Terence Ranger Research Articles

Postcolonial Theory and the History of Zionism

For the historian whose academic-scientific discipline aims to attain particularizing rather than generalizing forms of knowledge, theory—any theory—serves not as an end in itself, but rather as a ...

Music in Jewish History and Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Music in Jewish History and Culture Ronit Seter Music in Jewish History and Culture. By Emanuel Rubin and John H. Baron. (Detroit Monographs in Musicology/Studies in Music.) Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2006. [xxvi, 403 p. ISBN 0-89990-133-6. $70.] Illustrations, music examples, tables, appendix, glossary, bibliography, index. "What is Jewish Music?" This key question opening a door into the impossible—one cannot afford to ignore the question in such a book, nor can one answer it with [End Page 85] adequate clarity or consistency—is the subtitle of the "Prelude" that precedes the first chapter of Emanuel Rubin and John Baron's Music in Jewish History and Culture (p. xxiii). This author is tempted to answer willy-nilly: What is Jewish music? Defined by whom? The ancient Israelites? A late Renaissance Italian Jew like Salamone Rossi? A romantic composer like Meyerbeer? Or, perhaps, Meyerbeer's protégé, Wagner (when he published his "scurrilous" Das Judentum in der Musik by way of a psychological patricide in 1850, p. 336), Mussorgsky ("on his tombstone Mussorgsky requested Jewish music," p. 230), or Schoenberg (whose "Jewish works are political and religious statements of a Jew to the Christian world," p. 217)? As defined by a Moroccan or Iraqi Jewish audience in Israel? Or, perhaps, Jewish music as defined by "the ethnomusicologist"? Although Rubin and Baron state that one cannot answer this question as it is posed, their ultimate answer is thought-provoking nonetheless: "Jewish music is music that serves Jewish purposes ... any music having a Jewish purpose can be said to be Jewish music" (p. xxvi). This characterization of Jewish music subsequently informs and colors the remainder of the book. Had the authors left the question unanswered as they had first proposed, and instead suggested their conclusion as a working definition—one used only to outline the boundaries of the volume—it would have saved them from some uneasy (I dare say, awkward), assertions that they make as the text unfolds. Consider the discussion on Felix Mendelssohn, who "can hardly be part of the history of Jewish music through his own compositions.... Nonetheless Mendelssohn is part of the history of Jewish music not only because he was the grandson of the most important maskil [an enlightened Jew, who embraced the Enlightenment as interpreted within the Jewish community] in Jewish history, but because he inspired countless Jewish youth throughout the nineteenth century to become musicians, some of whom remained Jewish and devoted their talents specifically to Jewish music" (p. 209). Mendelssohn's music is not Jewish, so the authors imply. Nonetheless, they also state, "[t]he Mendelssohn sound—a mixture of 1830s Biedermeier harmony with the sentimentalism of the period—became the ideal for the German reformers inside the synagogue (Louis Lewandowski's music is the most well-known), and once accepted there it became the new sound of Jewish music wherever it was performed" (p. 211). Self-contradicting? Perhaps, but reasonably so. Ideas that might contribute to a better understanding of Mendelssohn's case can be found in literature that seems far removed from the study of Jewish music, but is still highly relevant. Such are, for instance, the core writings on constructing cultural identity, both published in 1983: Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (London: Verso). These, with more recent contributions to the topic, facilitate a very different perspective. Mendelssohn did not continue a Jewish musical tradition; rather, he created one—at his time (sadly, also today), an unforgivable sin in terms of orthodox Judaism, where preservation, not creation, is the defining norm. Another case in point is Gustav Mahler's music. Rubin and Baron assert that "Mahler's relationship to his Judaism was essentially negative, and there is nothing Jewish about his compositions.... That he was born Jewish in an anti-Semitic world became a thorn in his side" (p. 214). Reading the one page the authors allocate for Mahler, one wishes that they would have slightly diverted from both their confining definition of Jewish music and their positivistic-informational-taxonomic style, and acknowledged the growing scholarship about Mahler as a...

Teaching & Learning Guide for: What Should Historians Do with Heroes?: Reflections on Nineteenth‐ and Twentieth‐Century Britain

Teaching & Learning Guide for: What Should Historians Do with Heroes?: Reflections on Nineteenth‐ and Twentieth‐Century Britain

Introduction: Yvonne Vera's Fictions and the Voice of the Possible

Introduction:Yvonne Vera’s Fictions and the Voice of the Possible Liz Gunner and Neil Ten Kortenaar This collection of papers on the work of the Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera, who died in Canada in April 2005, comes, with the exception of one paper, from the colloquium on her writing held at the Centre for African Literary Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in September of the same year.1 We wished to hold an event that in some way honored and commemorated her as a powerful artist who belonged firstly to the African continent and to Zimbabwe, but also to the world and perhaps particularly to Canada. At a commemorative gathering for Vera held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, on 30 June 2005, Terence Ranger told of how, after her funeral in Toronto, Yvonne Vera's ashes were left partly with her Canadian husband and the rest were taken back to Zimbabwe with her mother (BZS). The South African novelist Lauretta Ngcobo opened the Colloquium with a provocative address titled "Portraits of the African Present." Several of her remarks chimed with themes in the papers that followed. Ngcobo, who is a member of the KwaZulu Provincial Legislature, pointed to a contradiction: a growing mood of assertion among African women in claiming "their new roles in society"; yet a profound inequality that still marked affairs of gender in African societies. "No matter what African women have done to fight side by side with African men in the liberation struggle, the tension between men and women remains the same, if not worse" she said (1). Ngcobo noted "a revolt in the voice' in Yvonne Vera's early collection of short stories, Why Don't You Carve Other Animals, where "she probes this stubborn refusal to change in matters of gender and sexuality" (2). Turning to power, the oral imagination, and an alternative stream of narrative in Zulu oral tales, Lauretta Ngcobo noted powerful women such as Mabhejana "who has a horn on her head in front of which no man can stand," and Nananabosele who faces and overcomes a child-eating elephant "despite his bulk and brute force" (2–3). As part of this "revolt in the voice," Robert Muponde's reading of Vera's Under the Tongue in this collection notes how in a time of trauma an alternative knowledge and subjectivity exists through Grandmother's songs and storytelling to the young girl Zhizha. Paul Zeleza's paper points to her fiction as continually [End Page 1] dissolving the continued binary between orality and literacy as Vera gives voice to the pain inflicted on the African woman's mind and body by colonial and postcolonial patriarchies. The emphasis on reinterpreting, and on alternative narratives, by Lauretta Ngcobo is also a key feature of the work of the new cadre of critics and creative writers who continue to publish challenging and innovative texts even as the country's political leaders carve out a narrow, exclusive, and selective version of its culture and history. Readers of Research in African Literatures will have seen the review article by Flora Veit-Wild on a number of these works in volume 37, number 3. The new "patriotic history" that emanates from government sources and that educational institutions, secondary and tertiary, are now being asked to teach leaves no room for counternarratives or open discursive spaces where new questions can be asked, new routes pursued. Control of the print media as well as radio and television ensures that no systematic development of a counternarrative can be undertaken by any group in the country, a point that Terence Ranger makes forcefully in his essay, "Rule by Historiography: The Struggle over the Past in Contemporary Zimbabwe," in the recent collection of essays edited by Robert Muponde and Ranka Primorac, Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture (241). The strand of cultural—and ethnic—nationalism now being deployed by "patriotic history" makes use of what Lene Bull-Christiansen has usefully termed a "spiritual temporality." This allows for "a spiritual connection between the initial anti-colonial struggle and the liberation war" known widely as the Second Chimurenga (60). The term the Third Chimurenga...

Mon Nationalism and the Invention of Traditions: The Case of the Mons in their Diasporic Communities

This essay is aimed to describe and analyze the invention of Mon traditions by applying Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s concept of invented traditions. As I found in my observations in the field and in archival research, the Mons in their homeland and their diasporic communities overseas have invented a number of traditions in order to show solidarity. These include national costumes, a national flag, a national anthem, and a national day.

A Transnational View

A Transnational View

Kwacha: The Violence of Money in Malawi's Politics, 1954–2004*#

One of the strongest limiting factors in the transition to participatory democracy in Malawi is the failure of independent and sustainable cadres of young politicians to emerge. This is caused by the role that money, generated via the informal economy, plays in Malawian politics. This money is channelled into politics via achikulire (neo-patrimonial patrons or ‘big men’), usually without party accountability. This factor may be more critical in retarding the development of participatory democracy than social structure, ethnicity, religion, donors or other aspects of political dynamics. The socio-economic impediments to achieving participatory democracy tend to be viewed through economic theories appropriate to contexts more westernised than Malawi. I will argue that some of the ‘disorder’ in Africa observed by Chabal and Daloz (1999) is actually a function of the unresolved historical dynamic between two economic sectors: the formal cash (colonial European and postcolonial black elite) sector and the ‘informal’ non-cash (rural/peasantry) sector. By controlling this dynamic, neo-patrimonial politicians can minimise ethnic, social, political and constitutional barriers to their hold on power. Successful Malawian politicians have a triple-edged relationship with the peasantry: peasants are their masters at election time, subjects at most times and business clients at harvest. This article will analyse the formation of new patron–client relationships during the 1991–1994 political transition and show how these were successfully exploited by United Democratic Front achikulire. In 2004, money sourced through achikulire enabled Bakili Muluzi to impose his designated successor on a reluctant party and nation, leading to the 2004–2005 constitutional crises. KuNyasalande Azungu achuluiche, nambo mbiya kwangali.1Wandu agamba kwenda! (Ndiche Mwalale) [So many Europeans in Nyasaland now but there is no money. People still migrate…].2 *‘Kwacha’, the name of Malawi's currency, means ‘A new day dawns!’. #Thanks to John McCracken, Patrick O'Malley, Terence Ranger, David Rubadiri, Jim Wilkie, Kings Phiri, Kenneth King, the History Department at Chancellor College, and anonymous peer reviewers and Malawians. 1 Mbiya: money, disposable/surplus cash. 2 This is an acerbic comment on 1950s Malawi by the popular musician, Ndiche Mwalale.

Froebel is Dead; Long Live Froebel! The National Froebel Foundation and English Education

The German pedagogue Friedrich Froebel lived from 1782 to 1852. The pedagogy that made Froebel famous was encompassed in his Kindergarten, a set of strictly defined methods and activities for the education of young children, which he developed and refined in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Froebel’s Kindergarten reached England in the mid‐1850s, where it attracted a small but enthusiastic group of followers and practitioners. By 1900, Froebel’s followers in England had become awakened to movements in child study and psychology and Froebel’s prescriptions did not hold up to ensuing criticism. In most histories of English education, the story of Froebelian education in England stops there, with the so‐called death of Froebelian early childhood pedagogy and its replacement with an eclectic range of pedagogies and institutions based variously on the work of Sigmund and Anna Freud, Margaret McMillan, John Dewey, Susan Isaacs, Maria Montessori and others. This article picks up this dropped thread, examining the English neo‐Froebelian movement after the death of Froebelian methods by the start of the twentieth century. Based on analysis of the organizational records and publications of the Froebel Society, National Froebel Foundation, NSA and other professional groups connected with early childhood and progressive pedagogy, this article identifies several turning points in the institutional and ideological trajectory of neo‐Froebelians in the most turbulent and decisive period of twentieth‐century English pedagogical and policy debate. More specifically, this article shows that Stuart Hall’s theories of identity politics—as well as Eric Hobsbawm’s and Terence Ranger’s concept of invented tradition—can help us make sense of the apparently paradoxical persistence of ‘Froebel’ discourse in interwar and 1940s progressive English educational discourse despite what appeared to be a complete disavowal of Friedrich Froebel, the man and his pedagogy on the part of those wielding his name.

Terence Ranger. The Historical Dimensions of Democracy and Human Rights in Zimbabwe. Volume 2: Nationalism, Democracy and Human Rights. Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press, 2003. Distributed by African Books Collective Ltd., The Jam Factory, 27 Park End St., Oxford OX1 1HU. 196 pp. Select Bibliography. Index. $29.95. Paper.

Terence Ranger. The Historical Dimensions of Democracy and Human Rights in Zimbabwe. Volume 2: Nationalism, Democracy and Human Rights. Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press, 2003. Distributed by African Books Collective Ltd., The Jam Factory, 27 Park End St., Oxford OX1 1HU. 196 pp. Select Bibliography. Index. $29.95. Paper.

LIBERATION WITHOUT LIBERTY? The Historical Dimensions of Democracy and Human Rights in Zimbabwe, II: Nationalism, Democracy and Human Rights. Edited by TERENCE RANGER. Harare: University of Zimbabwe Publications, 2003 (distributed outside Africa by African Books Collective, Oxford). Pp. 196. No price given (ISBN 1-7792-001-3).

LIBERATION WITHOUT LIBERTY? <i>The Historical Dimensions of Democracy and Human Rights in Zimbabwe</i>, <scp>II</scp>: <i>Nationalism, Democracy and Human Rights</i>. Edited by T<scp>ERENCE</scp> R<scp>ANGER</scp>. Harare: University of Zimbabwe Publications, 2003 (distributed outside Africa by African Books Collective, Oxford). Pp. 196. No price given (ISBN 1-7792-001-3).

Charles M Good, The steamer parish: the rise and fall of missionary medicine on an African frontier, University of Chicago Press, 2004, pp. xx, 487, illus., $30.00, £21.00 (paperback 0-226-30282-2)

The portrait offered by Charles Good of the fates of the S.S. Chauncy Maples and the S.S. Charles Janson, wood-burning steamers upon which were built the fortunes of the Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in the Diocese of Nyasaland, exemplifies many of the contradictions of European colonialism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa. Focusing on the socio-spatial ramifications of a novel transport technology, Good's elegant presentation unearths the tatters and the self-proclaimed glories of empire from the service history of a now-dilapidated hulk. Generously embracing both the poignancy of an ill-starred enterprise, and the blinkered obstinacy contributing to its eventual obsolescence, Good elaborates a thematic agenda no historian of medical mission can well ignore. At first glance, it may seem strange that a work devoting so much space and energy to the vicissitudes of mission transportation on Lake Malawi could purport to be a history of missionary medicine. However, in rapidly asserting that the history of medical mission is not primarily “about” medicine, and in contextualizing his presentation by means of a carefully reasoned depiction of missionary penetration with regard to local political economies, lacustrine ecology, and African philosophies of health and illness, Good obviates the need to ground his enquiries with respect to an epidemiological “baseline”. Though he covers such material extensively as his argument develops, it is the attuned sensitivity to place which gives this work its distinctive character. In considering the effects of social, economic, political and technical processes on populations and communities across Africa, historians have tended to assume that such processes act more or less equally across a given territory or selected area of analysis. The salience of these disciplinary habits emerge more clearly when contrasted with the concerns of geographers. Good makes explicit the links between the cost of maintaining a steamer and its drain on a poorly-resourced mission, the resulting need to use such a technological resource efficiently and effectively, the impact of local provisioning, site security (in the context of ongoing slave-raiding), and mooring on the development of the mission field, and the ramifications of technology for the politics of race, employment, education and medicine. Consequently, the exigencies driving medical mission, and the practicalities relegating it among the overall concerns of evangelists and traders, are detailed in all their manifold interactions. For the historian of medical mission, this represents a fundamental shift in sensibility, the subtleties of which are perhaps best exemplified in Good's commentary on Terence Ranger's 1981 essay on UMCA medical mission in Tanzania. Demonstrating how an aetiology recognizing human agency as a prime cause of illness could supplement, and persist alongside, biomedical models of disease causation in the social contexts of colonial and post-colonial Africa, even given the constraints placed on UMCA medical mission by financial and personnel difficulties, its insistence on celibacy among European staff, and an intentional policy of overextension of its mission surrounding Lake Malawi, Good challenges and complements Ranger's arguments, suggesting that issues internal to mission culture, contributing to its spatial extension and character, might well shape medical pluralism in Africa as much as a purported “passive resistance to ‘biomedicalisation’ ” (p. 309). Some issues with the presentation of the volume detract from its otherwise exemplary nature. Curiously, for instance, no distinction is made among illustrations between maps, photographs, and plans, all listed under the heading “figures”: a more comprehensive and clearer map of place names might also have facilitated the reading of a text which so carefully alternates thematic and chronological narrative. Arguments regarding climate, lakeshore levels, and topographical isolation of stations would have benefited from relevant maps; among these, the lack of a relief map is perhaps the most significant oversight. From the perspective of a non-geographer, if only to underline the distinctiveness of a geographic approach to the history of mission, it might help to indicate the intellectual heritage of terms such as “landscape” and “topology” with the care expended on explicating the use of the term “frontier”. These minor quibbles do not detract from an otherwise precise, sympathetic, detailed, and original depiction of the internal contradictions implied in the workings of an evangelical mission involved in medical provision in societies suffering the rapacities of political instability and unfettered imperial capitalism.

The Religious Worldview of the Indigenous Population of the Northern Ob' as Understood by Christian Missionaries

On the eve of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church had at least nine missions operating among Siberia's indigenous peoples. The Red victory in the ensuing civil war led to the elimination of all missionary activity, whose resumption was possible only after the fall of the Communist regime seventy years later. The few accounts of Christian missions published in the USSR were tendentious in the extreme. Only in the post-Communist era have scholars in the former Soviet Union been free to explore the rich archival and journalistic resources left by the missionaries. Anatoliy Ablazhei's article was chiefly addressed to scholars in Russia. It explores the extent to which the newly available missionary accounts are useful sources for contemporary scholars investigating native religion and cosmology. His work is reproduced here in translation for several reasons. It exemplifies the new wave of Russian scholarship about missions history, giving us a glimpse of the mass of documentary material available for researchers to use. Its critique of Russian Orthodox perceptions of native religion and the imperfect methods employed to spread Christianity in Siberia provides us with material from a mission field little known in the outside world. This information can prove useful for comparative missiological investigations. Above all, however, its value lies in its contribution to the ongoing debates about contextualization and syncretism, the validity of the Gospel for all peoples, and the appropriation of Christianity by the world's indigenous peoples. It exemplifies the errors of ignorance often committed by outsiders trying to spread the Gospel within a thoroughly alien culture. As Terence Ranger reminded us in the first Adrian Hastings Memorial Lecture at Leeds University in November 2002, authentic Christianity is indeed possible among indigenous peoples. The Holy Spirit can inspire a transformation of their lives and culture, without an excess of Eurocentric accretions.1

Introduction

Introduction

Simon Vengayi Muzenda and the Struggle for and Liberation of Zimbabwe, by Ngwabi Bhebe. Gweru: Mambo Press, 2004. xi + 297 pp. ISBN 086922-780-7

Journal Article Simon Vengayi Muzenda and the Struggle for and Liberation of Zimbabwe, by Ngwabi Bhebe. Gweru: Mambo Press, 2004. xi + 297 pp. ISBN 086922-780-7 Get access Terence Ranger Terence Ranger St Antony's College, Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 104, Issue 415, April 2005, Pages 357–359, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adi048 Published: 01 April 2005

Respectable and Responsible Women: Methodist and Roman Catholic women's organisations in Harare, Zimbabwe, 1919-1985, by Marja Hinfelaar. Utrecht: Bookcentrum, 2003. 184 pp. ISBN 90-239-1153-9 (paperback)

Journal Article Respectable and Responsible Women: Methodist and Roman Catholic women's organisations in Harare, Zimbabwe, 1919–1985, by Marja Hinfelaar. Utrecht: Bookcentrum, 2003. 184 pp. ISBN 90-239-1153-9 (paperback) Get access Terence Ranger Terence Ranger St Antony's College, Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 104, Issue 414, January 2005, Pages 155–156, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adi024 Published: 01 January 2005

Our Haunted Present: Cultural Memory in Question

If there is a commonplace in recent writings on cultural memory, it is that what Kerwin Lee Klein (2000) has called “the memory industry” is experiencing an unprecedented boom. Inspired by works such as Pierre Nora’s Lieux de Memoire (1984), Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s Invention of Tradition (1983), cultural memory has been “investigated,” “interrogated” and “problematized” in the past two decades in countless academic books and articles whose titles contain variations of phrases like “Cultural Memory,” “Memory and Trauma” and “The Politics of Memory” (Klein 2000; Olick and Robbins 1998; Zelizer 1995). This academic fascination with memory has been both feeding off and is fed by the “memory wars” raging across the West. From the European debates on the Holocaust to the American debates on the Vietnam War to the Canadian debates on treaty-making, redress and reparation for the various victims of state violence, the past has become an object of political conflict.

Nation, State, Europe and national revival in Hungarian party politics: the case of the millennial commemorations

POST-COMMUNIST TRANSFORMATION CONFRONTS all countries involved with questions of state redefinition. The strains that can be generated by these questions have been most evident, and most examined, in states newly emerged from the Czechoslovak, Soviet or Yugoslav federations and/or those with significant ethnic minorities. However, even in relatively old and ethnically homogeneous states, these issues cannot be tackled without engaging varying understandings of the national identity and the relationship between state and nation.! This article investigates the conceptions of the nature and purpose of the state presented by party political elites in one such state, Hungary. Hungary's relative ethnic homogeneity means that there has been no significant practical contestation about which national group the post-communist state is 'of and for', in Brubaker's terms.2 That is, questions have not arisen about public language use, for example (as between the language of the state's titular nationality and another, minority, national group), as has occurred in several other post-communist countries with larger and less assimilated minorities. Similarly, Hungary's well-established status has obviated any need to excavate a little-known national past to legitimate the state's existence. As then Prime Minister Viktor Orbtin commented in 1999, Hungarians could 'forget the word, invent Hungary. Hungary was invented quite well enough a thousand years ago, by St Stephen himself'.3 However, a 'national question' has consistently been identified as the single dominant dimension of the country's post-communist party competition.4 Partly, this dimension comprises familiar left-right differences over secularism and progressivism versus religiosity and cultural and social traditionalism. However, in the Hungarian context, as in many others, these differences also encompass divergent understandings of the national identity and of the nature and value of nationhood in general." In this respect, elite political competition since 1990 in part continues a central debate of modem Hungarian political and intellectual life, about what the Hungarian nation is and what its relationship to the Hungarian state should be.6 Prior to the 1920 Treaty of Trianon this debate indeed partly concerned the relationship between Hungarians, groups by then identified as being of other nationalities, and the Hungarian state. Since the

DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN ZIMBABWE HISTORY The Historical Dimensions of Democracy and Human Rights in Zimbabwe. Volume I: Pre-Colonial and Colonial Legacies. Edited by NGWABI BHEBE and TERENCE RANGER. Harare: University of Zimbabwe Publications, 2001 (distributed by African Books Collective, Oxford). Pp. xlvii+169. £14.95; $24.95, paperback (ISBN 0908307942).

DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN ZIMBABWE HISTORY <i>The Historical Dimensions of Democracy and Human Rights in Zimbabwe</i>. Volume <scp>I</scp>: <i>Pre-Colonial and Colonial Legacies</i>. Edited by N<scp>GWABI</scp> B<scp>HEBE</scp> and T<scp>ERENCE</scp> R<scp>ANGER</scp>. Harare: University of Zimbabwe Publications, 2001 (distributed by African Books Collective, Oxford). Pp. xlvii+169. £14.95; $24.95, paperback (ISBN 0908307942).

&lt;sc&gt;Sandra E. Greene&lt;/sc&gt;. &lt;italic&gt;Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana&lt;/italic&gt;. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2002. Pp. xix, 200. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95

Sandra E. Greene. Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2002. Pp. xix, 200. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95 Get access Greene Sandra E.. Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2002. Pp. xix, 200. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95. Terence Ranger Terence Ranger University of Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 108, Issue 2, April 2003, Pages 617–618, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/108.2.617 Published: 01 April 2003

The Decline and Rebirth of “Folk Memory”: Remembering “The Year of the French” in the Late Twentieth Century

THE study of folklore has been construed as the documentation of a vanishing subject. This poetics of disappearance, (1) which echoes the classic studies in social anthropology, perpetuates a nebulous concept of the final hour of authentic oral tradition before is irretrievably swept away by modernization. There is a long legacy of bemoaning the end of tradition, and this trope resonates through the writings of Irish folklorists, from the pioneers of the late eighteenth century into the twentieth century, (2) and it is still apparent in the writings of contemporary ethnographers. (3) In a comparative context there is an influential body of historical literature which maintains that throughout Europe a once vibrant living peasant tradition passed away at the turn of the nineteenth century (often dated between 1870 and 1914). To use the terms of Pierre Nora, the milieux de memoire, or settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience, were supposedly replaced with artificially constructed lieux de memoire (translated into English as realms of memory), which are repositories of *dead memory that are founded on invented traditions'--to use a term popularized by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. (4) Since the collectors of the Irish Folklore Commission (1935-70) were still documenting living oral traditions into the mid-twentieth century, it may appear that Ireland suffered from retarded sociocultural development, and that modernity was slow in replacing the last vestiges of tradition there. Yet studies of Irish popular culture reveal that, rather than constituting an irreconcilable dichotomy, features of and modern societies have regularly coexisted. (5) This realization ultimately undermines the validity of linear developmental models. Folk memory, or to use a more suitable term developed in interdisciplinary studies--social (6)--also has a history, which invariably shows that traditions were continually reinvented and regenerated through interactions with various cultural agents. Nonetheless, there is a general understanding that television killed conversation, or to be more precise, that rapid economic development, the growing influences of globalization, and the introduction of high-technology communications and mass media have instigated the demise of the collective historical memory cultivated by traditional oral culture. According to this line of argument, the boom of heritage centers and summer schools throughout the island is more about the peddling of kitsch than about facilitating a meaningful sense of continuity with the past. Has finally been laid to rest, or is it once again being recycled into new forms of representation? With this question in mind, this article presents a case study of provincial social remembrance in order to follow its mutations in the late twentieth century. invasion of Connacht and the north midlands in the late summer of r798 and the local rebellion that it sparked were vividly recalled in folk history. It lasted only a month, starting with the landing of a small expeditionary force at the village of Kilcummin by Killala Bay in County Mayo (22 August), reaching its apex with the rebel victory at The Races of Castlebar (27 August), and culminating with the defeat of the Franco-Irish army near the village of Ballinamuck in North Longford (8 September) and the retaking of Killala (23 September). But it was remembered popularly as Bliain na bhFrancach, or The Year of the French. This episode stands out in the larger picture of Ninety-Eight, the term through which Irish national historical consciousness has familiarly labeled the 1798 Rebellion. In the 1930s hundreds of oral traditions about The Year of the French were documented by the collectors of the Irish Folklore Commission and by pupils who participated in the 1937-38 Schools Scheme, which coordinated the collection of folklore in national schools throughout the Irish Free State. …