COVID-19 Impacts on Historic Soundscape Perception and Site Usage

The ISO 12913 standards acknowledge the primacy of context in perceiving acoustic environments. In soundscape assessments, context is constituted by both physical surroundings and psychological, social, and cultural factors. Previous studies have revealed similarities in people’s soundscape assessments in comparable physical surroundings, such as urban or national parks, despite differing individual associative contexts. However, these assessments were found to be capable of shifting in the historic setting of the Berlin Wall Memorial. Providing contextual information from the past appears to have some bearing on soundscape perception. The COVID-19 lockdown measures enacted since March 2020 in Germany have prevented most tourist activity at the memorial, and a resulting shift in user activity has been observed in the otherwise open and accessible memorial landscape. Building on previous soundscape investigations conducted at the memorial, this paper investigates what effect the restrictions have had on the soundscape context and its perception by visitors. Informal interviews paired with comparative measurements indicated context pliability for local stakeholders. In contrast to site programming alone, tourist presence also appears to affect context perception for local users. This holds repercussions for soundscape and heritage site designs serving local and tourist populations—and their divergent perceptions—alike. The impacts of soundscape assessments being neither static nor generalizable across stakeholders are discussed with suggestions for further research.

The practice of creating “places of memory” for the anniversary of the Altai Republic

The analysis of the practice of creating "places of memory" in connection with the 30th anniversary of the formation of the Altai Republic is given on the basis of the collected field material. It is noted that society and government materialize memory establishing monuments, opening museums, organizing holidays and festivals. The fact of the installation of V. I. Chaptynov monument (the first head of the republic) forms a memorial landscape in the central park of Gorno-Altaysk — the capital of the republic. Attention is drawn to the fact that in order to understand the significance of famous personalities, political myths have been put together as a tool to influence public consciousness. The main objects of the mythologization of the regional political space are the local public figures’ biographical facts and the events of regional history.

Historical Memory-Making in South Africa

In South Africa, as elsewhere, historical memory is a social thing. It takes on object properties through memorials, museums, archives, and other sites of memory. Some movement leaders, academics, and ordinary citizens took issue with apartheid-era memory projects, while others fiercely defended them. The memorial landscape in democratic South Africa is thus an unsettled collective space where claims about the past—what happened and what should we make of it—are challenged just as quickly as they are asserted. This chapter discusses these challenges and assertions as historical memory making endeavors to establish norms and rituals of collective remembrance.

Morts pour la France: Things and memory in the ‘destroyed villages’ of Verdun

This article considers the power of things to affect how the past is remembered in the aftermath of mass violence, through the case of the ‘destroyed villages’ ( villages détruits) of the battlefield of Verdun, theatre in 1916 of one of the most destructive battles of World War I. As well as causing mass military death, the battle also led to the ‘death’ of nine small villages, declared to have ‘died for France’ and incorporated into the post-war commemorative landscape of the battlefield. The article illustrates the 21st-century discourse and practices that surround the remains of these villages, from emplaced ruins to photographs and other documents. A century after the ‘death’ of the villages, people who identify as descendants of the original inhabitants gather at the sites and through these objects evoke their ancestors and the pre-war settlement, momentarily reconstituting a space that they can ‘inhabit’ physically, imaginatively and affectively. However, bids to restore a ‘village’ space and time are overwritten by the commemorative framework in which the sites and remains have been embedded for the past century, that identifies the ‘dead’ localities with the human Fallen and their history with the moment of their ‘death for France’. So, while the surviving traces of the former villages retain their power to affect and thus to evoke the pre-war, civilian past, their ability to produce a new memory for Verdun is limited by their incorporation into a memorial landscape dedicated to heroic military death for the nation. The physical expropriation of sites and vestiges during the post-war reconstruction of the battlefield and their preservation as tangible tokens of mass death has enduringly fixed and overdetermined their meaning, in a form of symbolic expropriation that limits their power to produce memory.

Conclusion

This chapter discusses the transformations in Hungary's politics of memory since the 2010 return to power of Fidesz, which has become a right-wing populist party. It talks about how Fidesz hailed its electoral victory that enabled Hungary to finally achieve transition and leave the socialist past behind. Yet critics of Fidesz argue that beneath the government's anticommunist rhetoric lie authoritarian policies that have turned back the clock on many of Hungary's postsocialist democratic transformations. The chapter also examines Fidesz's recent attempts to redefine Hungary's political and memorial landscape. It explains how both Fidesz and its opponents ironically revived the threat of socialist remains in order to warn the present of impending danger.

Monument to the Mansi Stepan Chumpin in the context of the Russian pre-revolutionary me-morial environment

The paper examines the history of creation and life of the monument to the Mansi Stepan Chumpin on the top of the Blagodat Mountain (сity of Kushva, Sverdlovsk Region), in the context of development of the Russian memorial culture. The paper aims to explore conformity of this monument with the memorial landscape during the time of its installation, as well as with the trends in the development of public commemoration in the pre-revolutionary period. Chumpin was the discoverer of a large field of magnetite on the Blagodat Mountain. The monument belongs to the category of anniversary ones, as it was built shortly before the centenary of the discov-ery of the field. Commemoration of this important event with the monument was the idea of the head of Goro-blagodatsky mining district Nikolai Mamyshev. This high-ranking official was also a sentimentalist writer. The monument he erected was not similar to those in the style of classicism that were made in Russia in this period. It represented a cylindrical bowl-shaped base for iron casting bursting tongues of flame. The inscription on the ped-estal says that Chumpin was burned here in 1730. It is believed the latter was done by his tribesmen associates. The paper formulates and justifies the hypothesis of the influence of Mamyshev's literary work on the concept of the monument: Chumpin, a «contemptible» character and a foreigner, is portrayed as a «noble savage» and a figure that evokes compassion. Such image of the discoverer gave a distinct ethnic orientation to the monument. It also appears as a memorial, since it was erected over the remains of a glorified person (although historians have proved that the fact of Chumpin's death in this place is a fiction). The monument is attributed to the monu-mental ones, as it is related to the great discovery by Chumpin, and to geographically motivated ones, as it is placed on the Blagodat Mountain. The monument is also a reminder of a significant event — the discovery of a rich deposit, and it affirms the recognition of the merits of the Mansi by the state. Even by the beginning of the 20th c., this monument did not become typical for the Russian memorial environment, although it turned into a popular tourist attraction.