Managing the difficult past: Ukrainian collective memory and public debates on history

This article analyzes the status of difficult historic events in Ukrainian collective memory. Difficult elements of collective memory are defined as those which divide society on basic matters, such as identity and national cohesion, and events which are being actively forgotten because of the role of Ukrainians as perpetrators. Three such issues were analyzed: World War II and the role of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Holocaust, and the ethnic purge of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943–1945. Utilizing data from quantitative and qualitative studies, the author showcases the significance of these issues for contemporary Ukrainian identity and Ukraine’s relations with its neighbors. In particular, the evaluation of World War II and the role of the UPA in Ukrainian history polarizes Ukrainian society to a great degree. At the same time, this element of national history is used to construct a common, anti-Russian identity. The difficulty of relating to the memory of the Holocaust and the ethnic purge in Volhynia is of a different character. These events are problematic for Ukrainian collective memory because they demand a painful settling of accounts with the past. At present, only Ukrainian elites are willing to work on these subjects, and only to a limited degree, while the common consciousness either denies or ignores them altogether.     

Advocating for the cause of the “victims of Communism” in the European political space: memory entrepreneurs in interstitial fields

The European Parliament (EP) adopted, between 2004 and 2009, a series of resolutions calling for recognition of Communist crimes and commemoration of their victims. This article focuses on an overlooked aspect of anti-Communist activism, the awareness-raising activities carried out by some Central European Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to perpetuate the cause through networks that enable them to exchange institutional credibility, scientific legitimacy, and policy-oriented knowledge with Institutes of National Memory, parts of academia, and victims associations. Although they use the techniques of expertise and scandalization that are often effective in European institutions, these memory entrepreneurs have largely failed to further their claims in the European Union (EU) after 2009. In line with the turn toward “practice” in EU studies and the increased attention paid to agency in memory politics, this article contends that the conditions of production of their narrative of indictment of Communism accounts for this relative lack of success. Because their demands produced a strong polarization inside the EP while colliding with established Western patterns of remembrance, these MEPs’ reach remains limited to their Conservative peers from the former Eastern bloc. This weak national and ideological representativeness hinders their capacity to impose their vision of the socialist period in the European political space.     

Workers,state, and development in Brazil: powers of labour,chains of value

This paper examines the significance of landscape and memory in peasant–state relations in Eritrea since independence in the early 1990s. During this period, people were being resettled around cultivable land in the western lowlands as a means of recuperating land and society after prolonged warfare. Projects of statemaking in Eritrea, involving both refugee resettlement and agrarian development, have drawn from a national narrative of lost fertility and deforestation caused by generations of colonial extraction and violence. This paper explores how shared memories of environmental change, an ecological nostalgia, become a means through which people from diverse ethno-linguistic, religious, and regional backgrounds come together to imagine a collective future based in creating livelihood from farm land. However, as people reclaim remembered landscapes and face the challenges of rebuilding communities and livelihoods during a time of tense political and economic change, their ideas of a shared future diverge from state-led projects of nation-building. This article argues that ecological nostalgia legitimises state interventions into rural livelihoods but also provides a means for people to speak and critique the state under conditions of increasing fear and silencing.     

The land of no taboo: agrarian politics of neglect and care in Madagascar

ABSTRACT

In considering the complex relationships between taboo, culture and landscapes, it is productive to examine not only how people bestow taboos onto places, but also how they take them away. In this contribution, I use as a case study a 35-hectare parcel of agricultural land in Madagascar, where members of an extended family are debating whether or not to continue to follow their ancestral taboos while farming. Analyzing the debate, alternative historical, cultural and political narratives of land relationships emerge, including a fraught colonial history, ongoing battles over land tenure, shifting community demographics, and intergenerational conflicts. Overall, this stretch of land illustrates that agricultural landscapes may be rendered without taboo not because they lack meaning, but because they contain an excess of overlapping – and highly contentious – meanings.     

A cuarenta años del golpe militar en Chile. Reflexiones en torno a conmemoraciones y memorias

The commemoration of the Fortieth anniversary of the coup d'état in Chile in September 2013 was unexpectedly intense; even so that it forced a critical revision of the last four decades of Chilean history. Like never before in past commemorations, memory was, in many ways, the central theme of the cultural-political debate, which motivated society to make a conscience examination in order to face the individual, as well as the collective, responsibilities around the coup and the dictatorship that emerged from it. This text explores some of the reasons that guided said explosion of memory, marking a crucial turn in recent Chilean history.     

Humanism in the autobiographies of Edward Said and Nelson Mandela: memory as action

This paper discusses the concept of memory as a form of humanist activism in the autobiographies of Nelson Mandela and Edward Said. Mandela and Said were chosen because they dedicated their lives to the cause of freedom in South Africa and Palestine. Their engagement with the political causes of their countries turned into a concern with worldwide struggles for human rights and racial equality. While Mandela emerged as a vital force against apartheid in South Africa, Said was a well-known and influential Palestinian critic and intellectual whose writings tackle the Palestinian struggle for justice within the worldwide experience of imperialism and its binary oppositions of white/black, male/female, superior/inferior. I argue that these autobiographies bear witness to the plight of Black South Africans and Palestinians as both a shared memory resistant to erasure and a call for justice. Mandela and Said used their personal memories and life stories to construct a public reading of the meanings of the events that shaped them. Here I focus on the concept of humanist and political activity in the two autobiographies.     

Transnational,transborder, antinational? The memory of the Jewish past in Poland

The aim of this article is to explore the interaction between local, national, and transnational frames of memory as it manifests itself in the contemporary commemoration of the Jewish past. Focusing on the case study of Poland, I argue that articulations of transnational memory still remain deeply rooted in local and national interests and mythologies, reflecting the fears, desires, or longings of memory makers. Ranging from digital media which stress the interactive and agency-based dimension of transnational memory, through to vernacular “stumbling blocks” inspired by German citizens and subsequently transplanted onto the Polish ground, to public memorials which are either embraced or contested by a variety of social actors, these initiatives urge us to rethink traditional approaches to memory. In particular, these different scales and locations of remembrance question the common perception of collective memory as rooted in rigid nation-state frameworks in favor of memories that travel, move, and transgress multiple boundaries and affect multiple communities.     

文学与博览会的对话——以1935年台湾博览会为中心

1935年的台湾博览会,台湾总督府作为策展者,力求将台湾装扮成“繁荣”、“昌盛”的形象,这些展示成了外界判定“日本殖民有功论”的资料证据。当时,台湾知识分子对博览会有相关的记述和叙事,他们以自己的“小叙述”,或纠正,或对抗策展者的“大叙述”。经由博览会这一空间,可以解读出台湾“殖民现代性”的驳杂性和多义性。     

儿童证人问题的心理学分析

在心理认知科学发展的背景下,对儿童作证主体之适格性问题的争论已经转变为对儿童证言的可靠性的判断。儿童证人由于其生理和心理的特点决定了其记忆信息的编码、贮存、和提取方面存在着不足,但不能因此否认儿童作证的适格性。相反,应根据儿童的身心特点,制订出相应可行的实践操作原则以提高儿童证人证言的可靠性。     

刑事数码摄影中应注意的问题

随着数字技术的发展，数码摄影应用于刑事摄影领域也是历史发展的必然。因为数码相机与传统相机存在本质区别，根据实际办案的需要．选择适当数码相机和数字图像存储格式，根据数码相机的原理及其特点，重新认识数码相机的参数，使数码相机在刑事技术中充分发挥其应有的作用。