SOCIAL MEMORY AND SACRED SITES IN THE WESTERN MAYA HIGHLANDS: EXAMPLES FROM JACALTENANGO, GUATEMALA

In recent years, religion, belief systems, sacred sites, and the desecularization of the world have gained attention in studies ranging from political and cultural geography to sociology, anthropology, and political sciences. This chapter is located at the intersection of some of these debates. It explores the relevance of the sacred in contemporary life and the importance of religion and religious landscape in sustaining personal and group identity. Specifically, it examines the role of sacred sites among minority groups as a locus of identity formation, collective memory, self-empowerment, and indeed resistance. This chapter focuses on the ways in which minority Islamic sacred sites in Israel serve as spatial metaphors. Through an analysis of the transformations of an Islamic sacred site (maqam) in the north (and periphery) of Israel, this chapter follows the ways politics of identity and minority group resistance are being performed and enacted through the sacred. Adopting a neo-Gramscian approach, this chapter reinforces the theoretical notion that landscape is essentially a political, cultural, and ideological endeavor which is rarely to be found in equilibrium. It directly addresses majority-minority relations in contemporary Israel and what seems to be a growing source of conflict in Israeli society – the evolution of a more elaborate, informed, and outspoken Palestinian identity among Arab-Israeli citizens.

The social science literature on identity politics around questions of race and ethnicity is profuse, prolix and contentious. Indigenous identity politics have seen a parallel growth and are equally complex. While there are analogies and overlaps, indigenous identities and social movements are neither conceptually nor empirically a sub-set of ethnic identities. The central issue of indigenous groups is the place of first peoples in relation to the nation-state system. This takes different forms in old world states of Asia and Africa to those of new world settler (ex-colonial) states of the Americas and Australasia. While the major issues of the indigenous peoples have expanded beyond their national boundaries, their modes of participation in the national political arenas vary. They share a gradual nationalization of indigenous movements, including stronger links with socio-political forces of the respective countries in the region, a heightened consciousness of global processes and the broadening and enrichment of their socio-cultural and economic objectives. This paper looks at trans-national dimensions of indigenous social movements and identity politics in relation to nation-state policy regimes and examines the varying routes taken by indigenous peoples to achieve their goals.

Communities in southwest Madagascar have co-evolved with a hypervariable environment and climate. The paleoclimate record reflects major fluctuations in climatic conditions over the course of Holocene human settlement. Archeological evidence indicates short-term occupations of sites, suggesting that frequent residential mobility and flexible subsistence strategies have been central features of life on the southwest coast for millennia. Today, despite rapid changes linked to globalization and increasing market integration, mobility and subsistence flexibility remain key to the lives of communities of the region. In this article, we advocate closer consideration of the social dimensions of the human niche, and their inextricable links to the biophysical world. Specifically, we explore the theoretical implications of applying a Niche Construction Theory framework to understanding the role of social memory in constructing the human niche of SW Madagascar. We look at how social memory facilitates mobility, resource use, and the creation and maintenance of social identities and ties among communities of foragers, farmers, herders, and fishers living under hypervariable climatic conditions. We conducted an extensive oral history survey in SW Madagascar between 2017 and 2018. We interviewed over 100 elders from 32 different communities. Our analysis of the oral history archive resulted in the development of a theoretical model of human niche construction centered on the maintenance and transmission of social memory. We argue that social memory and the ability to transmit oral histories of exchange, reciprocity, and cooperation, as well as ecological knowledge are key adaptive mechanisms that facilitate mobility and access to resources in a hypervariable environment. The preservation and transmission of oral histories and ecological knowledge are thus critical to future resilience and sustainability.

Conflict on Mount Lebanon: The Druze, the Maronites, and Collective Memory

Community Voices and ‘Community Scripts’1 Carmen Mangion As a primary source, oral history testimonies have a chequered twentiethcentury history. The resurgence of oral history as a methodology in the 1960s was received with consternation by some historians, who saw it, as Eric Hobsbawm did, as a ‘remarkably slippery medium for preserving facts’.2 In the 1960s and 1970s, despite those who discounted the empirical value of oral history, it became a wellspring of ‘facts’, especially for social historians investigating marginalised groups.3 Scholars of cultural studies from the 1980s embraced and valued oral history for its subjectivity. Luisa Passerini argued that oral history narratives were more than facts, they were cultural constructs (‘expression and representation of culture’) that revealed ‘dimensions of memory, ideology and subconscious desires’.4 Another doyen of oral history, Alessandro Portelli, added: ‘Errors, inventions, and myths lead us through and beyond facts to their meanings’.5 This reframing of oral history encouraged the development of the burgeoning field of memory studies, which bolstered the theorisation of oral history. Part of this theorisation included debates on the connections between individual and collective memory, which is the subject matter of this article. These links are examined to ask whether individual recollections of women religious6 fit into an (often unconscious) cultural script determined by the social norms, values and practices of religious life. If they do, than this suggests individual memories are pre-determined and constructed into grand narratives that are subsumed into collective memory.7 Cultural historian Anna Green suggests otherwise: that there is room for the ‘consciously reflective individual, or for the role of experience in changing the ways in which individuals view the world’.8 What better way to evaluate the question of cultural scripts than using the oral testimony of religious sisters?9 This short piece explores the subjectivities of Catholic women religious (their sense of themselves which includes their experiences, human inter-relationships and emotional states), Carmen Mangion Studies • volume 107 • number 427 302 as they frame their life-stories during the course of an interview (or series of interviews).10 One would expect, in communities of women who were socialised together, typically from youth to old age, a common narrative shaping their personal accounts of religious life. These narratives would then reflect in part the collective memory and corporate identity of the religious institute to which they belong. This article begins with a brief discussion of individual and collective memory, corporate identity and cultural scripts, before investigating three potential cultural script narratives. It concludes by arguing that collective memory does shape individual recollections but, given the disruptions to religious life many women religious experienced, personal stories do not always depend on a shared history. Collective memory and corporate identity The concepts of collective memory and corporate identity are important for understanding how religious life operates, as they allow us to connect communities of women religious to their historical traditions, customs and myths. They are also useful for understanding how cultural scripts are created. Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs employed the term ‘collective memory’ to identify how an individual used their social and cultural surroundings to link their individual memories with that of the larger community. He argued that ‘The individual calls recollection to mind by relying on the frameworks of social memory’.11 For much of the twentieth century, the intricate layering of frameworks of religious life included a two-part formation period, first as a postulant, then as a novice, with each stage punctuated by very specific milestones in the form of ceremonies and vows. Throughout this educative process, women were absorbing the history of the religious institute, learning community customs and studying the Rule and constitutions which guided their governance, prayer, work and even physical movements. Once a sister was professed and entered her community, collective memories were transmitted from sister to sister in order to create a cohesive message and identity.12 There was a consistent and repetitive emphasis on the Rule and constitutions, which was linked to the identity of a religious institute, and was used to build community and influence the self-perception of the community. Life for all women religious was structured by the horarium, which timetabled waking, praying...

Holocaust Memory and Restorative JusticeCompetition, Friction, and Convergences Björn Krondorfer (bio) Keywords Holocaust, transitional justice, memory, restorative justice, Jewish and Christian responses, trauma, uniqueness, reconciliation, politics of difference, national entrenchment, dialogical engagement In Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Michael Rothberg argues for the value of overlapping and intersecting Holocaust memory with other collective memories. He traces how the history and memory of the Holocaust have been evoked, adopted, and employed as a way of making sense of political struggles and group identity in various colonial and postcolonial contexts. For Rothberg, the concept of multidirectional memory recognizes that remembrances of cataclysmic events do not cancel each other out but are venues through which meaningful moral and political decisions can be formed in the present. In a time when momentous collective (and often traumatic) memories flow freely and rapidly across national borders, they are often pitted against each other competitively. But, Rothberg argues, the idea of "competitive memory" must be abandoned since it assumes a public sphere that cannot hold "different collective memories"—as if it were "a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources."1 While Rothberg's study largely focuses on how the Holocaust has figured as a political, cultural, and moral trope in negotiating the meaning of the Algerian War (in which Algeria eventually won independence from France), it transcends any specific cultural location. His frame is global in perspective and rests on an ethical foundation that pursues the "notion of transnational, comparative justice."2 Consequently, Rothberg disagrees with claims that view the Holocaust (or any other calamity, for that matter) as a unique and incomparable event. [End Page 373] In this essay, I use Rothberg's critical intervention—multidirectional memory—and its application as a "shared moral and political project"3 to probe the dichotomizing language of uniqueness/universality when applied to memorable events of great harm. By eschewing competition among collective memories, I seek new pathways of justice-oriented, dialogical engagement. I do so by tracing, on the one hand, the rhetorical weight of Holocaust uniqueness claims (particularly in American and occasionally German contexts) and, on the other, the universalist claims of transitional justice as they evolved after 1945. I will read uniqueness claims through and against a transitional justice genealogy, eventually arriving at the concept of restorative justice. I will argue that neither uniqueness nor universality is a helpful mechanism for thwarting the entrenchment of partisan political memory. I propose, instead, to speak of "singularity" with respect to the gravity of each injurious history and collective memory. Creating a framework that averts competition among narratives of suffering will be "inevitably dialogical," as Rothberg suggests.4 It supplants the competitive deployment of political memory with an ethical vision of engaged relationality. UNIVERSAL, UNIQUE, SINGULAR: PRELIMINARY CLARIFICATIONS "The question of the uniqueness and universality of the Holocaust," writes Michael Berenbaum, "is being considered with increasing frequency not only in scholarly quarters with a focus on historiography but also in communities throughout the United States where Holocaust memorials and commemorative services raise a consciousness of the Holocaust."5 Berenbaum wrote those lines before the 1993 opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, at a time when Jewish American and Israeli scholars were debating the place of the Holocaust along the oppositional poles of uniqueness and universality. In his 1981 essay, Berenbaum briefly reviewed the positions of some of the major participants in the debate, including Yehuda Bauer, Lucy Dawidowicz, Emil Fackenheim, Elie Wiesel, Richard Rubenstein, Ismar Schorsch, Eliezer Berkovits, Robert Alter, and Henry Feingold. Berenbaum, who had been a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, sided with a restrained embrace of the uniqueness claim, arguing that neither the perceived threat of a so-called Americanization of the [End Page 374] Holocaust nor the attempt to compare Jewish victims to other victim groups or other genocides would diminish the historical uniqueness for the Jewish community. To Americanize the Holocaust, he suggested, is just a way of telling "the story . . . in such a way that it resonates" with an American audience; to compare the Holocaust to other events, he continued, is no cause for fear since they are "analogous...

The Return of the Native

The goal of this chapter is to critically assess the nature of archives and oral history, how they are created, their possibilities and restraints in historical studies, and to present examples of theories and methods on how to use and evaluate them. The chapter also includes examples of the use of archives and oral histories in contemporary research, possible strategies for enrolling them in writing histories of archaeology in the future, and reflections on the impact of the digital development that we have witnessed in recent decades. Most information concerning archaeological achievements is not published but stored in various archives and in the minds of archaeologists as personal or collective memories. As the subject of archaeology’s history has become more specialized, the awareness of the potential of these sources has increased. This specialization has revealed long-forgotten and even neglected archaeologists, ideas, and practices and triggered interest in new issues that are important for our understanding of the discipline’s past.

Analyzed are collective identification processes that occur in conjunction with complicated, contradictory processes of glocalization, cultural exchange, emancipation of minorities, national liberation movements, etc. The paper aims to study the collective identity construction in the modern society, using the framework of cultural memory. Links between collective memory and collective identity are theoretically considered; the methodology of “imagined communities” is proposed to explore the collective memory as a resource of social integration. The article argues that the nation state is no longer the dominant basis for identity. Nowadays collectives require a shared memory of the past as the basis for social identity. The paper focuses on a high symbolic value of a remembering history, especially of a cultural trauma. The culturally constructed trauma can appear on the level of groups, and provide integration of community, based on victimization of the past. Thus, the collective traumatic memory can develop a negative collective identity, based on common traumatic experiences. Viewed from “imagined communities” perspective, social trauma is a part of politics of memory that becomes the politics of identity. Using results of sociological research, we distinguish three different versions of memorial paradigm, i.e. oblivion, displacement, and evocation. Such differentiation allows to argue that communities could manage their collective memory as a resource of social identification, and consequently integration.

Lucas Savino's Decolonizing Patagonia: Mapuche Peoples and State Formation in Argentina traces the development of Mapuche activism in the province of Neuquén (in southern Argentina) from the 1970s through the present day. The book considers Indigenous political identity formation in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism—defined as “a selective recognition of Indigenous rights” intended to make such rights compatible with “a broader neoliberal order of capitalist accumulation” (p. 9). Savino argues that neoliberal multiculturalism has at times opened up new spaces for Indigenous political participation in Argentina, a country long mythologized as homogenously white. At the same time, Argentina's embrace of neoliberal multiculturalism has allowed state institutions to absorb, contain, and stifle radical movements for Indigenous sovereignty.Savino's study is situated within a broader theoretical literature on Indigenous politics in Latin America. As such, it brings Argentina and the Mapuche into a scholarly conversation from which they have been largely absent. However, Savino is also attentive to the particularities of the Argentine case. The demographic minority of Argentina's Indigenous population (who comprise only 2.4 percent of the overall population) and the country's unique history of provincial political autonomy set the stage for Savino's discussion (p. 6).Chapters 1 and 2 provide a broad historical overview. Chapter 1 tackles the historiography of race, citizenship, and neoliberalism in Latin America, while chapter 2 delves into the history of Argentine state formation. Savino helpfully positions Latin American concepts like indigenismo and mestizaje as precursors to multicultural neoliberalism, tracing how dominant narratives about racial belonging have conditioned Indigenous peoples' access to citizenship and political belonging. Chapter 2 displays a strong command of the scholarly literature on Argentine state formation. However, the actions and agency of Indigenous peoples remain largely absent, giving the impression that state formation was something that happened to Indigenous people—not something that they shaped and participated in. Considering this book's focus on Indigenous politics, Savino could have strengthened his analysis by engaging more deeply with the historical and anthropological literature on Indigenous diplomacy and multiethnic frontier governance in the Pampas and Patagonia.Chapters 3 through 5 move into the present day, examining the complicated relationship between neoliberal multiculturalism, Mapuche political participation, and collective identity. Chapter 4 is particularly effective in this regard. In this chapter, Savino uses a series of case studies to highlight how the politics of neoliberal multiculturalism have invited Indigenous activism to an extent but also placed stark limitations on activist endeavors. For example, Savino highlights a recent push for Mapuche comanagement of national parks. Under a neoliberal multiculturalist regime, state institutions have come to see the Mapuche as having a “special relationship of respect” with nature and therefore as crucial to national park administration (p. 128). However, more radical demands for territorial autonomy and direct administrative control have been denied and, in some cases, have led to the end of comanagement altogether. Clear, engaging, and informative, this chapter would serve as a fantastic introduction to the concept of neoliberal multiculturalism and its real-world impacts for undergraduates or graduate students. Taken together, chapters 3 through 5 show how the shared goal of territorial autonomy has informed the development of a collective Mapuche political identity. Because these calls for territorial autonomy go beyond the bounds of acceptable Indigenous activism under neoliberal multiculturalism, the rise of this new political identity has corresponded with a rise in state violence and repression.One key contribution is Savino's decision to study Mapuche activism at a provincial scale. Savino convincingly argues that a national scope is inadequate for the Argentine case and more generally for Indigenous minority contexts. Because Argentina has no nationwide Indigenous organization, Savino argues, national-level studies tend to reproduce scholarly blind spots and reinforce a narrative of Indigenous absence. Savino instead employs a combination of documentary evidence and participant observation to provide a window into local-level neuquino politics. The scope of the archival research is impressive and provides Savino with an on-the-ground vision of Mapuche activism over the past 50 years. While personal interviews with Mapuche leaders clearly informed the study, the voices of Savino's interlocutors are only occasionally present in the text. The few direct quotations drawn from interviews add incredible dimension to Savino's work; more such quotations would have been a welcome addition.Although Decolonizing Patagonia is not strictly speaking a history book, historians of modern Latin America will find much to admire about it. Those who study race, state violence, and the formation of collective identities—either in historical perspective or in the present day—will appreciate this book's clear, readable analysis of Indigenous politics and state responses. This book is a welcome contribution to the small but rapidly growing English-language scholarship on Indigenous politics in the Southern Cone. Savino's clear prose and helpful signposting make this a strong choice for undergraduate and graduate courses in Latin American history and politics.

This research correlates the oral history with the testimonial writings about the desaparecidos during the term of President Ferdinand Marcos,in 1965 and until the Arroyo administration in 2010. To establish the relationship between oral history and memorial texts, this phenomenological study gravitated around the discussion between cultural trauma—the objective projection of the horrible experiences of the victims and collective memory—the subjective representations of shared experiences among the surviving relatives of the desaparecidos. With oral history vis-à-vis testimonial works or cultural trauma vis-à-vis collective memory as the focal point of the paper’s discussion, the study established that cultural trauma and collective memory are linked because of the lived experiences of the families and friends of the desaparecidos. Moreover, cultural trauma expressed in oral history is processed through collective memory of the family and friends of desaparecidos who create memorial texts that help perpetuate the memory of the disappeared. This study recommends that researches problematizing the cultural trauma of the family and friends of desaparecidos be utilized as forum of ideas in order to sustain the collectivity as a force to reckon with so that no enforced disappearance ever happens again.

Lake Qooqa in Oromia/Ethiopia started out as a man-made lake back in the 1960s, formed by the damming of the Awash River and other rivers for a practical function, i.e., for hydroelectric power. The lake flooded over the surrounding picturesque landscape, shattered sacred sites and the livelihoods of the Siiba Oromo, and damaged the ecosystem in the area, which was later resuscitated to have an aesthetic function for tourists. Available sources showed that people used the lake for irrigation, washing, fishing, and drinking, while tanneries, flower farms, and manufacturing facilities for soap and plastic products were set up along the banks without enough environmental impact assessment and virtually with no regulations on how to get rid of their effluents, which contained dangerous chemicals such as arsenic, mercury, chromium, lead, and cadmium, giving the lake a blue and green color locally called bulee; hence, the name the “Green Lake”. In the present study, following a string of “narrative turns” in other disciplinary fields of humanities and social sciences (folklore, history, and anthropology), I use social memory and life hi/story narratives from Amudde, Arsi, Oromia/Ethiopia, to consider a few methodological and theoretical questions of folkloric and ecological nature in doing a narrative study: What is social memory? What does social memory reveal about the people and the environment in which they live? Is a personal narrative story folklore? Where do stories come from? What should the researcher do with the stories s/he collected? Hence, this study aims to tackle two objectives: first, using social memory data as a means to connect social identity and historical memory set in a social context in which people shape their group identity and debate conflicting views of the past, I explore the Green Lake as a narrative, which is, in its current situation, a prototypical image of degradation and anthropogenic impacts, and trace trajectories and meanings of social memory about the shared past, i.e., the historical grief of loss that people in the study area carry in their memory pool. Second, toward this end, I use people’s stories from the research site, particularly Amina’s story about the loss of seven members of her family from complications related to drinking the polluted water, as evidence to show, sharing Sandra Dolby Stahl’s claim, that the narrative of personal experience belongs in folklore studies to the established genre of the family story.

Movement Atelier is a unique dance ensemble from Turkey made by women. They use oral history, literary texts written by prominent women writers of Turkey, and social science texts that theorize about public culture of Turkey as their starting points to develop performance works; which have the power of triggering a vast landscape of connotations for the Turkish audiences about the collective public memory of their country from an intergenerational feminist perspective. The focus of this paper is their 2009 performance cirCUMstances, in which the semiotics were constructed for the feminist blurring of public and private, and was realized through the female performers’ bodies that rapidly oscillate between affectionate and abject movements.

The article deals with the problem of ritualization of cultural memory, which became the main theme in the late 1990s in German and Austrian literature on the basic of postmodern novel by Christof Ransmayr “Morbus Kitahara”, published in 1995. The year of 1995 became a turning point in German-language literature and marked the so-called “boom” of memorial literature, which was devoted to the presentation of events of the recent historical past, the Second World War and the Holocaust. A number of novels were published in that year which in different ways deal with historical experience: from immersion into individual history to the creation of dystopian depiction of alternative history, while demonstrating the ambiguity of contemporary perception of collective historical memory. It is important that the notion of “collective memory” has been actively used in scholarly discourse since the early 1990s, and it marks a change in the paradigm of assessing social processes. Similar tendencies are also observed in fi ction, which tries to give a new assessment of the traumatic events of the past, to overcome the long silence on the issue of guilt and victim, using different approaches and mechanisms for memory representing. The methodology used in this paper refers to the memory studies of A. Assmann and M. Halbawchs, who both deal with the terms of cultural and collective memory as well as with mechanisms of ritualization of cultural and collective memory. Memory a concept is realized on three levels, distinguished by A. Assmann: individual, social (communicative memory) and cultural. For this, cultural memory, together with the individual memory of characters, occupy a signifi cant place in the novel. It is shown that the novel describes in detail the mechanisms of implanting of the cultural memory, using symbols and images, as well as rituals as memory stabilizers. At the same time, an intended instilling of guilt takes place that destroys the inhabitants morally and spiritually. The body is assumed one of the intermediaries of memory retention which is also used to instill the negative traumatic memories. The Kitaharadisease, which initially affects the vision of the main character of the novel, affects other characters fi gures, primarily combatants, and becomes a bodily expression of sick memory: visual impairment should be seen as an attempt to forget negative individual experiences. Keywords: ritualization of memory, cultural

Contents: Preface, H.E. Jean-Pierre Mazery Introduction: the legal protection of the sacred places of the Mediterranean, Silvio Ferrari. Part I What is a Sacred Place?: Towards a definition of sacred places: introductory remarks, Andrea Benzo The sacred spaces and sites of the Mediterranean in contemporary theological, anthropological and sociological approaches and debates, Yuri Stoyanov General problems of international law concerning sacred places, Umberto Leanza Finding a grammar of consent for 'soft law' guidelines on sacred places: the legal protection of sacred places within the existing public international law instruments and grass-root approaches, Peter Petkoff. Part II Sacred Places and Religious Traditions: Sharing sacred places: a Jewish perspective, Jack Bemporad Sacred places in the Christian tradition, Pier Francesco Fumagalli 'God has made the earth like a carpet': the sacred places in the Islamic tradition, Yahya Pallavicini. Part III The Sacred Places of the Mediterranean: Jerusalem's holy sites in Israeli law, Marshall J. Breger Jerusalem as a holy place: Christian sacred sites in the holy city, Rafael Palomino The Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem: an Israeli law perspective, Moussa Abou Ramadan Envisaging a legal framework for ensuring sustainable preservation of holy places with regard to the case of Kosovo and Metohia, Dusan RakitiA Sacred places and religious institutions in Kosova, Baki Svirca The regime of Mount Athos, Charalambos K. Papastathis Sacred heritage in Cyprus: bolstering protection through the implementation of international law standards and the adoption of an object-oriented approach, Alessandro Chechi Mecca: the 'blessed heart' of Islam, Simon Page Conclusion: a soft-law approach to the protection of sacred places?, Silvio Ferrari. Appendix Index.