A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion Edited by (original) (raw)
Related papers
Latin American Journal of Studies of Bodies, Emotions and Society, 2023
Many communities today continue to be haunted by conscious and unconscious memories of past atrocities as they struggle to live with the legacies of brutality and related trauma. These dehumanising events are not just recent wars, violent intercommunal conflicts, genocides, apartheid, and forced displacement, but also more distant outrages, including the occupation of indigenous lands, enslavement, and colonialism. So the trauma was transmitted from one generation to the next, and the effects of dehumanisation are kept alive in our collective memory. In this context, this article explores remembering as beyond the cognition and beyond language. It draws on the normative theory of collective memory and pays attention to remembering as the embodied and the emotional, including the ways that potent sensations and sentiments might encapsulate the unspeakable and in-articulatable experiences of loss, grief and injustice. This allows a further investigation into how remembering the past brutality can transmit and reinforce our identity, relational orientations and actions. As what we remember and how we should remember the past can determine our experience of our dignity and well-being, this article proposes that it requires the ethics of remembering aimed at enriching the healing and transformative potential of collective memory, and inspiring our responsibilities for co-creating a just and humane world.
An Ethical Outlook on The Influence of Memory on Violence
As we witness the growing popularity of what is referred to as memory discourse within the fields of historical and cultural studies, it becomes apparent that there is a lack of systematic insight into the ethical dimension of this subject. This paper attempts to alleviate this imbalance. In the first section, the author scrutinizes the relationship between memory and violence. This has appeared in human history as a very real and multifaceted issue but remains under-explored in philosophy and theology. Given the vibrant nature and moral fickleness of memory, in the second section the author outlines some ethical requirements that should regulate the use of memory. Epistemological, pedagogical and practical aspects of memory are taken into consideration within a comprehensive, broader social context, as well as individual demands. Presuming that memory can be a valuable ingredient of a good life, the author reconsiders the ethical criteria for memory, which should not just prevent violence but also stimulate tolerance and peaceful coexistence. Although the subject of memory has a long philosophical and theological tradition (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Locke, etc.), it appears that the memory discourse or memory boom that had emerged in the 1980s largely bypassed the normative approach. Considering that memory has been the subject of much literature over the last three decades, it is surprising that only a few analytic philosophers have discussed the critical role of memory in coping with the aftermath of the Holocaust. The topic of coping with memory has been primarily left to historians or social scientists, and philosophy and theology have remained largely silent. However, this omission of the normative significance of memory has recently been mitigated by a few outstanding works in the fields of both philosophy and theology; works by, for instance, Avishai Margalit, Jeffrey Blustein, Paul Ricoeur, and Miroslav Volf. This paper takes its starting point in these theories. The importance of the normative approach to how we use past experiences is paramount when observing the large number of conflicts caused by repressed historical traumas that have later surfaced through transgenerational transmission and instilled mutual misunderstandings between ethnic groups. It follows that a memory, as one of the effective tools of managing the past (other tools, for instance, are history, myth and tradition), is very powerful and hence challenging from an ethical point of view. To overcome the conflicts and violence caused by often-manipulated memories, it is not
THE GUARDIANS OF MEMORY Preface and Introduction
The Guardians of Memory and the Return of the Xenophobic Right, 2021
THE GUARDIANS OF MEMORY AND THE RETURN OF THE XENOPHOBIC RIGHT Translated by Alastair McEwen Copyright © Bompiani, 2019 USA Edition copyright © 2020 CPL EDITIONS All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-941046-32-6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface For a Memory Culture Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. By Michael Rothberg. 9 Introduction What Went Wrong? 19 By Valentina Pisanty Chapter I, The Duty of Memory. 31 Chapter II, The Discourse of History 75 Chapter III, Collective Memories 109 Chapter IV, New Cinema of the Shoah 153 Chapter V, The Spectacle of Evil 201 Chapter VI, Denial and Punishment 229 Appendix 263 End notes 285 Bibliography 307 Filmography 329 Index 335
2009
This text introduces students, scholars, and interested educated readers to the issues of human memory broadly considered, encompassing both individual memory, collective remembering by societies, and the construction of history. The book is organised around several major questions: How do memories construct our past? How do we build shared collective memories? How does memory shape history? This volume presents a special perspective, emphasising the role of memory processes in the construction of self-identity, of shared cultural norms and concepts, and of historical awareness. Although the results are fairly new and the techniques suitably modern, the vision itself is of course related to the work of such precursors as Frederic Bartlett and Aleksandr Luria, who in very different ways represent the starting point of a serious psychology of human culture.
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Memory Studies
(draft) In this chapter, I examine the most significant ethical questions surrounding memory, both at the collective and individual levels, as discussed in the literature. I begin by exploring the values associated with memory, including truth, accuracy, integrity, and broader social and political dimensions. I then address the concept of a duty to remember, particularly in the context of genocide and other human atrocities, and the complex questions this concept raises. Following this, I analyze the ethical challenges posed by forgetting, focusing on its collective implications for forgiveness and its individual dimensions, such as the responsibility for forgetting and the right to be forgotten. After briefly discussing memory virtues-a topic that remains underexplored in the literature-I explore the ethical considerations surrounding the wishes of individuals with severe memory loss, such as those with dementia. Finally, I summarize ethical debates related to current and hypothetical cases of memory modification, erasure, and enhancement, highlighting their potential impacts on personal identity, agency, authenticity, moral responsibility, testimony, and their overall desirability.
Memories as religion: What can the broken continuity of tradition bring about? − Part two
In postmodern societies the symbolic vacuum, a result of the loss of a unified religious tradition, calls for substitutes in the form of fragmentary and isolated memories. By drawing from the reservoir of those memories in an arbitrary and subjective way, privatised (deinstitutionalised) religion creates a kind of symbolic bricolage. Can such a bricolage become more than a mere ‘counterfeit’ of collective meaning that religion once used to provide? Can religious tradition, based on a broken continuity of memory, still bring about a matrix of the ways of expressing one’s faith? If so, how? This twofold study seeks to explore those and similar questions by means of showing, firstly, in what sense religion can be conceived of as memory which produces collective meanings (Part One) and, secondly, what may happen when individualised and absolutised memories alienate themselves from a continuity of tradition, thus beginning to function as a sort of private religion (Part Two). Being the second part of the study in question, this article aims at exploring the postmodern crisis of religious memory, which includes the pluralisation of the channels of the sacred and the differentiation of a total religious memory into a plurality of specialised circles of memory. Firstly, it examines the three main aspects of the current crisis of continuity at large, namely the affirmation of the autonomous individual, the advance of rationalisation, and the process of institutional differentiation. Secondly, the plurality of the channels of the sacred is discussed in light of religion’s apparently unique way of drawing legitimisation from its reference to tradition. This is followed by two illustrations of the reconstruction of religious memory. In the final section of the article, a theological reflection on possible directions that may be taken in the face of the postmodern crisis of religious memory is offered.