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.