The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place

Sarah De Nardi, Hilary Orange, Steven High, Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto, Sarah De Nardi, Hilary Orange, Steven High, Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429631641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This Handbook explores the latest cross-disciplinary research on the inter-relationship between memory studies, place, and identity.

In the works of dynamic memory, there is room for multiple stories, versions of the past and place understandings, and often resistance to mainstream narratives. Places may live on long after their physical destruction. This collection provides insights into the significant and diverse role memory plays in our understanding of the world around us, in a variety of spaces and temporalities, and through a variety of disciplinary and professional lenses. Many of the chapters in this Handbook explore place-making, its significance in everyday lives, and its loss. Processes of displacement, where people's place attachments are violently torn asunder, are also considered. Ranging from oral history to forensic anthropology, from folklore studies to cultural geographies and beyond, the chapters in this Handbook reveal multiple and often unexpected facets of the fascinating relationship between place and memory, from the individual to the collective.

This is a multi- and intra-disciplinary collection of the latest, most influential approaches to the interwoven and dynamic issues of place and memory. It will be of great use to researchers and academics working across Geography, Tourism, Heritage, Anthropology, Memory Studies, and Archaeology.

Part I

Mobility

Sarah De Nardi

Introduction

The first part of The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place takes us to the shifting memory worlds of mobility, migration, changing ideas of place, diaspora, and displacement. Mobility is at the core of the more-than-representational frameworks within which many increasingly operate, as it reflects the unstable nature of place and identity.

Place practices do not just underline and nurture presences. They can also mourn absences and expose wounds (Navaro-Yashin 2009; De Nardi 2017). Communities that once defined themselves spatially do not necessarily need to be located in a place to nurture a strong sense of belonging. Imagination and inherited notions of place, long-distance longings and nostalgia for a homeland, a town, a street, can all fulfil the need for closeness to a thing, a place, or even an ‘idea’ of another place which may or may not correspond to an objective truth. At the same time the hauntings and the experiences of an ‘elsewhere’ remain strong.

Transformation and mobility are shaping the ways that we conceptualise place and the social. The ideas that affect and emotion are expressed through social activism and political resistance (see Ahmed 2004 and Askins 2009 among others), or that they emerge in transformations (Richard & Rudnyckyj 2009) are not new. Chapters in this part frame the mobility of memoryscapes as so many expressions of decolonising dissent in their exploration of identity and remembrance as forms of place-based resistance-performance.

In the workings of mobile, dynamic memory-enacting, there is room for multiple stories, multiple versions of the past, and resistance to mainstream narratives: de Certeau calls these acts of resistance ‘tactics’ or ‘coping mechanisms’ (de Certeau 1984: xxii); non-hegemonic, marginalised voices have thus the possibility of infiltrating their own innumerable differences, multiple identities and motives into the dominant text (de Certeau 1984: 41) even in mundane, everyday spaces and places (e.g. Moles 2009).

In this vein, we may conceptualise memory of colonialism as a challenging encounter. Pratt talked about the ‘contact zone’ as a space of colonial encounter where ‘cultures met, clashed and grappled with each other’ in circumstances of highly unequal power relations (1991: 34). For Pratt, the contact zone was characterised by ‘rage, incomprehension, and pain,’ but also by ‘exhilarating moments of wonder and revelation, mutual understanding, and new wisdom’ (1991: 39). Further, Parkin (1999) has written about the ‘souvenirs’ of wartime refugees who take with them emotionally valuable domestic objects or photographs that then become relics of their devastated world. As they merge their displaced identities within ‘mementos in flight,’ refugees waiting for resettlement are striving for a new stability that will allow them to reclaim their identities.

Andrea Witcomb and Alexandra Bounia’s opening chapter interweaves narratives of twentieth-century Asia Minor and Greek diasporas following the Lausanne Convention with the current displacement plight of Syrian refugees at Skala Loutron on the island of Lesvos, Greece. Lesvos, together with the Museum of Refugee Memory on which the chapter centres, is an example of the workings of a shared memory which acts and operates a duty of care. Painful memories of the forced exodus of Asia Minor Greeks resonate in the present-day context, interwoven as they are with the agonising memories of the recent flux of people to Mytilene from Syria, via Turkey. This chapter channels the ways that the Museum foregrounds the processes of collection and the honouring of humble diasporic objects. These processes enable the creation of a community of care beyond direct memory and personal experience.

Katja Hrobat-Virloget brings us northwards in the Mediterranean to the Adriatic coast of Slovenia where 90% of mainly Italian-speaking dwellers emigrated, while the ‘ghost’ towns were settled by people from Slovenia and ex-Yugoslavia. This chapter represents a poignant foray into ghostly geographies of abandonment and melancholy cultural memory, in which the postmemory performances of former Yugoslavian and Italian ethnic populations intersect through the materialities and different emplacements in the region. The author makes a case for identifying processes of (non)heritagisation, appropriation, and silencing as the forces shaping the dominant remembrance and dwelling practices in a border area. She evokes the uncanniness of in-between places and things, haunted by present absences and loose ends of lives interrupted by the contingencies and emotional upheavals of borderland conflict.

Sean Field’s chapter leads us to Cape Town in South Africa, where familial memory and place-making practices intertwine with the searing memory of racism and Apartheid in an autobiographical reflection on race, place, and identity. The local and global scales of historical consciousness and affectual remembrance interweave in diffracting understandings of what District Six was, is, and will become. The optics of family storytelling intersects the cultural consciousness of Apartheid in this powerful chapter on the uncanniness of memory and of ‘memory in place’ as they work against each other. Whose remembrance has the most worth? Here, imagined geographies of home, of whiteness, and of class overlap with actual topographies of racial segregation in a reflection on the reliability and fairness of memory processes.

Shawn Sobers also leads the reader on an auto-ethnographic pilgrimage of places of memory and postmemory. Starting from the unsettling question of ‘How much of this was funded from the labour of my ancestors?’, the author retraces the emplacement and flow of memories of colonial England and the remnants of transnational-African memoryscapes in the West Country and its stately homes. The overarching theme of this chapter is an extended reflection on nation and identity; Sobers’ contribution serves as a poetic revisiting of the postmemory of enslaved Africans presented in a juxtaposition of experiences between the author himself and his teenage daughters coming to terms (or not) with a postmemory of sorts.

The final chapter by Sebastien Caquard, Emory Shaw, José Alavez, and Stefanie Dimitrovas traces the journeys of people and memories to Canada through the innovative medium of personal and migration story maps. In cultural geography especially, there is a reluctant hesitation to express or display cultural data cartographically: as Perkins argued, ‘theoreticians of the new critical cartography usually employ words to extol the virtues of socially informed critiques of mapping, leaving to other people the messy and contingent process of creating maps as visualizations’ (2003: 381). The authors of this chapter challenge this perceived shortcoming; their chapter reports on individual life stories rendered spatial and shared through non-Euclidean cartographic visualisations that chart emotion and experience as much as they pin down places. The map is a metaphor and an artefact, the materialisation of the dynamic nature of remembrance from place to place, accruing values and experiences in its motion.

Together, these chapters speak to the many dimensions of cultural mobility and displacement through diaspora, slavery, and war and conflict. The contributions to this part bear witness to the need to remember, respectfully, the plight of ourselves – as individuals, family members, and citizens – and others in ways that can move forward and even, when possible, heal.

References

Ahmed, S. (2004). Affective economies. Social Text, 22: 114–139.

Askins, K. (2009). That’s just what I do. Placing emotion in academic activism. Emotion Space and Society, 2: 4–13.

de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

De Nardi, S. (2017). The poetics of conflict: Experience. materiality and embodiment in Second World War Italy. London: Routledge.

Moles, K. (2009). A landscape of memories: Layers of meaning in a Dublin park. In: M. Anico and E. Peralta, eds. Heritage and identity: Engagement and demission in the contemporary world. London: Routledge, pp. 129–140.

Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2009). Affective spaces, melancholic objects: Ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 15: 1–18.

Parkin, D.J. (1999). Mementoes as transitional objects in human displacement. Journal of Material Culture, 4 (3): 303–320.

Perkins, C. (2003). Cartography – cultures of mapping: Power in practice. Progress in Human Geography, 28 (3): 381–391.

Pratt, M.L. (1991). Arts of the contact zone. Profession, 91: 33–40.

Richard, A., and Rudnyckyj, D. (2009). Economies of affect. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 15: 57–77.

1
The restorative museum

Understanding the work of memory at the Museum of Refugee Memory in Skala Loutron, Lesvos, Greece

Andrea Witcomb and Alexandra Bounia

Introduction

Lesvos is one of the Greek islands nearest to the coast of Asia Minor. Facing Ayvalik, on the Turkish coast, it stands as sentinel between Europe and Asia, as well as between past and present, receiving and sending people from across the seas. Traces of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Ottoman Empire, as well as the rise of the modern Greek state, can be seen and felt on its streets today – fenced off ruins, old Ottoman houses, now mostly in a dilapidated state but with their wooden window frames clearly announcing their origins, and empty mosques on the way to becoming a ruin. The clear lines of its nineteenth-century Greek houses, freshly painted in whites and blues, with their classical lines stand in clear contrast as does the orthodox Greek basilica in the centre of Mytilene, the island’s capital city.

Down at the old port, the Epano Skala, there is a statue of a mother with a child standing with her back to Turkey, facing the old main street of Mytilene as a commemorative offering to the 1922 exodus of Asia Minor Greeks, who came to Greece in their hundred thousands (estimated more than 1,200,000), fleeing the burning of their houses and lands by the Turks in retaliation for the Greece’s attempt to conquer what it saw as Greek Asia Minor (Figure 1.1).

A deluded attempt to recover the ancient Hellenic World, the result was a traumatic exchange of people, as Christians were sent back to Greece and Muslims were sent to Turkey after centuries of residence in lands that were now defined as on the other side of the newly established borders between Greece and Turkey (Clogg 2002). Mother and child stand quietly but powerfully, especially in the present-day context when memories of the most recent flux of people to Mytilene from Syria, via Turkey, is well and truly alive. At the local campus of the University of the Aegean, where students and staff engaged in a project to collect the detritus of the last wave of refugees in May 2016, there is a chess set made by the students out of the black rubber boats and orange life vests worn by those lucky enough to have them (Figure 1.2). Like the statue, the game stands sentinel to another episode in human history where political ambitions lead to vast human suffering.

Mytilene, like Lesvos itself, offers us a window into the way in which history not only repeats itself, but to the ways in which humans both commemorate, remember, forget, and re-remember past connections and violent breaks. This is nowhere more so than at a small local community museum, founded by third-generation descendants of the Asia Minor Greeks expelled from Turkey in 1922. The Museum of Refugee Memory, as it is called, can be found at another Skala, this time at Skala Loutron, a little village about an hour and a half’s drive through picturesque countryside, south of Mytilene. It is to this museum that we now turn in an attempt to explore not only how time and space collapse into one another as a result of the memory work undertaken by its founders, but also to explore the ways in which such memory work results in what we call the ‘restorative museum’ – a museum that seeks to restore to the souls of the dead their humanity and which does so by asking present-day visitors to empathise with the plight of these refugees and, by extension, the plight of the present wave of refugees. Our analysis is based on a joint visit in April 2017, including a detailed guided tour with Efthalia Tourli, one of the founders of this Museum as well as on previous visits and interviews with the guides/founders conducted by Alexandra Bounia in 2008 and 2013.¹

Figure 1.1Monument to the 1922 Greek refugees from Asia Minor, Epano Skala, Mytilene.

Source: Photograph by Andrea Witcomb.

Figure 1.2The chess set created by students and staff of the University of the Aegean, Mytilene.

Source: Photograph by Andrea Witcomb.

The Museum of Refugee Memory

The Museum of Refugee Memory was established in 2003 and opened to the public in 2006. It was the initiative of a local cultural group called ‘The Dolphin,’ established in 1990 mostly by local fishermen and members of their families who are descendants of the original Greek Asia Minor refugees who settled in the area. The Museum is just one of the activities of this group and forms part of their wish to ‘retrace their roots and to encourage/empower Asia Minor memories and identity’ (Interview, Stratos Valachis 2008). It is housed in the old, now disused, school of the village, the actual space where all the people who established and currently run the museum were introduced into the official version of Greek history. This is, therefore, a place that they still associate with the topos of where historical truth should be delivered. In the context of this museum, however, that topos becomes a place to deliver their version of ‘historical truth as they have learnt it,’ rather than as the official history books represent it, as we will discuss further on. The skala on which Loutra is now located was once the uninhabited piece of land that provided the inhabitants of the small village of Loutra up the hill access to the sea up until 1931; it was only then that 25 two-room houses were built to provide shelter for 25 families that had arrived in Lesvos as refugees in 1922, mainly from the ancient town of Phokaia on the coast across the sea, as a result of what in Greek history books is usually called the ‘Asia Minor catastrophe’ – the expulsion of the Greek orthodox population who lived in A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• About the editors
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Mobility
• Part II Difficult memories
• Part III Memoryscapes
• Part IV Industry
• Part V The body
• Part VI Shared traditions
• Part VII Ritual
• Index