Spacing commemorative-related violence in Northern Ireland: assessing the implications for a society in transition

This paper explores the geography of commemorative-related violence in Northern Ireland and considers its ramifications for a society in transition. Using original primary research, this article contributes to discussions on violence, space and memory through a spatial analysis of new quantitative archival data and existing archival material explored through a multi-disciplinary lens. It examines the complex relationship between the practices and processes of commemoration, the violence that it sometimes occasions and the places in which such violence exists. In unpacking this specific form of violence we consider the continued importance of both place and past in a post-conflict society.     

The commemoration of death,organizational memory,and police culture

Police scholars document that although there is fragmentation of the so‐called “monolithic” police culture, historically consistent features of the occupational culture of police exist. By drawing on ethnographic observations in three U.S. police departments, I describe how one consistent feature of police culture—the preoccupation with danger and potential death—is maintained by the commemoration of officers killed in the line of duty. Through the use of commemorative cultural artifacts, officers and departments construct an organizational memory that locally reflects and reifies the salience of danger and potential death in policing. Furthermore, commemoration of fallen officers is not restricted to a department's own; the dead of other departments are commemorated by distant police organizations and their officers, maintaining broad, occupational assumptions of dangerous and deadly police work that transcend a single department and its localized organizational memory. Implications for the study of police culture, inequalities in policing, and police reform are considered.     

Material mnemonics and competing narratives in Palestine-Israel

Since 1948 the re-designation of depopulated Palestinian villages as national parks has evoked Lippet’s “cartography of nowhere”, as ruins and unmarked sites are subsumed in the process of material forgetting. Juxtaposing narratives and material mnemonics, this article assumes the villages of Deir Yassin, Suba, Kufr Bir’im and Iqrit as case studies to determine the extent to which memory infuses ruins with the ability to counter contemporary narratives. The article subsequently explores the use of debris in the sustenance of national memory, and questions how far “haunting” the land through commemorative tours and in situ story-telling renders the ruins noeuds de mémoire, as opposed to lieux de mémoire. Finally, the transition of the ruins from sites of history to sites of activism is charted through the use of theatre and technology that draw on the past and present as forms of cultural resistance.     

林森与台湾的特殊情缘

林森参加了建设台湾、武装保卫台湾、致力重光台湾的斗争,在台湾期间与当地人结下了深情厚谊,是两岸人民血浓于水的典范。至今,台湾仍有许多纪念林森的遗迹,令人回味及深究。     

Bandera: memorialization and commemoration

This article examines the current heroization of Ukrainian nationalist leader, Stepan Bandera, as manifested in monuments and commemorative practices. It offers a topographic survey that reveals the extent and variety of modes of Bandera heroization. It examines the esthetic and historical controversies that surround Bandera memorialization. It enquires into the personal motivations and political strategies that underlie the effort to project the chosen image of Bandera upon the public space in highly visible terms. It suggests that the campaign in favor of memorializing Bandera can best be understood in performative terms. It is in depicting Bandera as a hero of Ukraine that Bandera becomes a hero of Ukraine.     

The discourse of counter-monuments: semiotics of material commemoration in contemporary urban spaces

This article analyses strategies of material commemoration in contemporary urban spaces. Deploying a philosophical and social-theoretical interpretation systematised by, in particular, Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies and its analysis of material commemoration, the article compares the semiotics of modes of commemorating through monuments and counter-monuments. As is argued, counter-monumental commemoration aligns much better than the traditionally static and non-dialogic monuments with the ongoing post-modern transformation and fluidity of contemporary urban spaces. By the same token, counter-monuments also allow commemoration of complex and difficult past events – such as the Holocaust – that are traditionally surrounded by multiple interpretations and often-conflicting attempts to commemorate them. The analysis at the core of the paper looks in-depth at counter-monumental installations known as Stolpersteine, or Stumbling Blocks, developed since the early 1990s by the German artist Gunter Demnig as a form of commemoration of victims of National Socialism and especially the Holocaust. As is suggested, counter-monuments such as the Stolpersteine carry multiple meanings and have multiple functions which allow for diverse patterns of interaction with past/present. They also allow embedding the dialogue between forms of commemoration (monument/counter-monument) various recipients (locals/tourists, spectators/passers-by) as well as their varied interpretations and expectations of commemoration in the discourse of contemporary urban space.     

World heritage and the local politics of memory: the Miike coal mine and fu no isan

Abstract

This article investigates the complex relations between heritage and memory through an analysis of the UNESCO World Heritage ‘Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution’ and its component Miike coal mine. When discussing this World Heritage Site, scholars and the media have focused on the diplomatic controversy over the history of forced labour between Japan and South Korea, interpreting it as a new example of a dispute over history in East Asia. However, this understanding oversimplifies the relations between heritage and memory. Based on fieldwork research and documentary analysis, this article investigates the diversity and complexity of the collective memory of Miike coal mine from a local perspective. The results show that there is a sharp dissonance between the World Heritage story and some of the ex-miners’ memories, which focus on the negative past, fu no isan. Documentary analysis shows that fu no isan has two different but closely related meanings: negative legacy and negative heritage. Fieldwork research reveals that the various commemorations of fu no isan in the local community, mainly based on ex-miners’ social networks, constitute a form of vernacular memory, independent from the official memory of the World Heritage. Finally, I conclude that heritage can be public memory, rather than just official memory, as long as it is open to plural memories of the past.     

Retelling the past,inspiring the future: Waffen-SS commemorations and the creation of a ‘European’ far-right counter-narrative

ABSTRACT

Heinrich Himmler created the Waffen-SS in part as a multinational force, willing to fight for a New Europe based on Germanic blood. After the war, many international Waffen-SS units formed veterans' associations (VAs). Like other VAs, these provided veterans with the chance to engage in ‘memory work’ and to keep alive a sense of comradeship and of valiant sacrifice, as well as an emotional commitment to the fallen. Waffen-SS veterans were, however, alone in celebrating their ‘sacrifices’. Others shunned them for their participation in atrocities. To defend themselves, they developed a counter-hegemonic Second World War narrative that presented the Waffen-SS as uniquely heroic ‘European’ volunteers' against Bolshevism. This counter-narrative, however, only gained resonance with the fall of the Berlin Wall. After 1989, in fact, veterans could seek out and establish sites of public commemoration, not in Western but in Eastern Europe. Hurd and Werther use veterans' journals and books to explore the redeployment of SS ideology in a revisionist version of history. They examine the resurrection of a mass Waffen-SS graveyard in East Ukraine as a telling case history, discussing, not least, the implications of a ‘reconciliation’ of the former German soldiers with both Ukrainian villagers and Red Army veterans. Finally, they explore the significance of the veterans' ‘European’ counter-history for a younger generation of neo-Nazis.     

Memoria y democracia. Una relación incierta

This paper begins with a series of findings on the increasing focus on the memories of the recent past, particularly in societies that have undergone periods of political violence, dictatorships and civil wars. In analysing the moment of installation of the institutional, territorial and symbolic marks (understood as expressions produced by various actors and state policies and social movements that respond to the demands of these social actors), one can see how memories of the recent past, suffering and political violence act as stimuli for countless rituals, cultural productions, and a search for interpretations and explanations. This paper seeks to question some of the basic assumptions and basic innuendos implicit in the “duty of memory”: an exploration of the relationship between memory and justice, between memory and democracy, and between preservation-preservation and transmission. By analysing these relationships, this paper aims to relocate memories in the context of broader and longer-lasting structures and social processes; centrally linked to the persistence of multiple social inequalities and the relationship between memory and political present. To do this, some institutional state processes are analysed, both at the symbolic level and in the field of education and transmission, in order to present some situations that allow the task of rethinking and raising further questions about the relationship between memory and democracy.     

郑和下西洋的启示

2005年7月11日是郑和下西洋600周年纪念日。任何纪念活动都不仅仅是为了重温历史的辉煌,而是为了新的发展,为了超越。纪念郑和既要看他的历史功绩,弘扬其民族精神,更应扩宽眼界,分析比较郑和与哥伦布航海对世界文明发展进程产生的不同影响及原因,从中汲取深刻的经验教训。