The Politics of Memorialization and War (original) (raw)
Related papers
In Whose Honor? On Monuments, Public Spaces, Historical Narratives, and Memory
Museum Anthropology, 2018
Recent organized protests have incurred outrage over monuments commemorating Confederate military leaders; in some cities, such as Baltimore, statues of Confederate military leaders have been removed overnight. In this context of charged public discourse, we ask: Does the immediate removal of these statues and monuments truly change the representation of histories and heritage? This expanded commentary, emanating from a Late‐Breaking Roundtable Session at the American Anthropological Association's 2017 annual meeting, is a discussion of the nuances and more obvious manipulations of power exercised through public spaces, representations, place names, and the production of historical narratives embedded in material forms of cultural memory. Research in the field of museum anthropology offers analysis pertinent to this subject, as well as intentioned practices to support communities addressing the violences, disparities, and racisms embedded in American history, and its material forms of cultural memory. In organizing the session, we suggested participants might explore the significance of “dissonant” or “negative” heritage; the narratives, counternarratives, and contestations highlighted in these controversies; or offer comparative perspectives from contexts other than the United States.
This essay analyzes three highly-contested, sacred spaces: Fetterman Battlefield, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, and Haymarket Square. Each was consecrated by the blood o f the fallen, each was marked with a monument enshrining a particular narrative o f its history, and each has been the site o f sustained argument over who should be remembered. Therefore, each enables us to explore the visual argumentation o f monuments, the functions o f argument in sacred space, the use o f sacred space to expand communal boundaries, the relation between mourning and blood consecration, and the ways in which visual argument may open, or close, consideration o f who is deemed human and worthy o f remembrance. By focusing on attempts to rebut specific arguments made by existing monuments, we uncover the possibilities o f memory technologies designed to correct, expand upon, or contradict previous monuments. We reveal oppositional memory practices by demon strating how public arguments, made on/with particular sacred spaces and in particular times, evolve. M onuments' attempts to stabilize particular histories can be refuted in diverse ways, including: interpretive plaques that access counterhistories and punctuate a space with interruptions; subsequent counter-monuments that " answer back " to the original; and even destruction and/or replacement. Our examples demonstrate that, often, monuments' arguments are answered by expanding the lives that count as griev able, thereby opening spaces in which public grief may be made more inclusive. K ey W ords: visual argument, m em ory, oppositional m em ory practice, grievability, Fetterm an Battlefield, Little Bighorn Battlefield National M onum ent, H aym arket Square On a windswept hill in Wyoming, a cairn lamenting that " there were no survivors " now stands corrected by historical plaques recognizing 1,500 Indian survivors. On the high plains of eastern Montana, a sea of white marble tombstones now is interspersed with red granite warrior markers. In bustling Chicago, a tall, bronze police officer, removed from his original location, loses a century-long standoff with a nearby sculpture of Justice placing a wreath on a fallen laborer. The monuments that occupy sacred sites make arguments about who is worthy of mourning, honor, and remembrance. The monuments themselves endure, but their arguments often are controversial and judgments of worthiness have proven far less permanent. In his influential work, The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade (1959) offered an understanding of the sacred that still resonates within scholarship of sacred space. The sacred, he wrote, " reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world " (p. 31). Nowhere are these functions more apparent than in sacred spaces: spaces set apart from their surroundings, ritually dedicated to the memory of a particular event, hero, or victim, and frequently adorned with enduring markers—often for those who lost their lives there-that offer seemingly eternal narratives of origin and orientation (Foote, 2003, p. 8). By enshrining particular narratives on a sacred site, monuments suggest what is worthy of
Confederate War Grief Transformed: the Openness of Memorials to New Meanings
IN_BO, Ricerche e progetti per il territorio, la città e l’architettura, v.8, n.12 (ISSN 2036 1602), 2017
Civil War memorials in the United States represent the difficult national memory of a still contested internecine war over slavery, social equity, and public values. Today there is a heated debate about physical monuments honoring Confederate leaders and soldiers. For many, the original social memory has disappeared and meanings attributed to them have shifted from association with war dead, or the cult of the "lost cause," to symbols of slavery and white supremacy. Their forms are open to new interpretations connected to human subjectivity and situatedness. Do these confederate memorials glorify racism or absorb the historical memory of grief? This essay examines the ongoing Confederate war memorial debate as evidence of the powerful role of monuments in the city and their ever changing meaning.
Shades of Memory: Reflections on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
2015
Not much attention has been paid to the effect of the Vietnam War on America’s national memory. American public are as divided over the rationale for and the conduct of the Vietnam War, as they are on the proper mode of honor and commemoration for the over fifty-thousand American soldiers who lost their lives in the war. The Vietnam War Memorial has elicited as much embrace as it has drawn flak. There is a split in the literature over the form that memorials should take. There are those who view memorial as a mourning tool and those who see it as a form of nation building. While individuals who are directly impacted by the war view memorials as a form of mourning, the state treats it as an opportunity for nationalistic glory. There is official co-option of the bodies of the fallen soldiers into national cemeteries and narratives. The immense depth of the emotion triggered by the Vietnam War has led to an alternative narrative pushed in opposition to the official narrative of collect...
Memory as Social Action: Cultural Projection and Generic Form in Civil Rights Memorials
New Approches to Rhetoric, 2000
becomes one among many, the question is one of generating an "active trust-trust in others or in institutions (including political institu tions) that has to be actively produced and negotiated" rather than accepted (p. 92). Such negotiation exists in the genres that chronically reproduce those institutions and, in a broader sense, create communi ties as people confront social tasks. In our time, the fragility of cultural and technological innovations easily attracts attention; the contingent stability of rhetorical genres and political institutions often escapes notice. The genres of a community, as staid as this perspective seems to many, offers a promising approach for exploring the generation of an active trust in a posttraditional time. Memory as Social Action Cultural Projection and Generic Form in Civil Rights Memorials Victoria J. Gallagher n my hometown paper, there was a story about a group of people embarking on a civil rights heritage tour. The tour was organized by the Raleigh Martin Luther King Resource Center and began on April 4, the 33rd anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s (MLK) assassi nation at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee (now die site of the National Civil Rights Museum). The travelers on this tour were described as being on a "pilgrimage into the past" and "bonded by their hunger to see civil rights landmarks firsthand" (Starling, 2001, p. ID). Although this story caught my attention because it involved civil rightsrelated memory sites, the linking of memory and tourism struck me as particularly interesting. If, as Danielle Rice (1992, p. 231) notes, "tourism in modern industrial societies helps people to define who they are and what matters in the world," the proliferation of museums, memorials, and sites of memory in the past two decades takes on added significance for scholars interested in examining how culture is commu nicated rhetorically.1
Oppositional Memory Practices: U.S. Memorial Spaces as Arguments Over Public Memory
This essay analyzes three highly-contested sacred spaces: Fetterman Battlefield, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, and Haymarket Square. Each was consecrated by the blood of the fallen, each was marked with a monument enshrining a particular narrative of its history, and each has been the site of sustained argument over who should be remembered. Therefore, each enables us to explore the visual argumentation of monuments, the functions of argument in sacred space, the use of sacred space to expand communal boundaries, the relation between mourning and blood consecration, and the ways in which visual argument may open, or close, consideration of who is deemed human and worthy of remembrance. Our examples demonstrate that, often, monuments' arguments are answered by expanding the lives that count as grievable, thereby opening spaces in which public grief may be made more inclusive.