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Religious Differences

Origin stories are particularly influential collective memories, establishing a society in the minds of its members. National collective memories are frequently conceived as being shared by all members of the country, but subnational groups may differ in their images of the group’s past. Surveying 2000 Americans, we examined political and religious differences in foundational events selected for America’s origins. While there was considerable agreement across religious and political affiliations for the most important events, there were also critical differences. While all participants demonstrated a marked positivity bias in their origin stories, conservative participants more frequently omitted foundational atrocities from America’s origin story, and thus had the most positive stories. Secular participants were most likely to begin America with the independent state, whereas religious participants frequently began America with earlier colonization events. Origin stories accord with varying images of America and American identity.

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