Politics of collective memory

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Politics of collective memory

• 13.10.2004

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Discussion topics

• Anthropology of collective memory in general
• Memory as
• Invention
• 19th c national awakening
• Resistance
• Communist era
• Recovery
• Regime change
• Klumbyte on Lithuania
• Nostalgia
• Post-communist era
• Berdahl on '(N)Ostalgie'
• Seminar discussion

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Study of collective memory

• Memory
• short-term or working memory
• long-term memory
• Interest for anthropologists
• Study of memory
• Psychology
• How people remember?
• Anthropology
• What people remember?
• What determines what people remember?
• Memory and culture
• Culture filters what is remembered
• Memory and power
• society determines what and how is remembered

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Anthropology of collective memory

• Memory is political
• Means of legitimation
• To validate the present
• Means of resistance
• To contest the present

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Anthropology of collective memory

• Past is subject to multiple interpretations
• Maurice Halbwachs
• La Memoire Collective (1950)
• History is a battleground for rival attachments
• Archaeological findings
• German archaeologists in 1940-42 in W-Poland
• Estonian / Russian archaeologists in SE-Estonia

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Anthropology of collective memory

• Memory is selective
• Remembering
• What and how?
• Forgetting
• structural amnesia (Barnes 1947)
• censorship of memory
• Soviet Encyclopedia syndrome
• Past is constructed
• Hobsbawm and Ranger Invention of Tradition
  (1983)

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Anthropology of collective memory

• Written vs oral history
• Alternative history
• Official vs unofficial history
• Official history
• written by the victors
• Unofficial history
• Counter-history
• James Scott
• onstage and offstage behaviour
• public vs hidden transcripts

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Invention of tradition

• Estonian national awakening (19th c)
• Baltic German initiative
• Scholarly interest in exotic cultural other
• Masing
• founder of Estonian written language
• never considered himself an Estonian
• Kreutzwald
• Author of Kalevipoeg (The Son of Kalev)
• doubted in the Estonians capacity for
  independent development

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Invention of tradition

• Estonia and Estonians in the 19th c
• No collective identity
• Not a distinct political entity
• Estonia and Livonia
• Not a distinct linguistic entity
• no written language
• country people (maarahvas)
• Estonian people (eesti rahvas) first used in
  1857

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Invention of tradition

• No glorious and heroic past
• historical consciousness by romanticization of
• folk traditions
• peasant life-style
• National epic Kalevipoeg (1857)
• invented by Kreutzwald
• moral message personified in the mythical hero
• one day an age will dawn/ when all spills, at
  both their ends,/ will burst forth into flame
  /and this stark fire will sever/ the vise of
  stone from Kalevipoeg's hand./ Then the son of
  Kalev will come home -/ to bring his children
  happiness/ and build Estonias life anew

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Politics of memory communist era

• Offical history
• Past read from the present
• monologic historical explanation (Kligman)
• Soviet Encyclopedia syndrome
• Alternative histories
• Oral histories individual life-histories
• memories of the first republic in 1918-40
• Soviet occupation in 1940
• WWII
• mass deportations into Siberia in 1941 and 1949
• Counter-histories
• Elsewhere published texts
• Samizdat
• RFE, VoA

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Politics of memory Soviet era

• Song festivals
• The first in June 1869
• to awaken people to national consciousness
• nationalist in form, socialist in content
• Modifications in form and content under Brezhnev
• rituals and memory
• commemorative ceremonies (Connerton 1989)
• Repetitive
• gt periodical reassertion of collective identity
  and solidarity.
• collective effervescence (Durkheim 1912)
• gt Singing Revolution

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Recovery of memory - transition

• Remembering
• Reinterpretation and rewriting
• Recovering
• Re-burial
• The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (Verdery)
• Susan Gal on Bartoks reburial

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Recovery of memory - transition

• Renegotiation and invention
• Belarus

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Recovery of memory - transition

• Forgetting
• Tearing down statues and monuments
• Occupation museum (Tallinn)
• Statue Park (Szoborpark, Budapest)
• Burning passports
• Minorities

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Communism as memory

• Contesting interpretations
• Ethnic, generational divisions
• WWII
• Tallinn liberation in 1944
• Nostalgia
• commodification of communism
• commercialization of memories
• indicator of socioeconomic inequality
• Communist governments