Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the visitors' experience at the Castel National site. Tough battles took place there during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The site's renewal left this fact vague and flexible to allow all the visitors to “connect” to the place during their visit and have a good time.

Paper long abstract:

his study is based on an ethnographic research that took place at the Castel National Site, a “natural” area surrounded by buildings, located at the center of Israel, during the years 2016–2017. We want to argue that Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA) shaped the Castel, where tough battles between Jews and Arabs took place before the state of Israel was established, in a way that the story of the site is vague, flexible and for some of the visitors even meaningless, in order to make it possible for all the visitors to “connect” to the place during their visit and enjoy it. Even the nature dimension in the site stays vague since the visitors found it hard to notice which elements were natural and which were man-made. Nevertheless, the flattening of the story that enables a wide audience to visit the site, created a sterilized experience that is not very attractive for part of the visitors and they refer to it as “nice”.

Difficulties in finding appropriate metrics for evaluating the quality of the site and the success of the employees and the manager, led to an unfortunate miss. The number of visitors – referred to as site entrance numbers, became unintentionally the main index of evaluation, giving little attention to the purpose or quality of the visit. The need to increase the number of visitors made the conflict between preserving nature and providing accessibility to visitors even stronger.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses upon the analysis of the recent past and the present of a transylvanian microregion (Romania): the understanding of the social and cultural attitudes of the rural communities of Transylvania, the memory practices, and the political ideologies and discourses about the forms of rurality.

Paper long abstract:

The paper focuses upon the analysis of the recent past and the present of a Romanian microregion. Our research investigates the social and cultural changes, and memory practices after the Romanian Revolution of 1989. It tries to answer the question relating to the way in which the rural area has experienced these changes and to identify the new as well as the surviving (similar, different, and complementary) forms of rurality, peasant or post-peasant modes of thinking and practice.

Certainly, the analysis of memorial practices can be carried out from many standpoints and discerned into various categories; for the present study I have chosen two major ones. My research focuses on production of heritage as a process, and analyses the practices of locating the (created) past in public spaces. Performing memory, regarded as ritual usage and symbolical seizing, opened another perspective for my research. By following how the elements of heritage is preserved and performed (public celebrations), I intended to present the actual cultural mechanisms that are connected to the past.

My analysis encompasses the events of creating a tradition, ways of interpreting new histories and memories, the attitudes of commemoration and the strategies of neglecting and legitimizing. It shows – first of all – how are these represented in narratives about past, history and life,and the social use and functions of heritage, as they occur in rural (and transnational) contexts.

What happens with tradition in the classical sense, and what counts as tradition in the age of translocal networks and transnational lifestyles? What does the transformation of tradition (i.e.thedetraditionalization, the post-modernization, the religious life, the cultural/collective memory, the individual and communal identity strategies, everyday lifestyles) mean in the context of increasing transfrontal migration, in the presence of changing medial environments? What social and economic consequences does the change of tradition have at the community level? And how does it influence the situations of ethnic cooperation and community resilience?

Paper short abstract:

Bulgarian men go "On the trails of Zographou saints", uniting Bulgarian saints who at some point lived in the Bulgarian monastery on Mount Athos. With Stara Zagora as a town of departure and Zographou as a destination this trail could be considered as a pilgrimage and as a national commemoration.

Paper long abstract:

As some of the monasteries and shrines of the monastic republic Mount Athos are connected with the Bulgarian history, in some cases they function not only as places of religious worship by Bulgarian men but also as sites of national memory. In this regard, a small group of Bulgarian men from the town Stara Zagora (Bulgaria) goes for some years now the so called route "On the trails of Zographou saints", including Bulgarian monks, who are venerated as Bulgarian saints and had lived in the Zographou monastery. Their route starts in Stara Zagora and goes through places connected with the life of the saints (birthplace, patroned churches, memorial houses, a.o.) as well as stops of the old (Bulgarian Revival) Zographou pilgrimage trail with the Bulgarian monastery on Mount Athos as a destination. Even the participants (i.e. from emic point of view) see it as a kind of their specific Camino, from scientific (etic) point of view their trail - a part of which is outside Bulgaria - and the paid homage predominantly to the given Bulgarian saints and their lives' work, could also be seen as contributory for the maintenance of the Bulgarian memory and heritage in national and extra-national settings.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine Kosovo Albanian diasporan summer holidays as spent in Albanian and Montenegrin coast. It will illustrate how recently these beaches are gaining multiple connotations and how they are used as places where their past and new identities are negotiated and performed.

Paper long abstract:

People tend to move from their homelands for various reasons, forcefully or willingly. However, keeping ties with homeland and people left behind remains an issue of big interest for them. One way to keep these ties is by practicing holidays back home. These holidays are filled with different activities, like meeting family members and friends, carrying on with family rites, building houses, going to the seaside with homeland family members, etc. that could be understood as a dialogue between them and homeland, concerned with who they were, are, and want to be, thus their identity.

Due to political situation in Kosovo at the end of 20th century regular practice of homeland holidays by Albanian Diaspora started only after 1999. Close observation of how they spend seaside holidays, what they do, and why they choose these particular places enabled their analyzing both in transnational and identity context, where different levels of local, regional and national cultural constructions and awareness are intertwined and in interplay.

Analytical tools in this paper will be the concept of transnational social field, as conceptualized by Glick Schiller/Levitt, and the frame of 'identity negotiation', as defined by Swan and Bosson.

James Clifford conceptualizes diasporan memories and practices of collective identity maintained over long stretches of time as a 'changing same', as something endlessly hybridized and in process but persistently there. Therefore, this way of holidaying being closely tied to diasporan inter-generational identification could be easily also considered or interpreted as a mnemonic practice of a 'changing same'.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation will examine the use of the Croatian past with the purpose of constructing local national, transnational and pseudo-national identities. The analysis shows that local vernacular memory, even though it exists in transnational settings, is far from becoming transformed by them.

Paper long abstract:

Based on several examples, this presentation will examine the present-day use of the Croatian past with the purpose of constructing a public memory and thus making it a part of local national, transnational and even pseudo-national identities. The three examples shown here will focus on the material and verbal vernacular memory of the Croatian Middle Ages in the cases of the mogila in the Maksimir Park in Zagreb, the presentation of the image of King Tomislav, and the so-called Curse of King Zvonimir. The narrative of "heroic history" in all three cases will be examined in the context of historical developments in 20th century Croatia - its path from national to transnational settings and eventually back again. Furthermore, with the aim of understanding the durability of national vernacular memory in spite of omnipresent global mobility (mental of physical) and transnational settings, this presentation will pay special attention to the Croatian way of communicating the past into the present. This multi-layered analysis will show that local national settings seem to be stronger than ever before, while mnemonic products and practices "grew tired" of the transnational.

Paper short abstract:

Historical ethnography of migration from Europe to America draws on recorded oral history interviews that capture a range of senses and affects. A historical sensorium of migration with humans intertwined with things and Ellis Island is a vibrant memory object refracting (trans)national identities.

Paper long abstract:

Oral history interviews from The Ellis Island Oral History collection are the source of my historical ethnographic account of migration through affects and senses. The “histories as usual,” especially those focusing on immigration through Ellis Island, assign a particular structure of feeling to the Great Migration from Europe to America at the start of the twentieth century defined by sentimentalized hardship and grit of immigrant life. Rather, a more sensuous and nuanced tone emerges in the analysis of narrations recorded in these interviews. The sensory recall of individuals offers access to an inter-text mediating the sensorium that involved both human and nonhuman participation in this rich archive and provides an interpretive framework for transnational memories shaped through American symbols and experiences of transatlantic crossings. The narrations articulate a complex representation of active imagination that engaged the immigrants’ subjectivities as they shape identities and identity processes of both individuals and multiple communities they invoke. The ontologies that emerge in the interviews involve the world of humans intertwined with things, the material and immaterial objects (melodies), places and shifting temporalities through representational and non-representational dimensions, setting the tone and atmosphere. The “machinic” processing of immigrants was an ambience defining the experience of migration through the body and senses; in recalling the event of migration, the affects were manifested in the narrations. An interpretive close reading of particular interviews and an aggregative reading and analysis of groups of interviews are combined to draw on the experiences of Southern and Central Europeans in particular.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the relationship between place-attachment and collective memory as reflected in interviews with Lithuanians living in Iceland. Impact of migration on affective relationship with place is recognised but also bearings of interest and access to cultural and communicative memory.

Paper long abstract:

One of the ways people form socio-spatial identity is through developing affective relationships to places. Place-attachment has been recognised as having significant impact on life fulfilment and lack there-of may have negative impact on personal wellbeing. In the literature on place-attachment it is often assumed that extended residency is basis of strong place-attachment. People having resided in a neighbourhood or region over a long time develop closer attachment to place than people who have resettled from elsewhere. Split habitus of migrants and lessened access to cultural and communicative memory of the adopted home and diminished contact with place of origin results in weaker attachment to place. Recent studies indicate that the picture is more complex indicating that migrants may indeed form and maintain strong attachment to both their place of origin and to their adopted place of residence. Drawing on interviews with Lithuanian migrants in Reykjavik, Iceland, the paper explores the ways and degrees the immigrants interviewed have developed place-attachment within Iceland and the ways they have maintained and developed attachment to the places in Lithuania they lived prior to residency in Iceland. The relationship reflected in the interviews between place-attachment and various forms of social memory is explored, offering insights into migrant attitudes and access to cultural memory in Lithuania and Iceland. In accordance with recent studies on migrant place-attachment the conclusions indicate that even though migration may be an important factor in determining place-attachment other issues such as personal interest in local and national cultural heritage is significant.

Paper short abstract:

This paper describes and analyzes autobiographical texts of a northern indigenous Tiko Vilka produced together with folklorist Ščerbakova as ways of presenting Vilka as a citizen of transnational Soviet community, yet omitting some of the general textual strategies of Soviet biography.

Paper long abstract:

Within the tradition of Socialist Realism and the so-called Soviet folklore, it was customary, if not obligatory to present the flow of time through binary opposition between the pre-Soviet tsarist years of misery and subordination and post-Soviet joy and advancement. To remember this way, was to become modern citizen of Soviet Union, and the press, publishers and stages provided immense exemplars for representing the proper model for the past. This applies also for the indigenous literatures that were a triumph of Soviet modernity and nationalities policy proving that the backward people could be mobilized towards social, cultural, and economic change through education and technical reformations.

The early Nenets literature represents one exception, Tiko Vilka. Vilka's autobiographical texts, produced in co-operation with folklorist Anna Ščerbakova, certainly discuss the process of becoming modern, being part of the transnational community of imperial Russia and Soviet Union. Nevertheless, he is able to pass the established dichotomies and tropes related to Soviet frames.

This paper seeks to describe Vilka's texts and their process of production, and understand through this and though the analysis of Vilka's use of both vernacular and official linguistic strategies, how he builds himself modern Soviet citizen yet avoiding some dominant modes available. Its proposition is that the exceptional mode is based on the texts' quality as neither literature nor folklore.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation explores the trope of childhood's end in the articulation of national and transnational positioning in regard to Ingria, Finland, and the Soviet Union in autobiographical memoirs of Ingrian-Finnish author, Juhani Konkka.

Paper long abstract:

Juhani Konkka (1904-1970) was an Ingrian-Finnish author and a translator of classic Russian literature who migrated from Ingria to Finland in the 1920s after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Ingrian Finns are a historical Finnish-speaking minority people of Russia descending from a Finnish population that migrated around the present-day city of Saint Petersburg during the 17th century. This presentation focuses on the trope of childhood's end - that is, growing from childhood to adulthood - in articulations of various spatial, societal, and symbolic borders and their crossings in autobiographical memoirs. By analyzing the two memoirs of Konkka, titled Kahden maailman rajalla (1939) [At the Border of Two Worlds] and Pietarin valot (1958) [The Lights of Saint Petersburg], from the perspective of the genres of bildungsroman and modern autobiography, the presentation discusses the trope of childhood's end as a figuration of temporal and spatial aspects related to human life and as a reflection of various societal and spatial transitions and mobilities. The presentation illustrates how Konkka uses the trope of childhood's end in the articulation of national and transnational belonging in regard to Ingria, Finland, and the Soviet Union.