By Sharon Macdonald
Memorylands is an unique and interesting research of the character of historical past, reminiscence and understandings of the previous in Europe this present day. It seems at how Europe has develop into a ’memoryland’ – suffering from fabric reminders of the earlier, comparable to museums, background websites and memorials; and at how this ‘memory phenomenon’ is expounded to the altering nature of identities – specifically eu, nationwide and cosmopolitan. In doing so, it presents new insights into how reminiscence and the previous are being played and reconfigured in Europe – and with what results.
Drawing specially, although no longer completely, on circumstances, options and arguments from social and cultural anthropology, Memorylands argues for a deeper and extra nuanced figuring out of the cultural assumptions focused on on the subject of the prior. It theorizes some of the ways that ‘materializations’ of identification paintings and relates those to various types of id inside of Europe. The booklet additionally addresses questions of method, together with dialogue of ancient, ethnographic, interdisciplinary and cutting edge equipment. via a wide-range of case-studies from throughout Europe, Sharon Macdonald argues that Europe is domestic to a miles higher variety of how of creating the prior current than is mostly learned – and a better diversity of types of ‘historical consciousness’. while, in spite of the fact that, she seeks to spotlight what she calls ‘the ecu reminiscence complicated’ – a repertoire of ordinary styles in types of recollection and ‘past presencing’.
The examples in Memorylands are drawn from either the margins and metropolitan centres, from the rather small-scale and native, the nationwide and the avant-garde. The e-book seems at pasts which are probably identity-disrupting – or ‘difficult’ – in addition to those who verify identities or supply chances for transcending nationwide identities or articulating extra cosmopolitan futures. issues lined contain authenticity, temporalities, embodiment, commodification, nostalgia and Ostalgie, the musealization of daily and folk-life, Holocaust commemoration and tourism, narratives of conflict, the background of Islam, transnationalism, and the way forward for the previous.
Memorylands is engagingly written and available to normal readers in addition to delivering a brand new synthesis for complex researchers in reminiscence and background reviews. it's crucial studying for these attracted to identities, reminiscence, fabric tradition, Europe, tourism and heritage.
Read Online or Download Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today PDF
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Extra info for Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today
Example text
There are, however, certain shifts that have been discussed by historians that are a prelude to the current memory phenomenon. I have already noted the notion of possessive individualism, which, it has been argued, became widespread in Europe from the seventeenth century. This turned memory and the past – and awareness of the past – into crucial elements of identity, initially personal and then, especially from the late eighteenth century, national. Then, in a logic of inversion, that so 22 The European memory complex often seems to operate in the social sphere, a continuous memory or history could itself become a way of proclaiming distinctive, individuated entities.
What is recalled, when and why? Whose pasts are told in the public sphere? What is forgotten, not mentioned or perhaps only told in whispers? And what notions of continuity, change, repetition or rupture shape or are expressed in recounted memories? This chapter looks first at some of the background to interest in these questions among anthropologists of Europe, focusing on interest in the invention of tradition. It then presents and discusses a range of examples and debates about the making of histories and variations in forms of historical consciousness in Europe.
Chris Hann points out, for example, that the Urals ‘were nominated for the role of boundary marker only in the middle of the eighteenth century, when Russian intellectuals were determined to prove that the Czarist empire, or at least its capital and historic core, belonged to Europe The European memory complex 21 rather than to Asia’ (2012: 88). Framing his own account in terms of ‘Eurasia’, Hann identifies various continuities and shared histories across Europe and Asia, and presents these too as challenging any taken-for-granted unity of the former (and, presumably, also the latter, though this is not stated).