Body Memory Research Articles

Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia

Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia applies a new theoretical literature on social memory to remembered events in Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. Highlighting connections between theorizing based on European examples and unresolved memory issues in East and Southeast Asia, the authors show how comparative study of the interpenetration of politics and lived bodily experience, of communal and personal memories, and of dominant and suppressed narratives, can yield insights into the human potential to become either perpetrators, victims or bystanders. The memories found within different groups in any society are open to negotiation, suppression, contestation, or revision in the ever-evolving politics of the present. The searching and close-grained analyses of contemporary issues found in the volume vividly illustrate the essentially plural and multivocal nature of social memories, and demonstrate the intricate connection between transnational, national and sub-national politics. Readers seeking a more nuanced and complex understanding of the past and of its continued relevance to the present and future, will find here much food for thought.

Botanical memory: Exploring emotional recollections of native flora in the Southwest of Western Australia

This paper examines the nexus of ecology, sensory experience, and emotion through the concept of botanical memory. Building upon theoretical precedents in environmental memory, collective memory, sensory memory, bodily memory, and emotional geography, I describe botanical memory as an important cultural convergence between plants and people. An ethnographic approach to the description of botanical memory draws from transcripts of interviews conducted with amateur botanists and tourists during the spring wildflower seasons of 2009–10 in the Southwest of Western Australia. Visitors from outside the region tend to communicate feelings of celebration and appreciation focused on memories of the beauty of wildflowers. In contrast, local residents engaged in conservation efforts tend to emphasize despair over species and habitat losses witnessed during their lifetimes. The paper concludes by stressing the heterogeneous character of botanical memory as a blend of emotionality, sensuousness, and embodiment. Research into botanical memory provides a promising wellspring for uncovering sense-rich emotional connections to flora.

Dancing Embodied Memory: The Choreography of Place in the Peruvian Andes

Dancing Embodied Memory: The Choreography of Place in the Peruvian Andes

Spiritual mestizaje: religion, gender, race, and nation in contemporary Chicana narrative

Gloria Anzaldua’s narrative and theoretical innovations, particularly her concept of mestiza consciousness, have influenced critical thinking about colonialism, gender, history, language, religion, sexuality, spirituality, and subjectivity. Yet Anzaldua’s theory of spiritual mestizaje has not been extensively studied until now. Taking up that task, Theresa Delgadillo reveals spiritual mestizaje as central to the queer feminist Chicana theorist’s life and thought, and as a critical framework for interpreting contemporary Chicana literary and visual narratives. First mentioned by Anzaldua in her pioneering book Borderlands/La Frontera , spiritual mestizaje is a transformative process of excavating bodily memory to develop a radical, sustained critique of oppression and renew one’s relation to the sacred. Delgadillo analyzes the role of spiritual mestizaje in Anzaldua’s work and in relation to other forms of spirituality and theories of oppression. Illuminating the ways that contemporary Chicana narratives visualize, imagine, and enact Anzaldua’s theory and method of spiritual mestizaje, Delgadillo interprets novels, memoir, and documentaries. Her critical reading of literary and visual technologies demonstrates how Chicanas challenge normative categories of gender, sexuality, nation, and race by depicting alternative visions of spirituality.

Staging battlefields: Media, authenticity and politics in the Museum of Communism (Prague), The House of Terror (Budapest) and Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen (Berlin)

This article analyses the construction of authenticity in three sites commemorating oppression under state socialism. I demonstrate that each of the sites aims to incorporate the physical involvement of the visitor as part of its educational programme. This observation is linked to the political potential of ‘prosthetic memory’, that is, bodily memory of events one has not experienced. The methods used to achieve this immersive visitor experience are assessed in each site and the potential impact on the individual consuming the exhibit is considered. I argue that the success of prosthetic memory depends not, or not only, on the authenticity of the artefacts, but also on the nature of the interpretation that accompanies them. An overpoliticized narrative, which does not allow the individual to make meaning for him or herself, is likely to focus attention away from the objects and may result in ‘disinheritance’ of particular visitor groups.

From Rupture to Remembering: Flesh Memory and the Embodied Experimentalism of Akilah Oliver

These undecipherable markings on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color. We might well ask if phenomenon of marking and branding actually transfers from generation to another ...? --Hortense J. Spillers, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe (260) The dense, blocky prose poems of Akilah Oliver's collection the she said dialogues: memory (1999) are packed like the sidewalk shopping carts she describes, debris of lives / stacked high (9, lines 16-17). Like those sidewalk shopping carts piled with the parings of popular culture and personal life, the contents of Oliver's poems crowd into and trace a center space of loss. This space of loss--what Hortense J. Spillers describes as the African-American female's misnaming (Mama's 258)--underlies and structures each poem. Oliver locates loss multiply, in literal violence against and in representational violence. Her poems cite corrupted historical narratives, undocumented lives, and contemporary systems of identity construction that are at once too limited and too determining. All these forms of loss, Oliver suggests, are the afterlives of the logic of slavery that produce one meaning of (27). Like Spillers in the epigraph to essay, Oliver implies that the markings on and sufferings of past bodies symbolically and representationally--that past bodily experiences and inscriptions shape contemporary meanings of blackness and black female identity. (1) Spillers expands on idea, stating, order for me to speak a concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness (257). But Oliver proposes a further type of bodily transfer that has the potential to speak the truer word Spillers seeks, affecting and expanding future meanings. Oliver's concept of flesh memory, performed throughout the collection, augments the record of markings and loss, attenuated meanings, and absence with an alternative epistemology of bodily presence. Flesh memory--what Oliver describes as the genetic memory or knowledge of the experiences of past bodies--engages the gaps and erasures of historical black bodies and experiences, but privileges presence over erasure or rupture. Oliver performs pluralizing gesture in her prose poems through parataxis--juxtaposing, layering, and stack[ing] high the plurality of voices remembered and accessed through bodily memory. By using parataxis, which is commonly seen as disrupting, minimizing, or decentering subjectivity, (2) Oliver undermines the conventional division between formally-motivated poetics (often called or experimental) and identity poetics as well as the and philosophical assumptions upon which such divisions are based. While many poets and scholars, including Juliana Spahr and Erica Hunt, point out that the familiar critical division between experimental and expressive poetry does not adequately reflect the poetry being produced now--or the poetry that has been produced for the past hundred years--these categories powerfully persist in criticism and reception. These critical categories are particularly pernicious because much of the poetry classed as expressivist is identified by the presence of a personal, autonomous, coherent--often gendered or racialized--lyric I. Harryette Mullen describes this idea that you can be black or (qtd. in Spahr 12) as aesthetic apartheid (Mullen 29). Houston A. Baker, Jr., Aldon Lynn Nielsen, and others have worked to problematize the critical and popular division between a formalist or innovative modernism and a formally conservative, identitarian Harlem Renaissance. (3) In addition, critics have sought to centralize and complicate the profiles of well-known African American writers such as Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, and Lucille Clifton. …

The mobilities of forced displacement: commemorating Karelian evacuation in Finland

In this article I discuss the mobilities of forced displacement. I analyse the politics of mobility by connecting the multiple scales of experienced mobility with the representational and non-representational strategies of sense of place. The aim of this article is twofold: to illustrate the different collective cultural narratives of displacement, and the ontological bodily memories. Three narratives of Karelian displacement are discussed. To capture the bodily memories, I also apply the philosopher Jacques Derrida's (1995) ideas on khora. Khora originates in Plato's Timaeus. Derrida's one interpretation of khora is a half-way-place, which is midway between space and time. I argue that khora as a non-topological concept deepens the understanding of existential place relations and also provides a fresh conceptual basis for the analysis of non-representational aspects of experiential place. Empirically, I focus on the commemoration of Karelian evacuation in Finland. I argue that the festivity called the Trail of the Displaced consists of several culturally representational and embodied non-representational mobilities which explain the complexities of spatial belonging among displaced communities.

Final Thoughts on the Case of Pamela and Commentaries

Much gratitude is offered to Drs. Bach and Bromberg for their rich discussions of the case. Some reflections and final thoughts are gathered. The value of the single case study is underlined. The emphases by Bach and Bromberg on the centrality of trauma, failures in recognition, and the healing fostered by acceptance, consistency, and care in the treatment are highlighted. Bach points to the patient's need to regress and to “float in her own subjectivity” in the treatment, to not be impinged on by another “I” in the room. Bromberg's focus is on the need to accept all of the patient's different self states, including the guardian of the weak vulnerable self. Bach highlights the unbalancing of the analyst's narcissistic equilibrium in enactment and Bromberg emphasizes the importance of real and spontaneous engagement. Both point to how such enactments involve a crucial unthought living through of the central trauma itself in the treatment of such patients. The analyst is both in the enactment and a witness to it, allowing for the transformation of traumatic affect and bodily memory. The issue of regression and the concept of the false self are highlighted as topics for further discussion.

Bodily memory: Introducing immigrant organizations and the family

This is an article about war survivors who ended up in migration in the aftermath of World War II: former Division soldiers from Poland and former Ostarbeiterinnen from the Soviet Union who settled in Belgium. It analyzes how these migrants dealt in their post-war lives with experiences of harm to their bodies undergone during the war. Often, attempts to ascribe meaning to the physical and/or psychological remnants of this harm were not made through words, but through non-verbal performances. However, such bodily memory could also, consciously or not, become socialized. In this article, I investigate the performance of bodily memory over time within two of the migrants' social entities: immigrant organizations and families, focusing in particular on their interaction.

I Promised Myself I Would Never Let It Leave My Body's Memory

From Jill Johnston to Sally Banes, Susan Leigh Foster, Mark Franko, Ramsay Burt, and, most recently, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, dance historians and theorists have extolled the qualities of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A (1966) and discussed its significance in dance history. My relationship to this dance is unique. I first saw it at the Billy Rose Theatre in New York City in 1969, and in the same year I learned and performed it at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College. In November of 1970 I first performed it retrograde, and I first taught it in the summer of 1971. In the forty years since, I have continued to perform and teach it. One of the high points in this odyssey was performing it in a duet with Yvonne at Judson Church in Trio A Pressured, a 1999 piece that marked her return to dance after a twenty-five-year hiatus as a filmmaker.What is it about this dance, beyond its ideas and groundbreaking methods, that has kept me wanting to perform it and others wanting to see and learn it? And how is the experience of doing it different from that of viewing it? How has it changed for me and across generations over the years? I must go back to that first experience with the dance to begin to answer these questions.

Coming to Our Senses: Appreciating the Sensorial in Medical Anthropology

This article supports the call for the sensorially engaged anthropological study of healing modalities, popular health culture, dietary practices, drug foods and pharmaceuticals, and idioms of distress. Six concepts are of central importance to sensorial anthropology: embodiment, the mindful body, mimesis, local biology, somatic idioms of distress, and 'the work of culture'. Fieldwork in South and Southeast Asia and North America illustrates how cultural interpretations associate bodily sensations with passions (strong emotions) and anxiety states, and bodily communication about social relations. Lay interpretations of bodily sensations inform and are informed by local understanding of ethnophysiology, health, illness, and the way medicines act in the body. Bodily states are manipulated by the ingestion of substances ranging from drug foods (e.g., sources of caffeine, nicotine, dietary supplements) to pharmaceuticals that stimulate or suppress sensations concordant with cultural values, work demands, and health concerns. Social relations are articulated at the site of the body through somatic modes of attention that index bodily ways of knowing learned through socialization, bodily memories, and the ability to relate to how another is likely to be feeling in a particular context. Sensorial anthropology can contribute to the study of transformative healing and trajectories of healthcare seeking and patterns of referral in pluralistic healthcare arenas.

Does Psychotherapy Recover or Invent Child Sexual Abuse Memories? A Case History

ABSTRACT This case describes bodily experiences that appeared to cue child sexual abuse memories during psychotherapy by a woman who was amnesic for her childhood and suffered from chronic dissociative states. Though corroboration was unavailable, she became increasingly confident about her returning memories. Special efforts were made to avoid making suggestions. The article proposes the theory that integrates the construct of the self with the relationship between bodily experiences and memory narratives. It suggests that: (1) amnesia and recovering memories involve normal and abnormal memory mechanisms; (2) remembering during psychotherapy is complex; (3) psychotherapy need not be suggestive; (4) inaccessible memories may act as constraints on suggestibility; and (5) narrative recall may depend on the connection of bodily experiences with self-reflection.

Special Section: Pleasure in Mind

After a brief introduction to Silvan Tomkins, the man and his work, the interdisciplinary reach of Tomkins' theory of affect is demonstrated here in a collection of articles illustrating how affective engagement intertwines inner and outer reality. Susan Best rescues the `pleasure in looking' from renunciation, consolation or a voyeuristic, suspect visual pleasure, and revitalizes aesthetics using Tomkins' conceptualization of affects, interest and joy. These affects suspend the viewer between objectification and identification, as interest leaves the art as object, while joy renders it a source of communion. Adam Frank demonstrates how lingering unspoken affective memory—bodily memory—uncannily shapes our negotiations with the environment, via skills or taboos: skills which remain as phantom `nervy guesses' as to where a lost limb might have been; or taboos on looking limiting our visual pleasure. Doris McIlwain rezones pleasure, renews the promise of drive theory and maps how even transient affective states (or gaps in affective experience) become enduring personality dispositions promoting cascading developmental constraints regarding what we can feel about, and do to, ourselves and others.

Moving through Time and Space: Performing Bodies in Derry, Northern Ireland

Abstract This paper examines the embodied remembrance of Bloody Sunday (1972), when thirteen civilians were shot dead by British soldiers while peacefully marching against internment. The work of Paul Connerton represents a crucial analytical starting point in a growing number of studies examining the body as site of memory. While Connnerton's theorisation has been very influential and persuasive, I argue that there is some scope for improving his ideas about the changeability of bodily memory and the Bloody Sunday case represents an interesting empirical example of how embodied remembrance reflects and responds to transformations in the wider socio‐political context.

Transgenerational Epigenetics, or the Spectral History of the Flesh

Recent advances in the field of genetics, more specifically the substantiation of epigenetic inheritance, have expanded our understanding of genetic transmission. We will try to demonstrate here that a Merleau-Pontian approach to some of these recent findings opens, not only new perspectives on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the flesh, but provides new insight into the notion of biological inheritance. What we intend to focus on in this paper is the inheritability or intergenerational transmission of environmental factors. This essentially amounts to the inheritability of phenotypic changes resulting from environmental factors, though these changes may in fact only become manifest in later generations. What we wish to argue is that this amounts to what is, in a certain sense, the transmission of experiences of past-generations via the body (i.e., via epigenetic influence on phenotypic development) onto future offspring. We shall try to describe this – in Merleau-Pontian terms – as a certain form of transgenerational bodily memory or institution (Stiftung), which in turn institutes a style.

Viral blitzkrieg

It takes years for AIDS to develop from the damage inflicted on the immune system by HIV or its simian counterpart. Surprisingly, as many as half of the body's memory T cells may die at a very early stage of infection.

Self creation and the limitless void of dissociation: the ‘as if’ personality

The concept of the 'as if' personality has been used variously in analytic literature without having formed part of a clinically based theoretical development over time. The author discusses the bases of her notion of the 'as if' personality, as observed across a number of patients and supervised patients in intensive, long term analytic treatment. In this composite clinical picture, a grouping of elements that form a particular kind of defence of the self is identified in certain patients with an exceptional capacity for creative engagement in the world, surpassing expectations given their background. The picture includes the presence of physical breakdown and illness, as psychic suffering arising from early narcissistic wounding and from a physical, emotional and/or sexual abusive familial environment, was held for too long in bodily memory but not in mind. A distinction is made between the 'as if' personality, the persona and the false self. The 'as if' personality concerns the action of defensive dissociation deriving from very early experiences of internalizing the presence of an absent object, creating the sense of an internal void at the core of the self. At the same time, the self is capable of acts of self creation through a succession of identifications and internalizations with other sources of environmental nourishment, which substitute for, and are constructed around, the original sense of internal emptiness. Thus are restored, but only up to a point, the resources of the originally diminished self. Until these resources have been used up, the self is often able to excel in activities to an exceptional degree. The countertransference is shown to be the means of both useful but often perilously obtained clinical experience and information, supporting the work along the hazardous analytic journey.

Transferência – uma regressão alucinatória

A transferência é analisada em seu caráter regressivo alucinatório, sendo objeto de pesquisa realizada pela autora sobre “A dimensão corporal da transferência”, junto ao Laboratório de Psicopatologia Fundamental da PUC-SP. O processo transferencial favorece extraordinariamente a instauração de movimentos regressivos, evidenciando uma via sensorial inerente à comunicação analista-analisando. As noções de regressão e repetição em psicanálise permitem a compreensão de que certas manifestações corporais são a expressão de uma memória corporal redespertada. O texto aponta a utilidade da revalorização do sensível face a algumas sintomatologias contemporâneas, cujo denominador comum é a incapacidade de representação.

Dys-appearing Tongues and Bodily Memories: The Aging of First-Generation Resident Koreans in Japan

According to Bourdieu's thesis on habitus, codes of behavior are memorized and incorporated by the body, becoming the repertoire of culturally appropriated bodily behaviors.Building on this model, immigrant subjectivity with respect to aging is examined through the concept of bodily memory. I focus here on the negotiation of colonial history, diasporic consciousness, and cultural practice by first-generation resident Koreans of Japan. This paper examines how the bartering of symbolic meanings in the consumption of Korean food reflects postcolonial negotiations of ideologies of difference and how the body acts as a critical site of struggle in the performance of identity.

The Berserk Style in American Culture

anxiety disorder and overwhelms defenses against death-anxiety. But since we are symbolizing animals, Herman's definition is misleading. We can only encounter death in the process of conceptualizing what is, strictly speaking, inconceivable. To think about death we have to rely on symbolic equivalents-a skeleton, empty shoes, pearly gateswhich imply a psychocultural context. And reciprocally, symbolic violence such as the threat of social death may terrify us as real death does: which is to say, traumatic injury is necessarily psychosomatic and psychocultural because the injury always entails interpretation of the injury. As medical historians remind us, clinicians have repeatedly rediscovered and lost sight of this principle.2 For over a century researchers have pursued tantalizing evidence of a neurological basis for traumatic distress, yet the results have been inconclusive and sometimes perverse. Nineteenth-century neurologists concluded that the body can store up repressed memories long after an original threat has ceased. Only gradually did the psychosomatic nature of trauma become apparent. In the 1980s and 1990s new versions of the belief in bodily memory produced iatrogenic embarrassments just as it had in Charcot's clinic a hundred years earlier. Many clinicians embraced