Memorylands

Heritage and Identity in Europe Today

Sharon Macdonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135628796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Memorylands is an original and fascinating investigation of the nature of heritage, memory and understandings of the past in Europe today. It looks at how Europe has become a 'memoryland' – littered with material reminders of the past, such as museums, heritage sites and memorials; and at how this 'memory phenomenon' is related to the changing nature of identities – especially European, national and cosmopolitan. In doing so, it provides new insights into how memory and the past are being performed and reconfigured in Europe – and with what effects.

Drawing especially, though not exclusively, on cases, concepts and arguments from social and cultural anthropology, Memorylands argues for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the cultural assumptions involved in relating to the past. It theorizes the various ways in which 'materializations' of identity work and relates these to different forms of identification within Europe. The book also addresses questions of methodology, including discussion of historical, ethnographic, interdisciplinary and innovative methods. Through a wide-range of case-studies from across Europe, Sharon Macdonald argues that Europe is home to a much greater range of ways of making the past present than is usually realized – and a greater range of forms of 'historical consciousness'. At the same time, however, she seeks to highlight what she calls 'the European memory complex' – a repertoire of prevalent patterns in forms of recollection and 'past presencing'.

The examples in Memorylands are drawn from both the margins and metropolitan centres, from the relatively small-scale and local, the national and the avant-garde. The book looks at pasts that are potentially identity-disrupting – or 'difficult' – as well as those that affirm identities or offer possibilities for transcending national identities or articulating more cosmopolitan futures. Topics covered include authenticity, temporalities, embodiment, commodification, nostalgia and Ostalgie, the musealization of everyday and folk-life, Holocaust commemoration and tourism, narratives of war, the heritage of Islam, transnationalism, and the future of the past.

Memorylands is engagingly written and accessible to general readers as well as offering a new synthesis for advanced researchers in memory and heritage studies. It is essential reading for those interested in identities, memory, material culture, Europe, tourism and heritage.

1

THE EUROPEAN MEMORY COMPLEX

Introduction

The imperative of our epoch is … to keep everything, to preserve every indicator of memory.

Pierre Nora¹

Memory has become a major preoccupation – in Europe and beyond – in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Long memories have been implicated in justifications for conflicts and calls for apologies for past wrongs. Alongside widespread public agonising over ‘cultural amnesia’ – fears that we are losing our foothold in the past, that ‘eye-witnesses’ of key events are disappearing, and that inter-generational memory transition is on the wane – there has been a corresponding efflorescence of public (and much private) memory work. Europe has become a memoryland – obsessed with the disappearance of collective memory and its preservation. Europe’s land- and city-scapes have filled up with the products of collective memory work – heritage sites, memorials, museums, plaques and art installations designed to remind us of histories that might otherwise be lost. More and more people live or work in or visit sites of memory; and increasing numbers are engaged in quests to save or recuperate fading or near-forgotten pasts. Local history societies, re-enactment groups and volunteer-run heritage projects flourish. Books of reminiscences and sepia photos of localities and community cram the shelves of libraries and bookstores. So too, do books about our fixation with remembering and the past.

This book is, inevitably, an addition to the memory mountain; or, more specifically, to that part of it concerned with trying to understand the memory preoccupation itself. Its particular contribution is anthropological, and more specifically still it provides a perspective from anthropological research on Europe. Central to an anthropological perspective is the attempt to understand assumptions made by people when they organise their worlds in the ways that they do. What is taken for granted when people feel compelled to act in certain ways? What assumptions inform senses of what is important? How are feelings bound up with particular as well as with more shared experiences? Are there alternative ways of seeing, doing and feeling – perhaps to be found among peoples in other parts of the world or in the less examined parts of Europe itself – that can unsettle our assumption that things must be done or felt in the ways that are more widespread or habitual?

This book was written out of a conviction that anthropological research on Europe contains much that can probe and unsettle ways in which memory, and especially the ongoing memory and heritage boom, are typically addressed and theorised. In part this stemmed from realising that my own research on a variety of topics in various parts of Europe threw up unexpected similarities or convergences. Investigating these further was another spur to write this book. So too was a degree of frustration that although there is so much excellent ethnographic research done on Europe, studies are less often brought together and synthesised than they might be – and I include my own here. As such, anthropological research often contributes less to wider debates than it could – or, in my view, should. In part, this is probably due to anthropologists’ emphasis on the importance of context and the local, and insistence on recognising complexity, which makes us more wary of the kinds of generalisations that other disciplines are more ready to make. While this is in itself admirable, it can sometimes mean that ethnographers do not realise some of the broader implications of their work or what it shares with that of others. It also makes it hard for those from other disciplines to relate ethnographic research to their own; and this is compounded by the fact that ethnographic texts often require more careful and time-consuming reading. How to recognise the complexities and specificities that ethnographic research typically highlights and at the same time to identify broader patterns is the challenge. This book is the result of daring to take up this gauntlet.

In doing so, then, it attempts to meet two aspirations that might be seen as contradictory or at least as in tension – but that I regard as crucial to our improved understanding of Europe as a memoryland – or set of memorylands. The indeterminacy of the singular or plural here is indicative of what is at issue. On the one hand, my aim in this book is to identify patterns in ways of approaching and experiencing the past that are widely shared across Europe. My argument is that there is a distinctive – though not exclusive or all-encompassing – complex of ways of doing and experiencing the past within Europe. This is not some kind of static template – a cultural blueprint or the like. Rather, it is a repertoire of (sometimes contradictory) tendencies and developments. The European memoryland, I contend, is characterised more by certain changes underway, and also by particular tensions and ambivalences, than by enduring memorial forms. This is not to say that there are no relatively longstanding patterns within Europe – there are. But they are not necessarily the most significant in the lives of European peoples. Rather than give them analytical priority just on account of their ancestry and age, my concern is to explore how they play out in relation to other parts of the memory complex.

On the other hand, I seek to show that there are also significant variations within Europe. This diversity is not only of the kind that is so often used as part of depictions of European plurality. In other words, it is not just about the ‘multicultural colour’ or ‘local flavours’ provided by, say, heritage foodstuffs or different forms that memorial practices might take. It also concerns less evident but potentially ramifying matters such as whether significance is attached to collective remembering at all, whether longer or shorter time periods are activated in local commemorative life or how personal and collective memories are brought together. This diversity is why the plural ‘memorylands’ is appropriate. Some of this diversity exists at fairly micro, localised – perhaps village or street – levels; but in other cases it carves up Europe along lines relating to particular histories, such as certain patterns of nostalgia in post-Socialist countries or attempts to devise ‘transcultural heritage’ in cities which have experienced post-colonial immigration – though even here there are more localised variations.

Recognising diversity is important for a number of reasons, not least for allowing the empirical to inform analytical understanding. Variations can act as a foil to help to highlight more common practices and assumptions, and can irritate our theorising to lead it in new, less predictable, directions. Alternatives may be brought to light when they come into conflict with majority patterns or when misunderstandings rooted in difference ensue; and, as such, recognising them – and finding better means of doing so – can also provide a basis for improved understanding of conflicts and misunderstandings. Moreover, awareness of ‘cultural alternatives’ can not only unsettle assumptions but can also open up new possibilities by highlighting other routes – other ways of doing memory, heritage and identity – that we might choose to take.

The memory phenomenon

The more specific focus of this book is what has variously been called ‘memory fever’, ‘memory mania’, an ‘obsession with memory’, ‘the memory craze’, a ‘remembrance epidemic’, ‘commemorative fever’, ‘the memory crisis’, ‘the memory industry’, ‘the memory boom’, and a time of ‘archive fever’ and ‘commemorative excess’.² Aspects of it have also been characterised as a ‘heritage industry’, ‘heritage craze’ or ‘heritage crusade’.³ These terms have been coined to characterise an increase in public attention to the past, especially its commemoration and preservation. While prefigured earlier in various ways, this increase is usually dated as gathering pace from the 1970s and escalating further towards the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.⁴ It includes phenomena such as those sketched in the first paragraph of this book above, and others including the creation of new civic rituals to commemorate (sometimes long-) past events, arguments over which histories should be aired in the public sphere and how, popular genealogy, the creation of heritage products, such as traditional foods and the broadcasting of numerous different television programmes about the past ranging from series about archaeology, with names such as Time Team, to historical dramas.

One notable dimension of this historical turn is that place distinctiveness increasingly seems to be marked by public reference to the past, and – sometimes and seemingly more often – to multiple pasts. Places are publicly imbued with time-depth through reference to historical narratives, and their historical content legitimated through institutions such as exhibitions, local history books and memorial plaques. This might be described as ‘historical theming’ – representing places through sets of public memories in order to configure what are assumed will be identifiably individuated ‘lands’. Ironically, rather than differentiating, this theming risks creating an apparent sameness of place – a set of familiar contours shaping a continuous land even as we cross boundaries – through its promulgation of similar strategies or techniques of historical marking. ‘Memoryland’ might easily be the name of a theme-park, or section of one; and ‘place marketing’ and ‘image-management’ are certainly involved in producing historicised village-, town- and cityscapes across Europe. But this is not the whole story and we need to probe further in order to understand why this form of thematisation occurs at all, and in order to perceive the various motives for both pursuing and challenging it. We also need to probe further if we are to perceive differences within the various ways of performing history and memory, as well as to hear the numerous voices that can be involved, and thus acknowledge the need to speak of ‘memorylands’ in the plural.

Many of the terms that have been coined to characterise the increased public attention to the past draw on the language of pathology (‘mania’, ‘epidemic’, ‘fever’, obsession’, ‘craze’) or employ other terms that carry negative connotations (‘crusade’, ‘industry’). This is expressive of an anxious perspective that many commentators adopt; and it is further entrenched through dualisms that pit the apparently disturbing developments against what is regarded as an organic or authentic relationship with the past – sometimes described as ‘tradition’, or ‘social memory’ – which, furthermore, is widely believed to be under threat. Here, I seek neither to straightforwardly accept nor dismiss this perspective. It is, in my view, itself thoroughly and constitutively part of that which it seeks to describe. In other words, the concern expressed about the ‘memory mania’ and its correlated preoccupation with questions of authenticity and loss are part of the ways in which the past is ‘done’ in Europe today. My choice of the term ‘memory phenomenon’ (cf. Kansteiner 2002: 183), then, is intended as less affectively loaded and also as a means of encompassing not only the expansion of public preoccupation with the past but also popular and academic debates and concerns about it.

The memory complex

If the memory phenomenon is the notable increase in attention to the past – and attention to that attention – that has been underway since the second half of the twentieth century, the memory complex is the wider whole of which it is part. Although I use the term memory complex, it should be seen as shorthand for something like ‘the memory-heritage-identity complex’ for these are all tightly interwoven. In choosing to use the term ‘complex’ I have been influenced by its meanings in a number of disciplines, as well as its etymology and allusion to complexity theory. Its general meaning is of an entity ‘consisting of parts united or combined’ (Oxford Etymological Dictionary). Its etymology also carries connotations that are apposite for my use here. Derived from the Latin complexus, past participle of complectere, meaning ‘encompass, embrace, comprehend, comprise’, it is also ‘sometimes analysed as … woven’ (Concise Oxford English Dictionary). A complex, in the sense that I want to develop it here, comprises different elements, woven more or less loosely together. It also has a propulsion towards further encompassment partly through offering what becomes an increasingly taken-for-granted form of comprehending and experiencing.

The ways in which the term ‘complex’ is used in various disciplines can help, by analogy, to explain this further. A chemical complex is a substance that is ‘formed by a combination of compounds’ (COED); ‘the formation of complexes’, says the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘has a strong effect on the behaviour of solutions’.⁵ In Mathematics, complex numbers are made up of real and imaginary parts, the latter being used to help solve mathematical problems that cannot be solved with real numbers alone; and in Linguistics a complex sentence is one including subordinate clauses. What I want to draw out from these is the idea of the complex as consisting of non-exhaustive patterned combinations and relationships; and of complexes themselves gaining autonomous meanings, effects and possibilities for ‘going on’.

I do not, however, want to adopt the popular psychological connotation of a ‘complex’ as being a pathological psychic-emotional condition, though in Carl Jung’s introduction of the term into psychology, he did not regard a complex as necessarily negative (Jung 1971/1921). His understanding of a complex as a meshing of parts and tendencies that add up to some pattern to which we might put a name, and that we can identify with particular effects, does capture the sense of complex that I am striving for here. In addition, Jung’s emphasis on the mix of the cognitive, affective and physical, and his argument about the relevance of history and myth, resonates with what I regard as necessary to include in an understanding of the memory complex, though I do not position my perspective within, or draw on other aspects of, his wider theorising.

Assemblage and complexity

My use of the notion of ‘complex’ is similar to that of ‘assemblage’ as it has come to be used in recent years in some social and cultural theorising.⁶ Both designate some kind of ‘entity’ made up of constituent inter-related parts that then has effects (assemblage theory often refers to ‘potentials’ or ‘capacities’) of its own. As with assemblage, I also want to stress that a complex is not an abstraction, though it may contain abstractions. Rather, it is made up, variously, of constituent practices, affects and materialisations. The memory complex can be seen, therefore, as an assemblage of practices, affects and physical things, which includes such parts as memorial services, nostalgia and historical artefacts. Moreover, assemblage theory insists that we be wary of taking particular objects or categories for granted and that to do this we should investigate specific instances – so, for example, we should examine particular shops and markets rather than simply ‘the market’, or particular museums and heritage sites rather than ‘heritage’ as a generalised category. By doing so, we can recognise the potential variety of forms that a wider term might designate. In addition, we can apprehend the particular mix of human and non-human, conceptual and physical, elements that are involved in constituting a particular assemblage/complex; and we can also identify the processes that contribute to, say, making certain notions or ways of doing things durable or making them capable of extending beyond their locality of origin.

This characterisation fits the approach of this book well, in that it gathers its material from specific instances and gives attention to a wide range of elements, including the materialisation of memory in heritage. Little of the research that I report here, however, has been conceived explicitly within an assemblage perspective. The studies on which I draw are nevertheless often amenable to consideration in relation to assemblage ideas because, as Bruno Latour, one of the architects of an assemblage approach, acknowledges, anthropological research is frequently conducted with just such an emphasis on looking at what actually goes on and interrogating what is taken-for-granted, and thus refrains as far as possible from imputing ‘external’ (or he says, ‘magical’) categories (2005: 68). Indeed, this is why much anthropological theorising proceeds by questioning existing theoretical positions by unsettling their assumptions through in-depth ethnographic examples. This methodological prudence of assemblage and much anthropological theorising extends also to its imputations of agency and causality. Again, there is an emphasis on empirical investigation coupled with a rejection of assumptions of linear causality or singular agents: instead, the stress is on the complex and particular coming together of a mix of agents (human and non-human), and on unpredictable – though not unpatterned and random – effects.

The point that complexity should not be seen as random or chaotic is important and is one reason for the fact that assemblage theory and complexity theory (which is referenced to many of the same authors and shares many of the same ideas)⁷ have produced an extensive vocabulary of terms to try to identify and characterise processes and patterns. The natural sciences have provided particular inspiration here, complexity and assemblage theorising variously employing terms such as ‘feedback’, ‘circulation’, ‘density’, ‘principles of association’, ‘attractors; ‘emergent properties’ and the like. While these can be thought-provoking and illuminating in specific analyses – and I employ some below – I do not seek to use them in any extensive way here. This is primarily because the production of these more general characterisations and distinctions is not my ambition. Rather, I am interested in exploring the specific constellation of the memory phenomenon in Europe and the memory complex of which it is part. This requires, in my view, attention also to meso-level theorising, which can often illuminate particular formations and processes better than can a jump straight to broad ontological claims. In addition, my analysis gives more emphasis to human meaning-ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 The European memory complex: introduction
• 2 Making histories: Europe, traditions and other present pasts
• 3 Telling the past: the multitemporal challenge
• 4 Feeling the past: embodiment, place and nostalgia
• 5 Selling the past: commodification, authenticity and heritage
• 6 Musealisation: everyday life, temporality and old things
• 7 Transcultural heritage: reconfiguring identities and the public sphere
• 8 Cosmopolitan memory: Holocaust commemoration and national identity
• 9 The future of memory – and forgetting – in Europe
• Notes
• References
• Index