Invisible threads linking phantasmal landscapes in Java: Haunted places and memory in post-authoritarian Indonesia (original) (raw)
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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.
Filling the Absence: the re-embodiment of sites of mass atrocity and the practices they generate
Despite the particularities that are present within every instance of genocide or state terror, one thing they all share is that, once the physical violence ends, there are always sites that are left behind, many of which contain material reminders or even concrete evidence of the violations that occurred within their boundaries. By focusing specifically on la Escuela Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), the largest former concentration camp in Argentina, this article examines these sites as places that allow for a certain set of shared, embodied practices to be performed both by the curators or organizers of the sites, as well as the visitors to the sites. I argue that it is never the spaces themselves, but rather the practices that transpire within these spaces and through the process of transforming the space from a site of atrocity into a site of memory that influence the constructive processing of past violence. They do so through their ability to make people re-encounter and re-activate the past in the present.
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.
Landscapes of Violence Witnesses and the Changing Goals of Memorialization
Violence is experienced by many people first hand. While some of these people are later allowed to serve as witnesses through memorialization, many are not. Often, those excluded encompass whole categories of people: victims, perpetrators, soldiers, women, etc. Who is allowed to serve as a witness during memorialization often depends on a range of factors, such as timing and context. But the very definition of a witness also shapes what outcomes are possible from memorialization. This article looks at three members of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience from three different contexts (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Italy), and examines how their varying definitions of what a witness is are not only rooted in the needs of their societies, but also shape their memorialization and its impact on those societies.
Keepers of the Grave: Ritual Guides, Ghosts, and Hidden Narratives in Indonesian History
Space and Culture , 2021
The 1965 killings in Indonesia brought about the incarceration, disappearances, and deaths of 500,000 to one million alleged members of the Indonesian Communist Party. This article concentrates on several suspected mass graves in Central Java reputed to have supernatural energy emanating from the violent deaths of the individuals buried there. These sites also have gatekeepers or juru kunci bridging the living and the spirits inhabiting these spaces. This research asks, How do these sites, through their juru kunci, elucidate a past which continues to be silenced? I posit that through contact with the souls of the executed, these gatekeepers utilize an ethereal connection to subvert the state's enforced silence. These sites also provide a ritual space transforming these ghosts into ancestors worthy of remembrance. By reclaiming the identities of those murdered, the living and the dead can achieve a kind of localized spiritual reconciliation.
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) problematize 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.
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.