Description
Book SynopsisIn tracing the process through which monuments give rise to collective memories, this path-breaking book emphasizes that memorials are not just inert and amnesiac spaces upon which individuals may graft their ever-shifting memories. To the contrary, the materiality of monuments can be seen to elicit a particular collective mode of remembering which shapes the consumption of the past as a shared cultural form of memory.In a variety of disciplines over the past decade, attention has moved away from the oral tradition of memory to the interplay between social remembering and object worlds. But research is very sketchy in this area and the materiality of monuments has tended to be ignored within anthropological literature, compared to the amount of attention given to commemorative practice. Art and architectural history, on the other hand, have been much interested in memorial representation through objects, but have paid scant attention to issues of social memory.Cross-cultural and interdisciplinary in scope, this book fills this gap and addresses topics ranging from material objects to physical space; from the contemporary to the historical; and from high art to memorials outside the category of art altogether. In so doing, it represents a significant contribution to an emerging field.
Trade Review'This volume presents a new and intriguing perspective on the relationship between the material and immaterial dimensions of culture, suggesting that people's material technologies of memory are always also their technologies of forgetting.'The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Table of ContentsPart 1 Ephemeral monuments: ephemeral monuments, memory and royal sempiternity in a grass-fields kingdom, Nicholas Argenti; the place of memory, Susanne Kuchler. Part 2 Remembering and forgetting in images past: Girodet's "Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-Representative of the Colonies" - in remembrance of "things sublime", Helen Weston; bribing the vote - 18th-century monuments and the futility of commemoration, David Bindman; forgetting Rome and the voice of Piranesi's "speaking ruins", Tarnya Cooper. Part 3 War memorials: remembering to forget - sublimation as sacrifice in war memorials, Michael Rowlands; remembering and forgetting in the public memorials of the Great War, Alex King; commemorating 1916, commemorating difference, Neil Jarman.
