Till E. Karen & Kuusisto-Arponen, Anna-Kaisa: Towards responsible geographies of memory: complexities of place and the ethics of remembering (original) (raw)
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TOWARDS RESPONSIBLE GEOGRAPHIES OF MEMORY: COMPLEXITIES OF PLACE AND THE ETHICS OF REMEMBERING
Debates about the meanings of place often emerge when unsettled pasts resurface unexpectedly in ways that dislocate present-day land-uses. Such was the case for the IGU 2011 Regional Meeting in Chile, which was held in Santiago's Military Academy. When considering the geographical scholarship about place and memory, the debates resulting from the conference should not be surprising. Geographers have long examined the controversial processes of social memory and forgetting at places marked by state-perpetrated violence and have noted the unpredictability of group memory due to the translocal nature of how places are connected to peoples and pasts through socio-political networks, cultural and economic connections, and personal and shared emotional geographies. To understand the complexities of ethical relationships we have with places marked by violence , we look to another example, the Memorial and Museum Camp Westerbork in the Netherlands. The past is never 'set in stone' or stable in present-day landscapes. Just as the narratives associated with remembering and forgetting the past may change through time, so too do the spatial contexts of memory. When space-times shift unexpectedly, new social discussions about the significance of the past in the present may emerge. With both examples in mind, we conclude by making a case for the creation of " responsible geographies of memory ". We argue that it is our professional responsibility as geographers and our obligation as global citizens to: 1) acknowledge that landscapes often function as places of critical testimony for survivors; 2) problema-tize singular claims to the authenticity of place made through universal narratives and seemingly stable material landscapes; 3) create safe spaces of listening, wherein stories about place can be articulated and acknowledged by various stakeholders, while recognizing the moral complexities in representing violence through textual, visual and embodied means; and 4) recognize the progressive potential of places as cosmopolitan spaces of encounter and learning. By treating places marked by difficult pasts as cosmopolitan, hosts and visitors are invited to engage critically with the unfolding processes of memory politics, and adopt respectful approaches toward justice that includes caring for places and peoples in the past and present. Zusammenfassung: Debatten über die Bedeutung von Orten der Erinnerung entstehen oftmals, wenn eine nicht aufgearbeitete Vergangenheit die gegenwärtige Nutzung dieser Orte in unerwarteter Weise in Frage stellt. Genau dies war der Fall, als im Jahr 2001 das IGU Regional Meeting in Chile in Santiagos Militärakademie ausgerichtet wurde. Ein Blick in die einschlägige geogra-phische Literatur über Erinnerungsorte lässt die aus dieser Konferenz sich ergebende Debatte kaum überraschend erscheinen. Die kontroversen Prozesse kollektiven Gedenkens und Vergessens an Orten, die durch staatlich verübte Gewaltverbrechen gekennzeichnet sind, gelten seit langem als Gegenstand geographischer Forschung. Die Erkenntnisse belegen, dass kollektives Gedenken angesichts des translokalen Charakters, wie Orte mit Menschen und ihrer Vergangenheiten durch sozio-politische Netzwerke, kulturell und ökonomische Verbindungen sowie persönliche und geteilte Geographien der Emotion verknüpft sind, letztlich unvorhersehbar bleibt. Um die Komplexität unserer ethischen Beziehungen zu von Gewalt geprägten Orten zu verste-hen, betrachten wir ein weiteres Beispiel – die " Gedenkstätte und Museum Lager Westerbork " in den Niederlanden. Vergangen-heit ist nie " in Stein gemeißelt " oder gleichbleibend in der gegenwärtigen Landschaft. Ebenso wie sich die mit Gedenken und Vergessen verbundenen Geschichten im Laufe der Zeit verändern können, gilt dies auch für räumliche Kontexte der Erinnerung. Kommt es zu unerwarteten Verschiebungen dieses raum-zeitlichen Gefüges, können daraus neue soziale Diskussionen über die Bedeutung der Vergangenheit für die Gegenwart erwachsen. Auf der Grundlage beider Fallbeispiele plädieren wir in der Schlussfolgerung für die Entwicklung " verantwortungsbewusster Geographien der Erinnerung ". Wir sind der Auffassung, dass es sowohl unserer professionellen Verantwortung als Geographen, als auch unserer Pflicht als Weltbürger entspricht: 1) anzuer-kennen, dass Landschaften oftmals bedeutsame Zeugnisse für Überlebende darstellen; 2) einseitige Ansprüche auf Authentizität von Orten zu hinterfragen, die sich aus universalen Narrativen und vermeintlich beständigen materiellen Landschaften ergeben; 3) sichere Räume des Zuhörens zu schaffen, in denen unterschiedliche Interessengruppen ihre jeweiligen Erzählungen artikulie-ren und anerkennen sowie die moralische Komplexitäten der Gewalt textlich, visuell und verkörpert vermittelt werden können, und 4) das zunehmende Potential von Orten der Erinnerung als kosmopolitische Räume der Begegnung und des Lernens zu erkennen. Eine kosmopolitische Sicht auf historisch belastete Orte lädt Veranstalter und Besucher dazu ein, sich mit den Prozes-sen von Erinnerungspolitiken kritisch auseinanderzusetzen und eine respektvolle Haltung gegenüber einer solchen Gerechtigkeit einzunehmen, die (Für-)Sorge für Erinnerungsorte wie auch Menschen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart einschließt.
2014
This volume offers a variety of perspectives on the relation between violence, memory and space. Focusing on enforced disappearances and genocide as violent practices aimed at destroying and erasing the traces of the 'enemy', the authors explore the manifold spatial strategies of domination and violence, and the powers of memory, resistance and transformation. The originality of this book lies in the dialogue it establishes between memory studies and the critical studies of space. The bridging of these academic fields opens up a fertile and, to a large extent, unexplored research area. Engaging with the spatial deployment of past and present violence in Argentina, Cambodia, Germany, Greece, Poland, Spain, Turkey and the United States, the chapters include an original interview with the eminent geographer David Harvey and fragments of The Cartographer. Warsaw 1:400.000 by the acclaimed Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga in its first English edition.
Geography and Memory: Explorations in Identity, Place and Becoming
Geography and Memory: Explorations in Identity, Place and Becoming, 2013
Geography and Memory creates a new space of study by assembling international scholars and emerging talent for the first coherent and co-ordinated approach to explorations of identity, place and becoming. In focusing upon these three dynamics the editors have organised the relationship between geography and memory into an accessible framework for approaching key aspects of memory, remembering, archives, commemoration and forgetting in modern societies. The contributors are drawn from a range of local, national and international contexts, including the UK, Germany, USA, Malaysia and Australia. The book uniquely opens up the disciplines of geography (human, political, cultural and physical) into a dialogue with other disciplines such as media, the arts, heritage, psychology, psychotherapy, politics, sociology and cognitive science so as to present a wide-ranging and nuanced approach to memory studies.
Studia Phaenomenologica 2019 – Volume 19 — On Conflict and Violence, https://www.zetabooks.com/studia-phaenomenologica-2019-volume-19-on-conflict-and-violence.html?fbclid=IwAR3AYkc7v3FaOPvwLPC5V5puYn-Rw1tuGt4QWo\_ZtzT9gJayNzo1fuGhuEw#.XeeMoppcSTE.facebook, 2019
Acts of violence develop in relation to place and involve the violation of its very limits. Every significant place is a scene of history, its limits embrace presence and sense. As such, it is the life-worldly home of memory. In this article, I will retrieve the bodily affective dimension of the phenomenon of place memory in instances of public commemoration. Drawing on different philosophical horizons like those of mainly Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Adorno, Ricoeur and Bataille, I'll contrast their different perspectives on the question of the intertwining of violence, place and memory and refer them to the narrative work of memorials (e.g. Libeskind's and Eisenman's for Berlin). Insofar violence has been traditionally represented and thereby obliterated by architecture, we may ask how should genocide, as the unspeakable and ungraspable be expressed? I'll suggest that it can only be attained by the suspension of meaning and presence: A narrative of bodily affections, of pathos, suffering and excess that accounts for what in itself remains beyond expression.
Sites of violence and their communities: critical memory studies in the post-human era
International Journal of Heritage, Memory and Conflict
Sites of Violence and their Communities" presents the results of a research project that brought together scholars and practitioners of memory work in an attempt to critically reinterpret the links between sites, their (human, and non-human) users, and memory. These interdisciplinary discussions focused on overlooked, repressed or ignored sites of violence that may benefit from new approaches to memory studies, approaches that go beyond the traditional focus on communication, symbolism, representation and communality. Clandestine or contested sites, in particular, pose challenging questions about memory practices and policies: about the status of unacknowledged victims and those who witnessed their deaths; about those who have inherited the position of "bystander"; about the ontology of human remains; and about the ontologies of the sites themselves, with the natural and communal environments implicated in their perdurance. Claude Lanzmann-one of the first to undertake rigorous research on abandoned, uncommemorated or clandestine sites of violence-responded to Pierre Nora's seminal conception with his work and with the critical notion of "non-lieux de mémoire." Methodologies emerging from more traditional as well as recently introduced perspectives (like forensic, ecological, and material ones) allowed team members to engage with such "non-sites of memory" from new angles. The goal was to consider the needs and interests of post-conflict societies; to identify and critically read unofficial transmissions of memory; and to relocate memory in new contexts-in the grassroots of social, political and institutional processes where the human, post-human and natural merge with unanticipated mnemonic dynamics.
Space and Polity, 2019
This paper examines the role of landscape in the local experiences of traumatic events in a rural hinterland of the Croatian-Serbian border. We study how landscape sets conditions and affords particular opportunities for local memory practices in response to traumatic events in a former clover field in the village of Lovas in Croatia. Like urban environments rural areas may be physically scarred by conflict, yet the effects are often less explicit, particularly to the external gaze. Like cities, rural landscapes may be ‘wounded’ and remain unsettled as sites of trauma. Landscape presents a significant medium and lens through which to study how hinterland communities cope with the legacies of violence. Often local communities are subject to state-led memorialization that tends to perpetuate conflict. However, under particular circumstances local actors may also harbour the distinct potential of landscape to enact the work of memory in closer correspondence to their needs. Recent scholarship has revealed the importance of place in the memory culture and politics of traumatized communities in urban borderlands. We argue that landscape settings in the hinterland of state borders play no less significant a role in mediating the complex dynamics of conflict and its aftermath for local commemorative practice.
Landscapes of Memory and Socially Just Futures
Erika Doss (2010: 2) has used the phrase "memorial mania" to describe the United States' growing "obsession with issues of memory and history and an urgent desire to express and claim those issues in visibly public contexts." The American landscape is increasingly populated with statues, monuments, museums, roadside shrines, historical plaques, public art installations, and other commemorative sites -permanent and temporary as well as spontaneous and planned. Similarly, David Lowenthal (1996) characterized society as "possessed" by a cult-or religious-like devotion to the past. Heritage has become a global industry that sells the past to promote tourism and development, feeding a rampant consumer appetite for things retro, restored, and reenacted. These activities signal an important transition in the construction of landscapes of memory, from a historically elite-dominated practice to one increasingly populist in terms of its participants and historical themes.