landscapes

5

Introduction

Landscapes of Violence: Memory and Sacred Space

Katharina Schramm

Violence leaves traces. Be it habitually remembered or consciously evoked, it has profound effects on individual consciousness as well as collective identifications. Moreover, the memory of violence is not only embedded in peoples bodies and minds but also inscribed onto space in all kinds of settings: memorials, religious shrines, border zones or the natural envi-ronment. The process of the identification of memory with place is not at all self-evident, as it implies the complex entanglement of procedures of remembering, forgetting and the production of counter-memories.1 Our specific focus on memorial landscapes of violence widens the scope of analysis by drawing together processes of movement and emplace-ment, thereby emphasizing the dynamics and translocal embedding of commemorative activity. Such landscapes are never uniform or fixed, but rather emergent and contested; they are constantly re/produced by the different people who are engaged in memory work in various ways.2

In the existing literature, the description of the relationship between official commemorations and popular or minority discourses and counter-memories as a contested terrain often implies that these positions are mutually exclusive.3 However, such a dichotomization of positions tends to obscure the many overlaps between them.4 The articles in our collection therefore aim at presenting a more balanced view of these encounters, without denying the existing power asymmetries between different subject positions, or the political interests that are at stake in the commemoration of violence. We therefore focus on the extensive permeation of the several

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6 History & Memory, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2011)

layers of interpretation through which a memorial landscape is perceived and trans/formed.

Moreover, places and landscapes do not simply act as memory con-tainers but rather profoundly shape, and are also shaped by, the ways in which violence is experienced and performed as well as remembered.5 All contributors to this special issue therefore pay close attention to the material aspects of the landscapes they analyze, be it in terms of authentication (Eschebach, Schuble, Schramm), imaginative potential (Schuble, Schramm) or the obstruction of movement that impedes on certain memories and engenders others (Feldman). Careful not to attribute agency solely to the physical environment,6 the authors meticu-lously carve out the shifting interface between symbolic forms, narrative strategies and material practices as it becomes apparent in the politically charged realm of commemoration.7 This tense relationship is apparent in designed memorialswhether erected at sites where violence and suffer-ing took place, such as the former Ravensbrck concentration camp in East Germany (Eschebach), or in central national locations, such as the Berlin Holocaust Memorial (discussed below).8 It is also expressed at sites where natural landscape features become saturated with meaning through memorial ascription, as for example in the case of the Dinaric mountain range that separates Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which has been the scene of several violent conflicts (Schuble), or in the example of the northern Ghanaian landscape that is being redesigned as a destination for African American pilgrimage tourists in search of the slave trail (Schramm). Finally, it can be observed in the unavoidable confrontation between dif-ferent groups of religious pilgrims to the Holy Land and contemporary politics at the recently erected Separation Wall between Israel and the Palestinian territories (Feldman).

Apart from concretizing the notion of landscapes of violence, the case studies brought together here aim at investigating a specific aspect of the relationship between violence, memory, body and landscapenamely the sacralization of memorial space. Hence, the sacred is not to be understood as an innate and unchanging quality inherent to certain objects or sites, but rather as potentiality, which may take different forms for different actors.9 Sacralization, as we understand it, takes place on two levels. First, it concerns the violent past and its relationship with the present. On the one hand, this linkage can be articulated in the overtly religious realm. For

7

Introduction

example, past violence may reverberate in the articulations and demands of ancestral and other spirits, which need to be constantly addressed by the living; or, it may be incorporated into religious liturgy, in prayers, votive shrines and the like. On the other hand, sacralization may also take place in more secular settings, namely through the explicit ascription of meaning to a violent past.10 The victim, the martyr and the hero are narrative figures through which such conversion of the inexplicable into the meaningful may be channeledand, as needs to be kept in mind, these figures are usually gendered. Second, the concept of sacralization relates to concrete places. These may either unfold their (sacred) potentiality through their authentic appearance, as unintentional monuments, which often become spiritual abodes or pilgrimage destinations. They may also be specifically designed for commemorative purposes, as intentional monuments, which follow a spatial choreography that aims at the creation of a sacred center.11 All these aspects are in constant motion and conversation with each other.

Declaring something sacred means to remove it from the everyday realm, giving it special attention and symbolic value and, at least ideally, deeming it undisputable. If applied to the commemoration of violence, the process of sacralization can be regarded as an attempt to bring the past to a close and adjust it to a future-oriented and almost evolutionist narrative of progress. Yet, as Walter Benjamin has already demonstrated in his powerful interpretation of Paul Klees painting Angelus Novus, the possibility of healing remains an illusion.12 Consequently, the attempts to create closure may be contrasted by conscious efforts to keep the past alive; or at least to actually address its complexities and the uncomfort-able gray zone, which characterizes the space in-between unequivocal positions.13 In addition, we deal with processes of embodiment and ritual reenactment that are not necessarily or exclusively discursively framed or reflected. As J. Shawn Landres and Oren Baruch Stier have observed, In some cases, disputes arise over memories of violence at sacred places; in other cases, the memory of violence itself is what makes the place sacred.14 The articles in this issue aim to address these different dimensions of the production of sacrality.

Before I introduce the individual contributions in more detail, I will provide a brief discussion of the relevant theoretical debates that have shaped our specific take on the landscapes of violence, namely, the relation-

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ship between violence and memory in general, the concept of landscape, and eventually the connection between commemoration and sacralization.

REMEMBERInG VIOLEnCE

The relationship between violence and memory has been given wide atten-tion in the social sciences, partly reflecting an ongoing public concern with the disturbing presence of the past, and the question of how to properly deal with its commemoration.15 A good example for this congruence between academic and public interests is the heated debate that evolved over the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. It not only revolved around the problems of how to adequately represent the past in monumental space (and the concomitant politics of exclusion) or of the tense relationship between victims and perpetrators, but also involved discussions over the parallel lack of funding and attention for the already existing memorials at authentic sites of nazi atrocities.16

The debate over the Berlin Holocaust Memorial (like the memorial itself) points toward a number of issues that are central to the discussion of violence and memory. First, it concerns the constitution of (national) identity that is the focus of so many analyses of the workings of memory and forgetting in contemporary social relations.17 Violence plays an impor-tant role in this constellation, as it often demarcates the grounds for the creation of national or other communal foundation myths (of resistance as well as of victory or defeat). In such nationalist narratives, The dark stories of terror and bloodshed are only memorized to be remembered/forgotten, as Peter van der Veer has put it.18 In other words, these are attempts to bring about closure and homogeneity in interpreting the past; (national) identity is thereby turned into a sacred object.19 The latter observation is not just limited to collective identities but also refers to a growing preoccupation with the past by individuals.20 These developments are echoed in an academic memory boom, which has been widely criticized as too imprecise. For example, Thomas Laqueur argues that memory has been appropriated by a discourse of sacrality, a tendency that he wants to oppose with a return to more objectified historical research.21 Aware of these criticisms, we nevertheless feel that it is necessary and worthwhile

9

Introduction

to explore the politics, i.e. the production and negotiation of memory, identity and sacralization.

A second, albeit closely related, field in which violence and memory are brought together, is the narration of victimhood that is often domi-nated by a discourse of trauma.22 If we consider trauma as the endless repetition of a violent experience, it is necessarily opposed to any idea of closure. Yet the focus on victimhood also entails the problematic dimen-sion of victimizationoften by means of a universalized (and mediatized) discourse of suffering that denies agency to survivors who find healing an unavailable (and unacceptable) option.23

Moreover, one needs to be careful not to essentialize suffering by creating a strict opposition between official and popular commemorations of violence (or between state and society).24 Avoiding such dichoto-mies, Laurence Kirmayer explores the connections between individual and collective forms of addressing trauma. According to him, Trauma shared by a whole community creates a potential public space for retelling. If a community agrees traumatic events occurred and weaves this fact into its identity, then collective memory survives and individual memory can find a place (albeit transformed) within that landscape.25 Drawing on a Halbwachsian notion of memory as socially framed, Kirmayer develops a healing perspective that is processual (and perhaps perpetual) rather than given and/or total.26

A third dimension in the discussion of violence and memory concerns the role and contemporary position of perpetrators, which is particularly relevant in German discussions of national Socialism and the Holocaust,27 but also comes up in other contexts, such as the postwar societies of the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda after the genocide, or post-apartheid South Africa. Together with the problem of victimhood, it is closely linked to the issue of reconciliation and the political implications of violent pasts. This theme has become prominently exposed in the various public tribunals that have sprung up since the 1990s, following the example of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In his account of the latter institution, Richard Wilson addresses the problematic representation of the past in a framework of healing and bureaucratic documentation which not only circumvents the issue of justice but also robs the individual of his or her experiences by subordinating them to the objective of nation building.28 Analyzing the truth-making machine as a means of pro-

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ducing new South African citizens, Wilson demonstrates how yet again memories of violence are brought to the surface in the public arena only to store them away even more securely afterwards; and he points out the limitations and inconsistencies of such an approach.

LAnDSCAPES OF/AS MEMORY

In these more general reflections on the linkage between violence and memory, the specific connections between landscape and memory are only sporadically addressed. Therefore, another important theoretical strand on which our argumentation is built is the understanding of landscape as process.29 As Eric Hirsch has emphasized, landscapes are never purely representational, but rather exist as part of peoples everyday practices and are therefore in constant flux.30 At the same time, they are consciously interpreted as well as manipulated by various actors and may thus indeed be associated with outwardly political or ideological perspectives, espe-cially if we deal with the memory of violence. This tension, which is often accompanied by a differentiation between local and outsider perspec-tives, can be grasped as the relationship between landscape as memory and landscape of memory, a distinction that was introduced by Susanne Kchler in her account of Malangan ritual arts.31 The former concept is closely associated with a dwelling perspective, where to perceive the landscape is to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perpetually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past, as it was poignantly put by Tim Ingold.32 The latter view, by contrast, privileges a more detached outlook, whereby intentionality is the dominant mode of landscape formation. Our perspective on sacral-ized landscapes of violence is an attempt to bring these two dimensions together and to explore their dynamic interplay.

The impact and reflection of violent pasts on the perception and construction of landscape has been explored in a number of contexts. One of the questions at the heart of this concern is the relationship between absence and presence. A prominent example for the attempted re/creation of a presence out of absence is the post-apartheid District Six Museum in Cape Town, where former residents of the demolished quarter were

11

Introduction

invited to inscribe their memories literally onto the museum grounds, by drawing street maps and attaching personal memorabilia to these. In addition, pilgrimage-like trips were organized to the sites of destruction, which aimed at asserting peoples spiritual ownership of the scarred landscape.33

However, such a recovery is not always possible. Thus, Ulrich Baer discusses how meaning is at the same time ascribed and denied to land-scape in Holocaust photography. The pictures of wooded clearings at the former Ohrdruf concentration camp do not reveal themselves immediately to the viewer; nothing but the inscription on the photograph indicates that these are sites of violence, suffering and extinction. The so-created sense of profound emptiness in these images gives loss a topography by showing us that nothingnot knowledge, empathy, commemoration, indignation, mourning, or shamecan fill these silent spaces.34

Silence is a recurrent reaction to the experience of violence. It is often associated with repression as well as conscious attempts at forgetting. Chal-lenging these assumptions with regard to the memory of the transatlantic slave trade in her account of Temne ritual and landscape interpretation in Sierra Leone, Rosalind Shaw argues that the memory of violence may be embodied rather than narratively articulated.35 A similar position is taken by Marianne C. Ferme, who extends the scope of her analysis to layered memories of violence, including those of more recent conflicts, such as the Sierra Leonean Civil War.36

The linkage between ritual practices and the memory of violence is also brought to the fore by Eric Mueggler in his analysis of the memory of the devastating famine during the Great Leap Forward in China. Mueggler explores the subversive aspects and transformative power of local ritual practices (the exorcism of the wild ghosts of furious and unmourned victims of the famine) vis--vis an oppressive state. To him, people are subject to the economic and political geographies that shape landscapes, but they are actively subject; they refashion these geographies locally and find their own routes through them. So too with the dominant architec-tures of time.37 In many contexts, this notion of a dominant architecture of time relates to the creation of clear-cut, unequivocal and closed read-ings of history that can be contrasted with more fuzzy interpretations of a past that reaches out into the present.38

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Another straightforward connection between landscape, violence and memory is evident in the struggle over the dead bodies of victims of violence, either in attempts of retrieval or of burial.39 The theme of death is prominent in most accounts of past violence and it is given specific attention in designed memorial landscapes.40 Here, the multifarious and ambiguous effects of sacralization become particularly evident.

MEMORY AnD SACRED SPACE

Healing on the one hand and glorification on the other can be regarded as two ends of a spectrum of intentionality that is connected to the sacralizing mode of representation in memorials. To Mike Rowlands, this classification involves a distinction between more personal practices of remembrance that are associated with memorials, and a collective, celebratory mode of commemoration associated with monuments.41 Since memory is a tran-sitory and transformative practice, these categories are never absolute. On the one hand, Rowlands notes a diachronic shift from memorials to monuments that he characterizes as follows:

Memorials become monuments as a result of the successful comple-tion of the mourning process. The dead are dead as an active process of remembering to forget, through the creation of an appropriate memory. Triumphalism ... achieves this through the assertion of collective omnipotence and by banishing from memory ... acts of humiliation.... The temporal gap between mourning and memorial is the outcome of a successful closure; a stage reached when a reasser-tion of mastery makes it possible to remember to forget the pain.42

On the other hand, one can observe a parallel synchronic development working against the smooth unfolding of a singular narrative of triumph, as different groups of people may disagree on the proper representation of the past, oppositional voices may be suppressed in some contexts, yet drift to the surface in others, and individuals do appropriate memorial space in idiosyncratic acts of commemoration that may in turn become once again part of the dominant representationthe Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington DC being a prominent example of the latter dynamics.43

13

Introduction

To give meaning to violence in sacralized commemorative acts can also easily verge on the edge of kitsch, as Marita Sturken has demonstrated in her study of sites of terrorist attacks in the United States, and particu-larly of Ground Zero in new York City. Sturken carefully reconstructs the processes by which the violent deaths of 9/11 become sanctified in a nationalist narrative of resilience and heroism. In addition, she pays attention to the production of commemorative objects and the promise they entail, namely that the good feelings that come from acknowledg-ing the pain and grief will make everything better, that innocence can be regained.44 Yet, the limitations of this encapsulated sense of innocence become painfully clearnot only in the extended warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in the illusion of security that is exploited in the marketing campaigns for SUVs and home security equipment. The epitome of this entanglement of memory, kitsch, sacralization and nationalist mili-tancy is probably the USS New York, a navy vessel that was released in 2008 and whose bow stem was built out of melted steel wreckage from the Twin Towers.

This ambivalence of sacralized narratives of healing and triumph has also been explored with regard to the performance of commemorative rituals at sites of former suffering connected to diasporic movements. Jack Kugelmass and Jackie Feldman have both looked at Jewish youth voyages to Poland and the death camps (one from an American and one from an Israeli perspective). Both authors employ the notion of pilgrimage to these journeys into the past, which aim at the affirmation of political identities in the present.45 Kugelmass, on the one hand, is rather skepti-cal of the highly emotionalized manner in which these commemorative acts take place. He contrasts the efficacy of traditional religious ritual, which is based on an elaborate cosmology, with the narrower focus of secular rituals that aim at momentary catharsis. Feldman, on the other hand, takes into account that in these voyages, As in other pilgrimages, the significant markers in the landscape are narrated through sacred texts, while many other features are read out as irrelevant.46 Sacralization on both levels (overtly religious or more mundane) is thus characterized by processes of exclusion and incorporation; emphasis on some elements and omission of others.

Yet another dimension of sacralization is introduced by Terence Ranger in his analysis of the relationship between nature, culture and

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history in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe. Ranger views this historical/natural landscape as a site of intense symbolic struggle scarred by visual memories of violence, and saturated with meaning.47 Colonial visions of conquest of nature as well as of people are most prominently articulated in the monumental burial site of Cecil Rhodes, the founder of the Rhodesian colony. They are contrasted (and entangled) with local understandings of the Matopos Hills as a powerful spiritual center and residence of many shrines, the latter also being connected to anticolonial resistance.48 Thus, the hills are constantly reinterpreted and transformedmost lately in the framework of the UnESCO World Heritage initiative.

The dynamics of heritage production are also the focus of a special issue of the Journal of Material Culture, where Michael Rowlands and Ferdinand de Jong explore heritage representations in African post-conflict settings. Though not explicitly referring to sacralization, these contribu-tions are relevant to our discussion as they are concerned with heritage as a technology for healing, whereby memoryscapes are transformed in such a way as to guarantee recognition and reconciliation.49 While some authors argue that the reworking of experiences of violence may indeed lead to a restoration of a social fabric that was destroyed in the past,50 others demonstrate the limits of this rather optimistic approach, as the attempts at closure or denial of violent conflicts may turn into sources of renewed violence.51 The key to this ambivalence lies in the term reworking, which designates an active and constant process, whereas the fixed mode of heritage representation denies this sense of agency and thus hinders people from actually confronting the past (and their role in it).

THE COnTRIBUTIOnS TO THIS ISSUE

The memory of violence, processes of sacralization and the trans/forma-tion of landscapes are thoroughly interwoven and articulated on different scales.52 In order to account for this complexity, our collection of articles privileges a comparative and translocal perspective. It includes contribu-tions from anthropology and comparative religion, with exemplary case studies from Croatia, Israel, Ghana and Germany. The articles address sacralization as a dynamic process. They all pay attention to the shifting

15

Introduction

political contexts in which sacralization occurs; and they interlink these with the concreteness of landscape formation.

In the landscapes of violence that are under review here, death and the dead take on a central role. The material evidence of death, exemplified in bones and ashes, becomes closely interconnected with spiritual notions, such as ancestral presence or soul, and ideological connotations, i.e. blood and soil. This interface takes different forms: Whereas Eschebach and Schuble focus mainly on the connection between violent deaths, ideology and the production of sacred space; Feldman and Schramm pay closer attention to the transformation of a religiously connoted sacred space through its embedding in different ideological narratives. Of course, there is no strict boundary between these processessacrality never simply exists in and of itself, but is created, attributed and variously interpreted, as all authors carefully demonstrate.

To some extent, sacralization can be regarded as a means of creating extraordinary space. Yet the singularity and outstanding character of certain sites or landscapes is not always limited to a quasi-religious interpretation but may also overlap with other understandings of the out-of-the-ordinary: from tourist attractions to the transitional space of border zones and check-points. Such multifarious spatial connotations and the resulting tensions between them are inherent to the landscapes of violence under discussion hereanother indication that sacralized memory cannot be understood in isolation but is deeply politically and economically embedded.

Finally, the sacralized narratives of the past that are the focus of this collection are produced in dialogue as well as in contestation between dif-ferent actors and agents. These dynamics take various forms. In Schubles contribution, we see how religious and political leaders in Croatia closely cooperate in aligning a Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary (together with the veneration of reliquia in form of bones) with the nationalist myth of Croatian victimhood, resistance and resurrection. not only do they express religious and political antagonisms (toward Communists, Muslims or Serbs) but they literally collect the remains of the dead of various wars declaring them Croats and linking this interpretation of the past to symbolic territorial claims in a not-so-stable border zone between Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Feldman also deals with a border situation that has a profound impact on the construction of a sacred landscapenamely that of the Holy

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Land. Drawing on the experiences of two different Christian pilgrimage groups, he analyzes how political and religious subjectivities are mutually constituted: the groups respective position toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shapes their perception of the divided landscape. Signs of recent political violence, such as the Separation Wall, which pilgrims need to pass on their way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, are being incorporated into their interpretation of the Bibleand political positionalities are presented as divinely determined and justified.

Another constellation is taken up by Schramm, who discusses the increasingly important role of diasporic groups in the commemoration of violence. In such instances, sacralization constitutes a means to reinterpret the narrative of violent dispersal in the framework of return to a homeland that is at once imaginary and concrete. However, the relationship between Diasporans and present local populations may turn out to be a tense one; a tension that also manifests in different, yet overlapping understandings of sacrality at sites of violence. In Schramms case, contrasting memories (and commemorations) of the slave trade in northern Ghana lead to dif-ferent notions of sacrality, emphasizing continuity, on the one hand, and closure, on the other.

In Eschebachs article on the history of the memorial at the former Ravensbrck concentration camp, she demonstrates how official memorial-ism and individual survivors memories did at times intertwine to produce a sense of sacrality, but she also shows the conflictive nature of these different commemorative strategies. Eschebach contrasts the political manipulation of the past by changing governments in different historical circumstances (from the Soviet Sector to the European Union) with the perspectives of different groups of survivors. She also offers an important insiders view of the role of professionals in facilitating a multiperspective approach to a violent past within the sacralized framework of a memorial landscape.

The traces of violence that we have attempted to expose in this collection do not follow a straight line but rather consist of meandering paths that intersect at various points. Acknowledging their diversity and accepting the gray zones emerging in between positions, while denying a healing perspective, nevertheless enables us to reach a better understand-ing of the past in the present.

17

Introduction

nOTES

This collection of essays is the result of a workshop that I organized in the summer of 2008 at the Max-Planck-Institute of Social Anthropology in Halle (Germany). It was sponsored by the Graduate School Africa and Asia in Global Systems of Reference (now Societies and Cultures in Motion). Special thanks go to nicolas Argenti, Ralph Buchenhorst, Tsypylma Darieva and Steffen Johannessen, who are not represented here, but whose input to our discussions was extremely valuable and enriching.

1. On the notion of counter-memory, see Michel Foucault, nietzsche, Geneal-ogy, History, in Donald F. Bouchard, ed., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977): 13964; for a discussion of memory, violence and displaced identities, see Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995).

2. See Christopher Tilley, Introduction: Identity, Place, Landscape and Heri-tage, Journal of Material Culture 11, nos. 12 (2006): 8. The whole notion of contested landscapes goes back to Barbara Bender; see Barbara Bender, ed., Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Providence, RI, and Oxford: Berg, 1993); idem and Margot Winer, eds., Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place (new York and Oxford: Berg, 2001).

3. See, for example, Richard Werbner, ed., Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power (London and new York: Zed, 1998); Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn McGregor and Terence Ranger, Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the Dark Forest of Matabeleland (Oxford: James Currey, 2000).

4. For an examination of such overlaps, see Andrew D. Spiegel, Struggling with Tradition in South Africa: The Multivocality of Images of the Past, in George C. Bond and Angela Gilliam, eds., Social Construction of the Past: Representation as Power (London and new York: Routledge, 1994), 185202.

5. See Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

6. See Sharon MacDonald, Words in Stone? Agency and Identity in a nazi Landscape, Journal of Material Culture 11, nos. 12 (2006): 123.

7. See Feldman, Formations, 1.8. For the relationship between those different memorial forms, see James E.

Young, The Biography of a Memorial Icon: nathan Rapoports Warsaw Ghetto Monument, Representations, no. 29 (Spring 1989): 69106.

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9. See John Eade and Michael Sallnow, Introduction, in idem, eds., Con-testing the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London: Routledge, 1991), 10.

10. See, for example, Insa Eschebach, Sigrid Jacobeit and Susanne Lanwerd, eds., Die Sprache des Gedenkens: Zur Geschichte der Gedenksttte Ravensbrck, 19451995 (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1999).

11. On the relationship between intentional and unintentional or involuntary monuments, see Alois Riegl, The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin [1903], Oppositions, no. 25 (1982): 2150. It has also been explored by Paul Basu, Highland Homecomings: Genealogy and Heritage Tourism in the Scottish Diaspora (London and new York: Routledge, 2007). On the notion of a sacred center in pilgrimage discourse, see Victor Turner, The Center Out There: Pilgrims Goal, History of Religions 12, no. 3 (1973): 191230.

12. See Walter Benjamin, ber den Begriff der Geschichte, IX, in Abhand-lungen: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, pt. 2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), 69798; cf. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), 22426.

13. Primo Levi, The Gray Zone, in nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, eds., Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 8390.

14. J. Shawn Landres and Oren Baruch Stier, Introduction, in Oren Baruch Stier and J. Shawn Landres, eds., Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place (Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 8.

15. See Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

16. See Gerd Knischewski and Ulla Spittler, Remembering in the Berlin Republic: The Debate about the Central Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 13, no. 1 (2005): 2542; James E. Young, Germanys Holocaust Memorial Problemand Mine, in idem, At Memorys Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (new Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 184223.

17. See John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Paul Antze and Michael Lam-bek, Introduction: Forecasting Memory, in idem, eds., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (new York and London, Routledge, 1996), xixxxviii; Sarah nuttall and Carli Coetzee, eds., Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998); Dan Ben-Amos and Liliane Weissberg, eds., Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999); Kevin A. Yelvington, History, Memory and Identity: A Programmatic Prolegomenon, Critique of Anthropology

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Introduction

22, no. 3 (2002): 22756; Paul A. Silverstein and Ussama Makdisi, eds., Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005); Werbner, Postcolony; Lily Kong and Brenda S.A. Yeoh, The Politics of Landscape in Singapore: Constructions of Nation (Syracuse, nY: Syracuse University Press, 2003).

18. Peter van der Veer, The Victims Tale: Memory and Forgetting in the Story of Violence, in Thomas Scheffler, ed., Religion Between Violence and Reconcili-ation (Beirut and Wrzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2002), 231.

19. John R. Gillis, Introduction: Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship, in idem, ed., Commemorations, 4.

20. See David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

21. Thomas W. Lacqueur, Introduction: Special Issue: Grounds for Remember-ing, Representations, no. 69 (Winter 2000): 4; cf. David Berliner, The Abuses of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly, 78, no. 1 (2005): 197211.

22. The usefulness of the trauma paradigm in social analysis has been contro-versially debated, especially with regard to the problem of transmission. While Cathy Caruth, for example, has adopted a very general and metaphoric use of the term, Stephan Feuchtwang argues for a more specific approach. See Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History, Yale French Studies, 79: 18192; Stephan Feuchtwang, The Transmission of Traumatic Loss: A Case Study in Taiwan, in nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm, eds., Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmis-sion (new York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010), 22142.

23. See Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman, The Appeal of Experience; the Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times, Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 123; Lawrence L. Langer, The Alarmed Vision: Social Suf-fering and Holocaust Atrocity, ibid., 4765

24. See van der Veer, Victims Tale, 232.25. Laurence J. Kirmayer, Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, narrative, and

Dissociation, in Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (London and new York: Routledge, 1996), 18990; on the actualization of violence in the public/private realm, see Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, Introduction, in Veena Das et al., eds., Violence and Subjectivity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 118.

26. See Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mmoire (Paris: Alcan, 1925).

27. See Sigrid Weigel, The Symptomatology of a Universalized Concept of Trauma: On the Failing of Freuds Reading of Tasso in the Trauma of History,

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New German Critique, no. 90 (Autumn 2003): 8594; cf. Bernhard Giesen, Das Ttertrauma der Deutschen: Eine Einleitung, in idem and Christian Schneider, eds, Ttertrauma (Konstanz: Universittsverlag Konstanz, 2004), 1154.

28. See Richard Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

29. On the connection between landscape and memory, see also Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, eds., Landscape, Memory and History: Anthro-pological Perspectives (London and Sterling: Pluto Press, 2003). However, these authors are mainly concerned with issues of identity, heritage and home-making and therefore pay less attention to violent disruptions that are the focus of our collection.

30. Eric Hirsch, Introduction: Landscape between Space and Place, in idem and Michael OHanlon, eds., The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives of Space and Place (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 22. See also Gerald Chikozho Mazarire, Changing Landscape and Oral Memory in South-Central Zimbabwe: Towards a Historical Geography of Chishanga, c. 18501990, Journal of Southern African Studies 29, no. 3 (2003): 70115.

31. See Susanne Kchler, Landscape as Memory: The Mapping of Process and Its Representation in a Melanesian Society, in Bender, ed., Landscape, 85106; cf. Howard Morphy, Colonialism, History and the Construction of Place: The Politics of Landscape in northern Australia, in ibid., 20543.

32. Tim Ingold, The Temporality of Landscape, World Archaeology 25, no. 2 (1993): 15253.

33. See Martin Hall, Cape Towns District Six and the Archaeology of Memory, in Robert Layton, Peter G. Stone and Julian Thomas, eds., Destruc-tion and Conservation of Cultural Property (London and new York: Routledge, 2001), 298311.

34. Ulrich Baer, To Give Memory a Place: Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition, Representations, no. 69 (Winter 2000): 52; for a more elaborate exploration of the connection between Holocaust photography and memory, see Marianne Hirsch, Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory, Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 537; for the association between a natural landscape and the memory of extinction, see Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (new York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), chap. 1.

35. Rosalind Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002). For the combination of discursive and embodied forms of the memory of violence, see Janine Klungel, Rape and Remembrance in Guadeloupe, in Argenti and

21

Introduction

Schramm, eds., Remembering Violence, 4159; for the importance of embodiment and incorporated practices in social commemorations, see Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

36. See Marianne C. Ferme, The Underneath of Things: Violence, History and the Everyday in Sierra Leone (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2001).

37. Eric Mueggler, The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2001), 10. For a comparative view on the emergence of different temporalities in the memory and commemoration of political violence, see Feuchtwang, Transmission of Traumatic Loss.

38. A good example for these dynamics outside the realm of violence is Michael Herzfelds analysis of heritage politics in Rethymnos, Greece, A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town (Princeton, nJ: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1991).

39. See Paul Sant Cassia, Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus (Oxford: Berghahn, 2005); Grey Gundaker, At Home on the Other Side: African American Burials as Commemorative Landscapes, in Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, ed., Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2001), 2554.

40. See Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, Introduction, in idem, ed., Places of Commemoration, 18.

41. See Michael Rowlands, Remembering to Forget: Sublimation as Sacrifice in War Memorials, in Adrian Forty and Susanne Kchler, eds., The Art of Forget-ting (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 130.

42. Ibid., 131.43. See Young, Biography of a Memorial Icon; Kristin Ann Hass, Carried

to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

44. Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham, nC, and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 285.

45. Jack Kugelmass, The Rites of the Tribe: American Jewish Tourism in Poland, in Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen-Kreamer and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington DC: Smithonian Institution Press, 1992), 383427; Jackie Feldman, Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008). For a comparative exploration of African American pilgrimage tourism to former slave sites in Africa, see Katharina Schramm, Coming Home to the Motherland: Pilgrimage Tourism in Ghana, in

Katharina Schramm


John Eade and Simon Coleman, eds., Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion (London and new York: Routledge, 2004), 13349.

46. Kugelmass, Rites of the Tribe, 4035; Feldman, Above the Death Pits, 6.47. Terence Ranger, Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the

Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe (Oxford: James Currey, 1999), 3, 231.48. On the linkage between shrines and colonial history, cf. Sandra E.Greene,

Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002); cf. Mor-phy, Politics of Landscape. The overlap and contestation between local religious connotations of space and newly sacralized memorials is also taken up by David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, Introduction, in idem, eds., American Sacred Space (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 142.

49. Ferdinand de Jong and Michael Rowlands, Introduction: Postconflict Heritage, Journal of Material Culture 13, no. 2 (2008): 13334.

50. See, especially, Larissa Frster, From General Field Marshal to Miss Genocide: The Reworking of Traumatic Experiences among Herero-Speaking namibians, Journal of Material Culture 13, no. 2 (2008): 183; Ferdinand de Jong, Recycling Heritage: The Monument as Objet Trouv of the Postcolony, ibid., 195214.

51. See, in particular, Michael Rowlands, Civilization, Violence and Heritage Healing in Liberia, ibid., 13552; Paul Basu, Confronting the Past? negotiating a Heritage of Conflict in Sierra Leone, ibid., 23347.

52. Cf. Lily Kong, Mapping new Geographies of Religion: Politics and Poetics in Modernity, Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 2 (2001): 21133.

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