Commemorative Rituals Research Articles

Embodied Memory: Commemorative Ritual in Sociology of Émile Durkheim

Reconstruction of Emile Durkheim’s views on collective memory is the focus of the article. Durkheim had not created the completed concept of collective memory and his main attention was concentrated on its concrete form, that is to say the commemorative ritual. Thereby he laid the methodological foundations for further development of the concept of collective memory and influenced on later memory studies. Durkheim’s sociology leads with the necessity for a conclusion that for the support of stability of a community, its members have to remember certain things in a certain way and to forget, in an orderly way, other things. The general theme of Durkheim’s sociology is that a community needs a certain degree of intellectual, moral and emotional conformism of its members. This provision results in a more particular conclusion about the social necessity of the “memorial conformism”. The paper explores Durkheim’s work The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life which takes a special position in the logic of Durkheim's research program. This book demonstrates the way to development of the general cultural theory of social, constructed on the basis of the category of sacred. However, for a long time this work, on the contrary, has been considered as less significant, almost marginal, written on a secondary ethnographic material. Only recently, in the context of the general cultural and anthropological movement in modern sociology, the “later Durkheim” was read anew.

THE CHRONOLOGY AND HISTORY OF MOUNT TAYLOR PERIOD (CA. 7400–4600 CAL B.P.) SHELL SITES ON THE MIDDLE ST. JOHNS RIVER, FLORIDA

Mount Taylor period (ca. 7400–4600 cal. B.P.) shell mounds on the St. Johns River in northeast Florida were some of the first Archaic freshwater shell sites to be documented in the Southeast. However, there is much that remains unknown about their chronology, history, and changing significance through time. This paper presents a regional chronology ofMount Taylor shell sites based on radiocarbon assays from well-documented contexts. Three major changes in the distribution, arrangement, and use of shell sites are identified which correspond with significant shifts in social interaction and environmental change. An examination of the contexts of shell deposition demonstrates that shell sites were frequently established as places to dwell and were subsequently transformed into places of commemorative ceremony or mortuary ritual. The history of Mount Taylor shell sites has implications for the broader debate on whether shell sites were middens or monuments.

Expecting the unexpected

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore a postmodern approach to crisis management through the lens of complexity theory to understand six non-profit organizations’ communication responses to anti-abortion terrorism. Design/methodology/approach – Researchers conducted a qualitative content analysis of publicly available documents from six non-profit organizations, which included 62 news releases and statements on organization web sites, 152 tweets, and 63 articles in national and local newspapers. Findings – A history of violence and rituals of remembrance emerged as important pieces of organizational, personal, and social history surrounding anti-abortion terrorism. The process of self-organization facilitated calling publics to action and combating the “terrorism” naming problem. The non-profits’ dynamic environment exemplified the importance of coalition building to construct digital attractor basins, or networks extending beyond permeable boundaries, through a variety of strategies, including new media. Twitter served as a strange attractor, where the concept of interacting agents emerged as a key component of relationship building. Research limitations/implications – Findings provide opportunities to expand complexity theory. Practical implications – Findings suggest practical implications for anti-abortion counterterrorism and crisis management, and provide opportunities to develop communication counter measures. Originality/value – Applying a complexity lens to the study of anti-abortion counterterrorism builds on the growing emphasis of the postmodern approach to crisis management and answers the call for further inquiry into the application of complexity theory to crisis situations. Furthermore, this study fills a gap in the study of crisis management by investigating how multiple organizations handle a crisis.

La comensalidad identitaria un reto para las políticas públicas de salud. El caso del mulli al asado de boda en la Gran Chichimeca

La Gran Chichimeca se concibe como una zona de intercambio cultural constante entre grupos sedentarios y nómadas que se ubica de San Juan del Río al suroeste de Estados Unidos. En el presente trabajo se muestran relaciones entre algunas poblaciones de los actuales estados de Querétaro a Zacatecas a partir de las comidas empleadas en los rituales conmemorativos del ciclo vital y festivo para demostrar cómo a través de los alimentos y sus formas de preparación es posible dar cuenta de los intercambios culturales en la zona, ubicando las transformacio­nes y continuidades que promueven factores identitarios a partir de la comensalidad ritual. Algunas de las preguntas que guían la exposición son: ¿Es posible identificar continuidades en el uso del maíz y el chile? ¿Cómo se modifica la incorporación del guajolote al cerdo? ¿Por qué hay platillos cuya denominación hace explícita la referencia a lo indio? ¿Cómo se rela­ciona la comensalidad con políticas internacionales como el derecho a la alimentación o el reconocimiento de ciertas cocinas como patrimonio cultural de la humanidad?

Performing the Peace Process and Performing the Past in the Irish Republican Commemoration

In the years since the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement in Northern Ireland, there has been a structural realignment of the Irish republican activist milieu. The agreement delivered the end of armed struggle for the largest republican militant group, the Provisional IRA, and provided the opportunity for the electoral growth of its formerly subordinate political wing, Sinn Fein. The latter has become the dominant gatekeeper of republican identity, defining ideologically important performative rituals, like commemorations. During the period of the Peace Process, these rituals self-consciously eschewed armed and uniformed displays of military force that were central to the propaganda war of the Troubles, such as those of the Hunger Strikes in 1981. New performative rituals of commemoration symbolized the political transformation in Provisional republicanism’s strategy. In terms of typology, rituals such as graveside orations on important commemorative dates, were reimagined to signify not military strength, but political and cultural development, with street theatre taking the place of parading and drilling. However, the peace agreement did not deliver the reunification of Ireland and the end of British rule, which had been the central aims of republican resistance. Dissident groups, who split from the Provisionals as a result of opposition to the Peace Process, have grown in support. Militant groups like the Real IRA (RIRA) have contested the internal cultural hegemony of Sinn Fein by emphasizing paramilitarist traditions at their own commemorations and funerals. By utilizing masked volunteers to deliver graveside orations and employing armed guards to fire gunshots over the coffins of dead members, they have sought to reclaim the ideologically potent performative rituals of the recent past to establish their claims to being the true keepers of republicanism’s ideological soul.

A Mississippian conflagration at East St. Louis and its political-historical implications

A walled portion of the extensive Precolumbian civic-ceremonial precinct of East St. Louis, near present day St. Louis, Missouri, enclosed a cluster of as many as 100 small buildings or huts. The huts were associated with a walled ritual-residential zone or elite compound dating to the late Stirling phase (a.d. 1150–1200) and, importantly, were burned in a single conflagration. The burning of East St. Louis may have resulted from a ritual commemoration, an act of aggression, or an accidental fire; circumstantial evidence primarily supports the first scenario. With strongly diminished mound and architectural construction at the site in subsequent decades, and with the coeval disappearance of key ritual-residential buildings from the regional landscape after the burning, the ancient East St. Louis fire was part of a larger pattern of historical events that mark a downward turning point in the social and political history of Greater Cahokia.

Rite of Redemption.

Abstract Across Canada, people commemorate the lives of fallen soldiers by wearing red poppy flower pins for Remembrance Day on November 11. In recent years, Canadians have increasingly taken pride in the symbols used in Remembrance Day, such as poppy flowers and a poem called In Flanders Fields. The day celebrates the notions of sacrifice, belonging, and the nation state of Canada. Japanese Canadians also celebrate this holiday by wearing poppies and remembering the war dead. World War II, however, marked a turning point for the lives of second generation Japanese Canadians. The majority of them were interned in the “relocation camps” during the war years as “enemy aliens” irrespective of their Canadian citizenship status. This paper will describe a present-day Remembrance Day service held in a Japanese Canadian Christian congregation in Ontario, in which its veterans are remembered. The article argues that this ritual of remembrance reverses the historical and social location of Japanese Canadians from those who were the victims of the war to those who were contributors to it, enabling Japanese Canadians to assert their rightful position in Canadian society. This paper also includes a discussion of the author’s personal transformation of historical consciousness about World War II and being Japanese in Canada during this research.

Reading and AIDS Literacy in Allen Barnett’s Short Fiction

This essay traces a tradition of texts that document the impact of AIDS literacy on gay men’s understanding of the epidemic. AIDS literacy refers to practices of reading and information exchange that engage with different bodies of knowledge from cultural debates to biomedical discourse, and with various genres of representation from media portrayals to obituaries. Focusing on the stories of Allen Barnett and the recent public discussions surrounding the death of former New York City mayor Ed Koch, this essay argues that the cultivation of AIDS literacy is paramount for confronting the unfinished history of AIDS. By staging AIDS literacy in two of his stories—“Philostorgy, Now Obscure” and “The Times As It Knows Us,” both published in 1990—Barnett bestows to his audience a meaningful set of ideas about gay identity, reading practices, and rituals of remembrance that can revitalize AIDS consciousness at the present historical moment.

Conferência - Ritual de Aurora e de Crepúsculo: a comemoração como a experiência de um tempo fronteiriço e multiplicado ou as antinomias da memória

Este texto foi apresentado como conferência de abertura do XXVI Simpósio Nacional de História, ocasião em que se comemoravam os 50 anos de fundação da Anpuh-Brasil - Associação Nacional de História. Ao mesmo tempo em que analisa os vários sentidos do comemorar, trata da relação entre as práticas de comemoração e o trabalho do historiador, faz uma reflexão sobre a relação entre memória, temporalidade e rituais de comemoração, e se apresenta também como um texto comemorativo, por isso sujeito às mesmas ambiguidades e antinomias que aponta em todo gesto de comemoração. Ele constitui, ainda, uma análise das práticas de comemoração e um texto comemorativo. Texto, portanto, fronteiriço e antinômico.

Rite of Redemption.

Across Canada, people commemorate the lives of fallen soldiers by wearing red poppy flower pins for Remembrance Day on November 11. In recent years, Canadians have increasingly taken pride in the symbols used in Remembrance Day, such as poppy flowers and a poem called In Flanders Fields. The day celebrates the notions of sacrifice, belonging, and the nation state of Canada. Japanese Canadians also celebrate this holiday by wearing poppies and remembering the war dead. World War II, however, marked a turning point for the lives of second generation Japanese Canadians. The majority of them were interned in the “relocation camps” during the war years as “enemy aliens” irrespective of their Canadian citizenship status. This paper will describe a present-day Remembrance Day service held in a Japanese Canadian Christian congregation in Ontario, in which its veterans are remembered. The article argues that this ritual of remembrance reverses the historical and social location of Japanese Canadians from those who were the victims of the war to those who were contributors to it, enabling Japanese Canadians to assert their rightful position in Canadian society. This paper also includes a discussion of the author’s personal transformation of historical consciousness about World War II and being Japanese in Canada during this research.

“Lighting up in distant regions the sacred fire of the Nation” : the Centenary celebrations (1910) and the Welsh community in Patagonia

Given the pride of place accorded to Welsh descendants in the recent Bicentennial of the May Revolution in Chubut, it may be assumed that Welsh settlers would have received similar recognition when the Centenary was marked in 1910. However, Welsh Patagonians were then regarded very differently by the central authorities, who used the 1910 festivities as part of a campaign to “Argentinise” Chubut populations. Though a crucial snapshot of the process of inclusion of what was perceived as a reticent ethnic group into the nation’s “imagined community”, the marking of the Argentine Centenary in Chubut remains mostly unexplored. Based on the view that key aspects of social memory are conveyed and sustained by ritual performance and commemoration, this article discusses how the invented tradition of the Fiestas Mayas was reenacted in the Centenario in Welsh-populated areas in Chubut according to reports by contemporary sources.

Rituals of Commemoration – Identity and Conflict: The Case of Die Linke in Germany

For social groups, as for individuals, memory is an important part of their identity. Therefore political parties usually have an instrumental relation to their own party's history whose function is to enhance party identity. The ‘official’ party history normally is inclusive, designed as a composition of party heroes and villains as well as of party achievements which all members and ideological wings can agree upon or, at least, where they can find themselves represented. But sometimes it is hard to agree on history. All wings and currents of Die Linke can agree on Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht as symbols; their assassination in January 1919 is commemorated by a demonstration every year. Unexpected intra-party conflicts arose when in December 2006 a stone was placed at the cemetery Friedrichsfelde in Berlin near the graves of Luxemburg and Liebknecht commemorating the ‘victims of Stalinism’.

Francesco è vivo, e lotta insieme a noi!Rebuilding local identities in the aftermath of the 1977 student protests in Bologna

The decade spanning from 1968 to 1980, known also as theanni di piombo, is among the most difficult and traumatic periods in Italian post-war history. One of the most memorable years of this decade was 1977, when a new student movement stood up against the established order. The so-called Movement of ‘77 manifested itself among others in Bologna, where it had a predominantly creative and joyful character. Nevertheless, the protests were violently struck down when left-wing student Francesco Lorusso was killed by police forces during clashes, resulting in an urbanguerriglia. This incident worsened the relationship between the historical left and younger generations of (more radical) left-wing activists, and marked the beginning of the end of the Movement of ‘77. The chapter on 1977 was, however, never really closed, and a ‘counter-memory’ has continued to divide the local community ever since. In this article, we shall see how different memory communities in Bologna have dealt with this ‘collective trauma’, focusing on the former Movement of ‘77 and the way it has used public commemorative rituals to rebuild a collective identity for itself in subsequent years.

Videography: analysing video data as a ‘focused’ ethnographic and hermeneutical exercise

Visual research methods are becoming increasingly important for qualitative studies. Within this dynamically expanding field, methods for analysing ‘natural’ video recordings have developed considerably over the past decades. In this article we discuss methodological aspects of general importance for any analysis of this type of video data. Being a fundamentally interpretive method, our first argument is that sequential analysis is always a hermeneutic endeavour, which requires methodical understanding. The second refers to data collection. We stress that, in addition to sequential analysis, the ethnographic dimension of video analysis should be taken into account methodologically. Video analysis requires, thirdly, a systematic account of the subjectivity, both of the actors analysed as well as of the analysts. Our arguments are grounded in extensive data from several studies, including the communicative genre of powerpoint presentations, commemoration rituals and public events. Selected data fragments are presented here to support our claims. Building upon this expertise, we propose further improvement of video analysis methodology by reflecting on our own practice of analysing video in data sessions (i.e. the ‘video analysis of video analysis’).

Symbols and Rituals in the Mobilisation of the Romani National Ideal

AbstractThis article analyses recent attempts of Roma/Gypsy organisations to construct a pan‐Romani ethnic‐national identity. It is argued that although Roma do not fit the classical picture of a nation, in the globalised world such a project of transnational or diasporic identity may be viable in spite of the fragmentation of Romani communities. The article presents two groups of rituals employed by the Romani political movement: linguistic rituals, associated with the attempt to introduce an umbrella concept of ‘Roma’, and rituals of remembrance, which ‘authenticate’ certain streams of Romani history to introduce among Roma a sense of a common past. The article concludes that the ritual approach may be an efficient method to study the project of Romani national identity. With functions similar to religious ritual, Romani political rituals form a bridge between empirical Roma identity and the projected national identity, although in other contexts there may be little communication between them.

Past Continuous: Newsworthiness and the Shaping of Collective Memory

This study explores the multi-layered interrelations between the production of news and collective remembering. We investigate this phenomenon by analyzing television newscasts aired on Israel's Memorial Day for the Holocaust and Heroism (MDHH), 1994–2007. These newscasts provide a rich research corpus because they stand at the intersection between two types of rituals: the everyday ritual of newsmaking, and the national commemorative ritual, for which the media serves as a main site of articulation. The article implements a “zoom in” perspective: first, we examine the broadcasting schedules, exploring the role of newscasts in the process of leading the audiences in and out of the commemorative ritual. Next, we suggest a typology distinguishing between (a) items dealing with current events, (b) commemorative items focusing on Holocaust remembrance, and (c) dog whistle items that are “attuned” to the specific cultural ear and thus enable mundane news items to be interpreted as related to Holocaust commemoration. We argue that the dual aim of the items featured in MDHH newscasts–to provide both news values and commemorative values–leads to the construction of “reversed memory,” a narrative that commemorates past events (the “there and then”) by narrating present events (the “here and now”). Reversed memory commemorates the difficult past through the achievements of the present, and thus not only eases the collective confrontation with painful traumas, but rather avoids this encounter altogether.

From Flanders to Fallujah: Rethinking remembrance

This article questions the attitudes of a sample group of British young people to the rituals of remembrance commonly observed in the United Kingdom during the second week of November. In view of the complete transformation of war and war service since 1919 - none of the fallen from current and recent wars in Afghanistan or Iraq are buried abroad or buried unknown, and none were conscripted - this article seeks to establish whether or not the established '1919 model' of remembrance continues to best serve contemporary attitudes to military service and military loss. To this end, participant students were invited to complete a questionnaire and debate their views in various discussion groups and in a plenary session. All discussion groups were facilitated by and moderated by a team of university tutors and high school teachers. The results indicated very high levels of support for and engagement with remembrance events. The results also indicated widespread respect for and imaginative use of the traditional 'two-minute silence'.

Constructing a commemorative culture: American veterans and memorialization from Valley Forge to Vietnam

Ever since Philippe Ariès identified World War I as the conflict that witnessed the peak of the 'civic cult of the dead', scholars have tended to interpret the response to death in battle in the context of that 'war to end all wars'. In the case of the United States, the militarized commemorative culture that lies at the heart of its national identity has a personal and political resonance, expressed through a combination of public ceremonial constructions and practices and personal published narratives. Together these comprise the commemorative response both to the dead of war and surviving veterans. This response is designed to contain and control the death resulting from warfare, and is one that, although developed in the context of nineteenth-century conflict, clearly prefigured the development of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century European military commemorative ritual which, in turn, influenced the evolution of commemoration in the twentieth-century United States.

"Trabalhadores do Brasil!": as comemorações do Primeiro de Maio em tempos de Estado Novo varguista

O presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar as celebrações do Primeiro de Maio ao longo do Estado Novo varguista. Pretende-se identificar mudanças e permanências em seus rituais comemorativos, bem como as estratégias de preparação, apresentação e legitimação de suas comemorações por parte do governo.

Out of the Analytic Shadow: On the Dynamics of Commemorative Ritual

This paper explores the dynamics of commemorative ritual as it is embodied and enacted outside the consulting room. While the function of lifelong acts of memorial in marking traumatic loss has been well documented, psychoanalysis has given short shrift to the value of these ongoing commemorative rituals in instances of “ordinary” (i.e., less traumatic) loss. Historical and sociological writers have explored their functions, but commemorative rituals have tended to evoke resistance within psychoanalysis, perhaps because of their collision with the termination ideal and the value of relinquishment. Here, I build on previous essays concerning Jewish mourning ritual (shiva) by addressing the function of several acts of commemoration including that of Yizkor (Jewish memorial ritual). Enacted across the lifespan, commemorative rituals serve multiple functions. They allow us to mark absence and create “presence” as we access and sometimes reshape personal memory. Such rituals can create a sense of linkage to “like mourners.” At their best, these acts—in their multiple incarnations—mimic aspects of psychoanalytic work by helping us deepen emotional connectedness and facilitating integrated remembering in a way that enriches and frees rather than binds us.