Paper short abstract:

The author reflects on silences in her research of population transfers, national heroes and other heritages which are perceived as consequences of national amnesias, contested pasts, national homogenizations of heritage, appropriations, interruptions of histories, changes of social positions etc.

Paper long abstract:

Among the reflections on different kind of silences in her ethnographic research the first one refers to an omnipresent silence on the "Istrian exodus", the migrations of 90% of Italian speaking population after WW II from the contested region of Istria after its annexation to Yugoslavia. Due to decades of fascist oppression and war violence, the Italian population was collectively criminalized in the dominant Yugoslav memory, thus, the memories and heritage of the ones who stayed in Istria as a minority were silenced. The question will be raised who, when and why was silenced. The research of memories on this period resounds in different kind of silences, which could be interpreted as consequences of incompatible individual/collective memories, individual traumas, struggles for power, outsider/insider position etc. However, silence can be also saturated with words, when memory tries to rationalize, censure and prevent from being hurt again. The second reflection refers to monuments to national heroes as material sites of official memory which reflect tensions with the individual memories and collective silences decades after the fall of the official memory. The paper reflects on reasons for persistent regional collective silence in a case of a national hero, which was still strong enough to obstruct the erecting of the monument. Silence in this case can be a result of adapting to a political system, a way to survive. Other silences can occur in the field of intangible heritage of beliefs as resistance against authoritative researcher, clash of different worldviews etc.

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws attention to the ways in which individuals remember in migratory and post-war contexts, and how they manoeuvre and place their memories in public spaces that are strongly defined by national remembrance and thus undercutting alternative histories.

Paper long abstract:

Memories are created, manifested but also contested and silenced in social fields. Using two case studies, Mostar and Vienna, I will examine how individuals remember, and how they manoeuvre and place their memories in public spaces that are strongly defined by national remembrance and thus undercutting alternative histories. The first examines the rewriting of local history and urban memory in Mostar after the 1992-95 war and the ways in which individuals position themselves in this new mnemonic landscape where personal and collective memories are likely to diverge. The second example explores the specific case of labour migrants who entered Vienna as so-called 'guest workers' in the 1960s and 1970s. It investigates how Turkish labour migrants place their memories in Vienna's cityscape, where the histories of guest workers are not part of public remembrance but where national remembrance of the Ottoman sieges still prevails. By analysing these two case studies, this paper puts everyday spatial mnemonic practices into focus and explores processes of individuating the city (de Certeau 1984). The focus on place and remembrance in this paper allows us to explore the ways in which individuals generate continuities between different life periods as well as between different localities in times of social change.

Monika Palmberger is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Vienna and at the University of Leuven. She is author of the book "How Generations Remember" (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) and co-editor of "Care across Distance" (Berghahn 2018) and of "Memories on the Move" (Palgrave Macmillan 2016).

Paper short abstract:

In my presentation, I will approach memories of displacement transmitted within a family through material culture. I have interviewed people whose families were displaced during WWII in the Finland documenting their mementos, and analyzed their material autobiographies.

Paper long abstract:

When leaving their home country and migrating, people bring along certain belongings that include both everyday objects as well as personal mementos and family treasures. In the course of time, some of this memorabilia disappears while other artefacts gain new meanings and values in the hands of next generations. In my presentation, I will approach memories of displacement transmitted within a family through material culture.

The family histories I explore include experiences of forced displacement that took place during WWII in the Finland. I will introduce histories of both families who were evacuated and able to return to their home regions in Finnish Lapland as well as families who left and could not return to the ceded areas in both Lapland and Karelia. I have interviewed family members of different generations and documented their mementoes. Drawing on the notion that material objects have a capacity to elucidate memories of silenced experiences, shameful and painful, and speaking for complex and abstract issues (e.g. Povrzanović Frykman 2016; De Nardi 2016, 33-96), I have compiled material autobiographies that enunciate experiences of loss and disconnection, suffering and longing that are not articulated through narratives or words.

De Nardi, S. 2016: The Poetics of Conflict Experience. Materiality and Embodiment in Second World War Italy. London and New York: Routledge.

Povrzanović Frykman, M. 2016: Sensitive Objects of Humanitarian Aid Corporeal Memories and Affective Continuities. In: Jonas Frykman & Maja Povrzanović Frykman (eds.) Sensitive Objects Affect and Material Culture, 79-104- Lund: Nordic Academic Press.

Paper short abstract:

Reflecting on work with newcomer women, it is the silences between the stories that seem most powerful. What did the women chose to silence and what do they make vocal? How do my own expectations and silences influence the stories? Even in an effort to amplify their voices, the silences resound.

Paper long abstract:

Reflecting back through the years since I first began documenting refugee and immigrant women's stories of migration and resettlement, it is the silences between the stories that now seem most powerful. What did the women chose to silence and what do they make vocal? In what ways did my own expectations and silences influence those stories? We have been working together for 18 years gathering their narratives and sharing them with the general public in a variety of ways; exhibitions, theater productions, and even a cookbook. It has been a collaborative process in which my own presence has been as facilitator. This paper will reflect on the silences so apparent during the fieldwork process as well as the co-curatorial process of designing public events: what stories were not told; how and why have those silences shifted over time? Even in an effort to amplify the voices of those who are silenced, the silences resound in those spaces. I will also explore the nature of the silenced stories and what they say about our work with refugees and immigrants. How can understanding enlighten that work? Whether grounded in fear, pain, or pride, the silences contribute to what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls the "single story" of the immigrant. This is as true of my own position as folklorist or silent facilitator as it is of the choices the women make. My own silences as well as my expectations are implicated in the process.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to describe the role silence and denial play in the process of self-representation in the first generation of Bosnian Serbs grown up in postwar Gradiška, a Bosnian town administratively located in Republika Srpska, the ethnically Serb entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).

Paper long abstract:

More than 20 years after the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), the memory of the conflict constitutes the symbolic space where divisive narrations and policies are created and promoted by ethnonationalist movements and political parties.

Constitutionally grounded in ANNEX IV of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA), contemporary BiH is a state defined by its three constituent nationalities - Bosniak, Croat and Serb - as well as two territorial entities that are ethnically aligned, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH), and the Republika Srpska (RS). Today, a new generation of adults has grown up in this sectarian political landscape. A context where the recent past has been used to create exclusive institutional practices and narratives of belonging.

This paper aims to analyse the role silence has in the process of self-representation of Bosnian Serb youth living in the municipality of Gradiška (Republika Srpska). While many social analysts reasonably focused their efforts in pointing out the level of genocide denial and the nationalist policies that characterised Republika Srpska institutions since the end of the war, a close ethnographic account shows us a more complex dynamic. A dynamic where silences and omissions not only characterise the work institutions conduct in order to re-codify the past but most importantly they play a crucial role in defining the public as well as the private sphere of sociability, calling into being different moral economies and practices of resistance.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the silencing of a religious tourism route The Stepinac Path (Croatia) which reflects dissonance over the heritage of the Blessed Alojzije Stepinac.

Paper long abstract:

Like many revived old pilgrimage routes throughout Europe, a religious tourism route The Stepinac Path (Croatia) is a project that follows the model of the Camino de Santiago, a cultural heritage route promoted in Europe since 1987. The Stepinac Path is delineated to connect four mnemonic sites related to selected segments of the Blessed Alojzije Stepinac biography. It includes the reconstruction of some old pilgrimage paths to the national pilgrimage shrine of Our Lady of Marija Bistrica. The Stepinac Path is conceived to be incorporated into a wider network of Croatian and international Marian pilgrimage paths. The project is created and managed by tourism institutions, with the aim to heritagize a figure of Alojzije Stepinac by highlighting several aspects of his life. However, the phrase "the heritage of the Blessed Alojzije Stepinac" is mostly promoted by the Catholic Church in Croatia, and emphasizes the religious aspect of his legacy. The complex power relations between religious and heritage policies, along with recent revival of some silenced (counter)memories, push the implementation of The Stepinac Path in a silent phase - without the propper support of the Catholic Church, as an influental body in religious heritage politics, the project is weakly recognized in public domain and slowed down.

The paper examines the silencing of The Stepinac Path in terms of dominant and silenced memories, and of heritagization and deheritagization of the Blessed Alojzije Stepinac in political, religious and economic discourses and power relations.

Paper short abstract:

Mobility symbolises the urban and the present, the settled symbolises the rural and the past. An ethnographic look at seemingly depopulated villages in the rural Alps-Adriatic counters this assumption. Why has this dynamic memory of mobility and the settled been silenced in the hegemonic discourse?

Paper long abstract:

Mobility symbolises the urban and the present, the settled symbolises the rural and the past. A closer ethnographic look at seemingly depopulated villages in the rural Alps-Adriatic between Italy, Austria and Slovenia counters this widespread assumption. The region has been the site of major European conflicts in the 20th century. Focussing the villages reveals a heritage of political and ethnic conflicts, subsequent labour migrations, periodic returns and multi-local settlement, a memory which is silenced in the hegemonic discourse on seemingly remote and peripheral mountain areas. Yet in everyday lives, this heritage continues to be performed and practiced until today, creating specific forms of transnational, multilingual sociality where the urban and the rural combine and fixed national identities are being transgressed.

Why has this dynamic memory of mobility and the settled been silenced behind the discourses of globalisation, urbanisation, and depopulation of the rural? What is to be gained by directing attention to places where it is practiced as living heritage? This paper demonstrates memory practices and subjectivities which cannot be reduced to a single national heritage, to either country or city. It argues that the silenced yet persistent memory of mobility and settlement and especially its roots hold the seed for open-minded social relations which may counteract the nationalist revival that seems so prevalent in today's Europe.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is a reflection on the construction of sources in the context of extensive fieldwork research, carried out on the post-industrial outskirts of Milan. I describe the silent memories that emerged with incisiveness in the relation between my interlocutors and me.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is intended as a reflection on the socio-political construction of oral sources in the context of extensive fieldwork research, carried out in a post-industrial area of the city of Milan, known as Bicocca. It investigates the ethnographic encounters as heuristic tools aimed at the construction of specific anthropological knowledge. Today, the University of Milano Bicocca, the Theatre Arcimboldi, CNR, and Siemens Italia, among others, occupy the site. However, until the 1980s, the same area hosted the Pirelli Industries, one of the major Italian plants for the production of plastics, tires, and cables. Even if the site has subsequently been transformed into a "technological integrated area", it is still permeated with both material and immaterial historical traces of its industrial past. I consider here my ethnographic interviews with former unionists and workers of the Pirelli focusing on the accounts of the years 1968-1969, also known as the "Second Red Biennium" or the "Autunno Caldo". Rethinking these "ethnographic documents" collected between 2008 and 2013, I describe the silent memories that emerged with incisiveness in the relation between the subjects involved in this ethnographic research and me.

Paper short abstract:

Based on Paul Connerton's typology of forgetting (2008) as well as on other studies in the field, this paper will explore changes in the identities of Israel's Palestinian Arab citizens through the prism of forgetfulness and silence.

Paper long abstract:

The field of memory studies focuses primarily on how societies remember and on insights drawn about social groups through an analysis of the ways in which their members remember the past. Less is known, however, on how societies forget.

Based on Paul Connerton's typology of forgetting (2008) as well as on other studies in the field, this paper will explore changes in the identities of Israel's Palestinian Arab citizens through the prism of forgetfulness and silence. The analysis will take into account 'Jewish-Israeli' amnesias, silences and acts of erasure, but first and foremost it will attempt to examine the concept of forgetfulness, its various types and its different agencies, through an examination of changing 'Israeli-Arab' attitudes towards the past.

The paper will discuss differences between explicit acts of cultural erasure and implicit ones. It will deal with how Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel forced themselves to forget, but also with how (and what) they chose to remember and under which circumstances they decided not to keep quiet. Differences between resistance and remembrance will be discussed in the paper, but its emphasis will be on forgetfulness and its relations with neglect, repression, denial and shame.

Paper short abstract:

Language usually means communication, but there is a silence created by people's return to their native languages as they age, one created by listeners and hegemonic cultures through an inability to understand. Culture is lost, stories are no longer told, and our very humanity silenced.

Paper long abstract:

How can speaking create silence? Language usually connotes communication, but this paper explores a voicelessness that is created out of a return to native language as people age.

It is well known that dementia sufferers lose more recent memories first, falling further and further back into the remembered past and into their native tongue. Thus, older generations in Scotland leave behind English, the language of empire and domestic hegemony, and return to their mother tongues of Gaelic and Scots as monoglot speakers. The voiced become voiceless in the anglicised linguistic environments that surround them. They lose their ability to communicate their story, their experience and, at times, even their most basic needs.

History is partly told by unvoicing the defeated, actively suppressing memories we wish to overlook in creating our own reality. But silence is not just the absence of sound; it can be created by listeners through the absence of hearing, of understanding. So, I want to talk about the silencing not of the speakers and storytellers, but of the silence created by the hegemonic culture surrounding them.

This is how silence is truly created: no one wants to - or can - hear. And thus culture is lost, stories are no longer told, experience is no longer valued, and culture is no longer passed on. Silence becomes not the absence of sound, but the loss of interaction and communication, the loss of our identity as homo narans, the loss of our humanity itself.