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- Convenors:
-
Birgit Bräuchler
(University of Copenhagen)
Sina Emde (Leipzig University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 26 University Square (UQ), 01/005
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
How people remember a violent past determines how they envision the future. Focusing on transgenerational and performative memory work of young people, we investigate the transformative potential of memory and factors facilitating/hindering a creative engagement with the past towards peace.
Long Abstract:
In many post-conflict settings, performative and transgenerational remembrance are seen as pathways towards more peaceful futures. To facilitate transformation and to potentially generate hope, such memory work requires 1) creative approaches that open up spaces for reflection, reconstruction and engagement, and 2) supportive wider contexts. Together, they allow for the negotiation of desired futures. In this panel, we want to investigate the transformative potential of memory and ask which factors support hopeful processes of remembering and which factors hinder, discourage or undermine a creative and transformative engagement with the past - be it, for instance, a specific political climate, lack of access to creative means or the lack of motivation to engage in such work. With our focus on transgenerational and performative memory work, we are particularly interested in how young people who grew up during violent conflict or were born in its aftermath remember that violence. We also ask how the youth is part or a target group of national/international programs or interventions aimed to create transgenerational memoryscapes. How do young actors creatively engage with memory, for instance through social media, arts, storytelling, alternative participatory transitional justice tools and others and how are these practices inspired by both global patterns and aesthetics of memorialisation and local cultural approaches to reconciliation and remembrance? For our panel, we invite scholars who study and/or themselves engage in such transformative creative memory work and analyses based on both empirical field research material as well as conceptual reflections that resonate with our panel themes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This presentation focuses on how imaginings of the independent future of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea seem to be hampered due to people’s subjective memory of the troubling past.
Paper long abstract:
How can we imagine a future when we are locked into a traumatic past that determines our present? This presentation focuses on how imaginings of the independent future of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea seem to be hampered due to people’s subjective memory of the troubling past. While those grown up and born during the conflict cannot envision a time before the conflict, nor the time of the ancestors, the older generation can. As a result, the latter generation’s desire to re-create a pre-conflict Bougainville sociality has no resonance among a large part of Bougainville’s current population. Moreover, although the conflict is officially over, for many, especially male ex-combatants and those traumatised by the crisis, the conflict has not ended and they still live with it, which constitutes a kind of anti-temporality. This presentation shows how at the eve of the Bougainville referendum in 2019, the performance of Catholic pilgrimages united people from different genders, regions, denominations and political affiliations, momentarily moving away from traumatic and conflicting lived temporalities. As argued, these pilgrimages enabled participants to commemorate, mobilize and hence perform the divine, and (albeit temporarily) move away from their individual pasts and passive presents towards the envisioning of a communal and peaceful new future.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation will analyze Druze reincarnation experiences in the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War (1975- 1991) analyzing how such experiences work to reformulate questions of communal memory, violence and trauma amongst the generation of Druze youth born in the conflict's wake.
Paper long abstract:
Based on extensive fieldwork conducted amongst the generation of Druze born after the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1991) who believe themselves to be the reincarnation of specific people killed during the conflict, either as combatants or civilians, this presentation will seek to better understand how such 'memories' and experiences of trauma help influence the way the war and the violence of the war is memorialized, processed and understood by the wider community. The Druze are a heterodox Islamic community based in the Middle East and global diaspora who believe in reincarnation. According to Druze folklore those who die a violent or sudden death are more likely to remember their past lives thus creating a direct link between violent trauma and so-called past life experiences. This presentation will attempt to bridge the gap between study of reincarnation as a religious phenomenon and the growing body of research surrounding communal trauma and memory in relation to war in general and the Lebanese Civil War in particular. (Hagubolle, 2010; Mermier and Varin, 2010; Rabah, 2020) The presentation will also seek to understand how relationships created through reincarnation experiences exist in a state of cooperation and competition with other forms of Druze identity including Druze sectarianism. Following this the presentation will finally touch on how reincarnation narratives might work to both harden sectarian lines and/or help foster reconciliation efforts between the Druze and other sectarian communities in Lebanon.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses young people's engagement in memory work as response to collective violence. The empirical data on Alevi youth in Switzerland (and Europe) sheds light on “temporal reasoning” in relation to violence as influential factor for young people's commitment to future making.
Paper long abstract:
Beyond claims on a broader socio-political level, performative public memorialization also entails important aspects for community internal remembrance, transmission and future formation. As loss or suffering are often difficult to put in words in a private space, the public form of memorialization can facilitate e.g. transgenerational communication and understanding for past experiences of violence and trauma beyond mere words. Simultaneously it can entail claims upon a community’s youth to become engaged in order to prevent the looming threat of repetition.
Based on ethnographic and biographic fieldwork in Switzerland with young people who consider themselves Alevi, I examine how variations in “temporal reasoning” (comp. Guyer, 2007; Ringel, 2018) related to representations of a violent past can influence a sense of community and motivations to get engaged for a “better future”. Therefore, on the one hand, I explore how “bodily synchronicity” (Krøijer, 2010: 147) in the act of performative commemoration can allow young people to become part of a community by sharing a “bodily belonging to the same moment in time” (ibid.) - be it “figurations” of pasts or futures (Krøijer, 2010). On the other hand, I explore how beyond and despite these shared moments young people engage in varied and distinctive forms of reasoning about temporal relations linked to violence and their own stakes in future making. Thereby, facets of ruptures as well as continuities with the larger community’s “temporal reasoning” become apparent and bear possibilities for continuities as much as for transformations in how a hopeful future could be made.
Paper short abstract:
Transgenerational and transformative memory-work involves the temporal and embodied interplay of memory and imagination. It is a lens to understand the co-implication of multiple temporalities in people's lives and projects and the dynamics of transgenerational and collective memory formation.
Paper long abstract:
Stories and narratives among Muslims of their survivance in colonial and postcolonial Philippines that are passed on through generations have shaped the civic and political subjectivities of Muslim youths who are active in the Bangsamoro's struggle for the right to self-determination. This transgenerational and transformative memory-work involves the temporal and embodied interplay of memory and imagination that links the past, present, and future and through which individual stories and experiences connect with the collective story and generations are bridged. Muslim youths' commemorative-imaginative practices create a sense of shared heritage, break the hierarchies of humanness and the colonial logics of violence, erasure, and subjugation, and are part of their struggle to have a peaceful and prosperous life and a future of self-determination. This is an imagined future that, in many ways, is a departure from the violent past and the precarious present. In their own ways, and drawing on the resources available to them amid the challenges of being young and Muslim in the Philippines, these youths are changing the present and shaping the future of the Bangsamoro.