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INTIMATE GEOPOLITICS: Love, Territory, and the Future on India's Northern Threshold: By SARA SMITH. In a vivid ethnographic study of the Ladakh region in northern India, Smith provides an intricate examination of how community tensions are shaped by ethnic identities, family planning, and majoritarian politics - and one incendiary moment on a public street. Though I Intimate Geopolitics i is overtly a study of Ladakhi territorial politics as related to family dynamics, the commentary on sectarianism is relevant beyond the confines of the distant province. [Extracted from the article]

Today, the marriage between cartographic language and narrative strategies has reshaped maps with the generative capability to represent the intangible historical characters and events involved in social memories following a narrative manner. Despite these advances, rather few efforts have been spared to unveil the potential of tourism maps in a narrative form. This paper seeks to rectify the gaps in this line of research by unfolding the underlying theories and cartographic design guidelines for making narrative tourism maps. In particular, a narrative cartographic design approach is demonstrated and evidenced to be practical using the case of 'Red Boat Spirit Map', a tourism map designed for Jiaxing City, one of the most well-known destinations of China's red tourism. It is believed that the theoretical instrument and cartographic design guidelines presented in our paper are particularly relevant and can be easily adapted to more general research of narrative maps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Invented market traditions are practices and memories of the past created by corporations and sustained through consumption. Invented market traditions show how organisations have the potential to reorganise collective memories of the past, creating new mnemonic narratives rather than drawing on existing ones. Materiality provides long-term stability to these narratives. This paper focuses on the institution of Italian breakfast, based on milk, coffee, and convenience bakery products such as biscuits, invented by the brand Mulino Bianco. Biscuits exemplify how commodities imbued with nostalgic meanings can mobilise these invented memories and fold them into social practices. The recurring consumption of biscuits at breakfast, which was marketed as a rediscovery of Italian heritage, created those very nostalgic memories that consumers wanted to remember. Invented market traditions show the social repercussions of organisations' rhetorical work and expose how context plays a role in understanding their success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of European Journal of Psychotraumatology is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The city of São Carlos, state of São Paulo, Brazil, has a historical coexistence between society and floods. Unplanned urbanization in this area is a representative feature of how Brazilian cities have developed, undermining the impact of natural hazards. The Gregório Creek catchment is an enigma of complex dynamics concerning the relationship between humans and water in Brazilian cities. Our hypothesis is that social memory of floods can improve future resilience. In this paper we analyse flood risk dynamics in a small urban catchment, identify the impacts of social memory on building resilience and propose measures to reduce the risk of floods. We applied a socio-hydrological model using data collected from newspapers from 1940 to 2018. The model was able to elucidate human–water processes in the catchment and the historical source data proved to be a useful tool to fill gaps in the data in small urban basins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical markers help preserve and display history and communicate what a group deems important about a place's past. This paper analyzes the changing themes and landscape relevance of California's official historical landmarks. California's thousand- plus markers are classified and mapped by themes, analyzed for changing topical emphasis over time, and evaluated for landscape presence. The thematic distribution and relative density of these landmarks is uneven. Gold Rush and Spanish themes have become less prevalent over time as culturally related landmarks have grown in importance. This paper illustrates how historical landmark programs help sustain and define the public's collective memory through designating dispersed geographical locations as particularly important points of reference to the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memory institutions, including libraries, transmit experience and creativity across the borders of time and space, language and custom, tribe and individuality. As institutions, they have their own memories, enshrined in their collections and buildings and as mutable as human memory. Those memories echo through the institutions, shaping expectations and possibilities. Tracing its history back nearly two centuries, the State Library of New South Wales has its own deep memories that condition its present and contribute to its future. This paper offers a case study of that Library to explore the nature and consequences of institutional memory in memory institutions. The address on which this paper is based opened the 11th Library History Forum held at the State Library of New South Wales on the 18th and 19th November, 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community memory can provide the crucial bridge between large-scale information bases like digital libraries and the day-to-day activities of a community's members. Just as a digital library is based on a general structure and conventional means of access to diverse collections of materials, a community memory will help cull and shape the structure and contents of this collection to meet more particular needs. But it is by no means straightforward for people to collect, maintain, share, and apply the materials that are part of a community memory. Useful and usable community memories require support for: (1) the acquisition and evolution of content and structure; (2) the identification of materials and community members relevant to a particular task; and (3) the maintenance of organizations that are mutually intelligible across the community. In this paper, we explore issues related to these three requirements based on a meta-analysis of our collective experiences with the development and use of shared hypermedia information resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Aquaculture is the global food system's fastest growing sector. The postproductive transition—the shift away from commodity production toward more consumption‐oriented land uses—is common in many coastal areas as well. This paper examines the intersection of these trends in a U.S. state, Maine, with expanding aquaculture and extensive coastal, rural economic and demographic change. It examines interactions between coastal landowners and aquaculture farmers at aquaculture lease hearings in the state's three main aquaculture regions. Landowners are often uncertain about aquaculture because it is new and unfamiliar. Farmers use lease hearings to educate coastal landowners about farm operations, and farmers respond to concerns by altering their operations to fit landowners’ priorities. However, comparative analysis of the three regions reveals divergent histories and geographies leading to different levels of conflict. This study shows the value of applying rural postproductive transition theory to coastal regions and aquaculture development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Harun Farocki's lifelong study of the mute language of manual expressions, the human hand is explored not only as a versatile tool, but as a repository of social memory, a topos in the genealogy of the moving image, and a critical agent in the theory and practice of filmmaking itself. While cinema distinguished itself from previous artistic media through its capacity to salvage and store everyday gestures for later scrutiny, accruing a Bilderschatz for future anthropological and archaeological research, it was also integral to an ongoing process that spurred the progressive withdrawal of the human hand from the manufacturing of images. By adopting a double-pronged approach that considers the programming of bodies and images as integrally aligned, the article traces the gradual demise of craftsmanship and the increasing automation of imaging and perception as engaged across a wide range of Farocki's essay films, found-footage compilations and observational documentaries. Taken together, this body of work at once proffers an encyclopedia of gesturing hands, a form of chiro-praxis in its own right, and a search for alternative or forgotten modes of manual communication and collective imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite our deepening knowledge of non-perennial streams, they are still poorly recognized, and people still perceive them as less valuable and less worthy of conservation than perennial streams. Due to its power to shape attitudes and opinions, mass media plays a critical role, which can also contribute to improving perceptions regarding non-perennial streams. Here, we aim to analyse how non-perennial streams are depicted by mass media in the Balearic Islands and how a catastrophic flood influenced mass media communication about these ecosystems. We analysed all news reports related to streams, published in the most read online newspaper of the Balearic Islands, for 25 months (12 months before and after the catastrophic flood). A total of 407 news reports were analyzed to identify the topics covered (e.g. floods, ecology, stream uses, water quality). News reports related to non-perennial streams focused on past floods and their consequences; our analyses showed how the catastrophic flood event affected the news temporal agenda, as well as the territorial inequalities in media coverage. News reports rarely covered ecological aspects of non-perennial streams or their relevance for freshwater resources. We concluded that news reports contribute to generating a collective memory around flood events but also contribute to social misconception about non-perennial streams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the popular response to Soviet myths in the post-Soviet period through the lens of the complicated treatment of Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia. As arguably the most famous Soviet World War II martyr, Kosmodem'ianskaia's image splintered after glasnost' and has been located at the nexus of debate in various media since 1991. This paper poses questions about the fracturing of national memory when a nation has undergone upheaval: about the stability of heroes, about citizens' responses to them, and about heroes' transformation in the new regime. Catriona Kelly has demonstrated that the treatment of a national hero can illuminate the circumstances that produced the hero and the cultural climate of subsequent decades. Building on her work, this article asks "Why and how has the image of Kosmodem'ianskaia remained relevant while other Soviet heroes have been neglected since 1991?" This article posits that Kosmodem'ianskaia's continued significance lies above all in the flexibility of her image and the transitional aspects of her body. Her depictions in various contexts represent prominent responses to the authoritarian regime which gave birth to both Kosmodem'ianskaia and her legacy. The variety of her images demonstrates the continued relevance of this figure two decades after the collapse of the USSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is a short introduction to the "global turn" in memory studies and to transnational memory in particular. Both culturalist and normative positions are presented. After the conceptual overview, there follows an analysis of two films, Auf der anderen Seite (2007) and Caché (2005), with special focus on the two notions "translocal" and "inclusive distinction", and on the theme of an ethics and morality of memory. This is in order to explicate the usefulness and importance of the notion of transnational memory. Finally, the concluding remark is made that research into transnational memory is significant due to its recognising of small-scale trajectories and memory practices beyond the framework of the nation, and because of the subtle dialectics between an ethics and morality of memory-thus leading to a persistent "transnational monitoring" of the national as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the dynamics of cultural memory against a transnational background. The paper offers a concise discussion of the concept of cultural memory as developed by Jan and Aleida Assmann and as qualified by the most recent scholarship. Focussing on aspects concerning practices of cultural memory, the analysis proceeds to examine a couple of decisive components of Romania's cultural identity. Over time, the arguments attempting to define this identity have drawn on strands of cultural memory that have defied strictly drawn borders: the Latin cultural connotations as embodied by the Romanian language and Eastern Orthodoxy. Mapping the convergence of these two strands within this particular illustration of cultural identity shows one way in which the concepts of cultural memory, of the national, and of the transnational can be applied to a concrete case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper I use arguments from Ludwig Wittgenstein, John L. Austin and Judith Butler to show how the concepts of collective memory and of performativity can help to formulate some ideas about what an ethics of memory can deal with. The positions of speakers or agents and the question of responsibility play a fundamental role in this argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates African matrix cultural production as an avenue of sustainable human development through a study of two African Diaspora communities in Santiago de Cuba. The point of departure of this paper is firmly grounded in Afro-Cuban cultural expressions of music, dance and performing arts as realms filled with numerous intangible benefits for the grassroots participants in these communities. The focus of this work asserts that cultural productions of the African matrix are filled with varied human development potentials including socio-cultural, educational, political, and economic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the need for making connections between and among cultures, especially among Aboriginal and dominant cultures. The context of the paper is one in which we compare and contrast three Aboriginal cultures: the Adnyamathanha people of South Australia, the Sechelt people of Canada, and the Paiwan people of Taiwan. In the act of making connections, we suggest that several themes need to be addressed. The first theme is cultural memory: connections with land. Immersing oneself in the three Aboriginal cultures highlighted here, it is clear that cultural memory (oral history) is deeply tied to connections with land. The second theme is cultural performance: creating and living connections. Rather than conceptualizing visual products as art, we suggest cultural performance as a concept which embraces the integrated nature of culture. Culture is performed through the participation of creators and viewers within a cultural context. The third theme is one of cultural translation: connections for art education. Coming to understand another culture is an act of cultural translation, an act that can only represent a partial understanding from a personal perspective. Through recognizing and respecting cultural memory and cultural performance, art educators may be better able to act as cultural translators alongside members in cultural groups wishing to engage students in learning about their cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including cultural and transcultural memory, chief aspects of cultural memory and transnational background, and spatial sense making through transnational context.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including transnational cultural memory, memory studies, and a call for papers on the so-called "thinking practice."

The collective memory inscribed in Korean history books recalls when the Japanese colonial state requisitioned brassware from Korean households during World War II. This study explores the complex mechanism behind these campaigns. Copper was a scarce commodity in the Japanese empire. The colonial brassware industry expanded but struggled due to fluctuating copper prices before the war. To overcome the reluctance of Koreans to part with their brassware, the colonial state had to coordinate various actors across multiple organisations, provide ceramic replacements, and establish a system of financial payments. The Japanese also ultimately created a 'brass bureaucracy' capable of carrying out the sensitive task of removing copper from Korean households. The Korean case reminds us that institutional frameworks are necessary for wartime salvage. Finally, brassware collections also resulted in fundamental changes in Korean society and everyday material culture that require careful analysis. (141 words) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Critical African Studies is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Traditional beliefs and customs concerning pregnancy and childbirth are still numerous and vivid in Romania and among Romanian inhabitants in neighbouring countries. Fieldwork on this theme carried out over several decades has resulted in a large body of material showing the special position of a pregnant woman in traditional Romanian society. This paper deals specifically with Moldovan birth tradition and concentrates on society's view of the pregnant woman and her unborn child as indicated by the large variety of beliefs and traditions aimed at protecting her and her child. It is evident from this material, that both the prospective mother and society are expected to be aware of, and to engage with, traditional precepts concerning the healthy development of the foetus and the achievement of an unblemished birth. It is also clear that the role and influence of the former untrained midwife in the magical protection of the mother and her child are still part of cultural memory in Moldova. The idea that a pregnant woman has the ability to bring rain in times of drought seems to emanate from a traditional perception of her as embodying fertility powers linked or analogous to the earth's germinative capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper explores contested memories of place in the historical recovery and community revitalization of Salinas, California's old Chinatown. For over a century, Chinatown has been home to Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and Mexicans. Today, it is occupied by the homeless, drug dealers, and addicts. Chinatown is variously remembered as the site of the best Chinese food in town, a place of gambling and prostitution, and “home.” Oral histories reveal multiple and contested significations of place: from intensely nostalgic recollections that mythify the past to distanced accounts that reveal little attachment to place. Narratives shed light on the tensions involved in cultural recovery and negotiating spatial claims across ethnic and cultural groups, generations, and social classes. Accounts also reveal how the restoration of lost community history can generate new coalitional practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cognitive remediation is a type of treatment added recently to the range of tools available to therapists. It includes a number of miscellaneous methods that aim to correct some of the cognitive impairments observed in schizophrenia. These cover the fields of target attention, memory and executive deficits, as well as impaired social cognition. Cognitive remediation acts as a complement to medication and psychological therapies, which constitute the core methods of treatment for schizophrenia. The present paper reviews the state of the art in cognitive remediation. The principle underlying this innovative therapeutic approach is the enhancement of the cognitive resources of patients with schizophrenia in order to improve their cognitive functions, social skills and in some cases alleviate some of the symptoms of the disease. Several programs developed within the past two decades (e.g., IPT, CRT, NEAR, CET, NET, CRT and CAT) are becoming more widely used. Their efficacy on neurocognition and on functional outcome has been demonstrated, with inconstant continuation of benefit after completion of treatment. The sustainability of the cognitive and functional improvements following completion of these programs has to be further studied. Other programs aimed at acting upon altered social cognition (one of the critical facets of schizophrenia) are still in the experimental stages, but the results obtained so far are encouraging. A preliminary study has also demonstrated the effectiveness of board games in improving cognitive functioning, which seems to be a highly promising therapeutic avenue owing to its ease of use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literatures dealing with legends and vernacular narratives, on the one hand, and collective memory, on the other, are rarely brought to bear on each other. Following a discussion of the classificatory focus of the legend literature, and the lack of agreement about classification in that literature, this paper draws on the collective memory literature to suggest a focus on process. In particular, it suggests that we should pay attention to a historical process during which local reports of "known" people and happenings may be transformed, in the course of their incorporation into wider spheres of discourse, into legends, which may, through further chronological and spatial distancing from their original context, become fantasies. This tentative framework is used to analyse how the local reputation of Biddy Early, a well-known nineteenth-century "wise woman" of County Clare, Ireland, spread - originally through the work of Lady Gregory, in particular - to become first national, then international and, finally, in the age of the Internet, global. In the course of this long process, first-hand reports of her skills and powers eventually became transformed into free-floating marketing devices and New Age fantasies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to a selection of case studies on the theme “the past in music” I offer a few thoughts on the nature of the past and the role of memory in constructing historical narrative, with reference to the way in which these concepts have been theorized by historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists. In reviewing the different ways in which echoes of the past can still be heard in the music of the present, I consider the capacity of music to evoke, embody and transform the past and, by so doing, to act as a medium for history and its interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a comparative analysis of works of Caribbean art and literature that engage in a mutual project of addressing the paradox of the colonial archive. Trinidadian-Canadian writer M. NourbeSe Philip crafted her long poem Zong! from an eighteenth-century legal document about the murder of 132 enslaved Africans onboard the slave ship of the same name. Exposing the dehumanizing language of historical record from which she nonetheless extracts affective and poetic scraps of human experience, Philip shows the power and necessity of artistic intervention in the colonial archive. The similarities between Philip's literary strategies and Belle's artistic interventions in the archive of the Danish (now U.S.) Virgin Islands are striking, and the two illuminate one another. Focusing on Belle's series entitled Chaney (We Live in the Fragments), the analysis delves into her work with "chaney," a Creole term for the colonial-era shards of china that wash out of the soil of the Virgin Islands as a reminder of the centuries-long Danish presence there. Belle's art is both counter-archival and counter-canonical in her direct address to the national Danish institution of the Kongelige Porcelainsfabrik, or Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Factory. Both the poem and the artwork focus on the aesthetic of the fragment, whether in terms of the fragmented nature of the colonial archive with its many blind spots, the fragments of lost narrative that Philip scatters across the page, or the fragments of pottery that Belle transforms into paintings and ceramics that evoke the disjointed nature of Caribbean identity. Framing Zong! and Chaney with the notion of "comparative relativism," the article draws on literary and art historical methodologies to reveal an important transdisciplinary approach to Caribbean archives and to the creation of cultural memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In choosing to present the history of the campaign from the perspective of India's border regions instead, they highlight the contending memory narratives that have emerged from both the postcolonial state and the border communities. Shibashis Chatterjee and Udayan Das examine how the foreign policy elite leveraged public history to mobilize support for the Indian state. With its focus on how history is located, experienced and interpreted at distinct sites, public history steered away from the academic field of enquiry that characterized the study of history. [Extracted from the article]

The article looks at British India's Burma campaign of 1941–45 and asks why the decisive battles of Imphal and Kohima appear to be virtually invisible from India's national imagination today. It further critiques dominant readings of the twin battles for their failure to accommodate the heterogeneity of experiences and contributions of the hill tribes of the India-Burma borderlands who fought in it. The omission appears even more intriguing given that despite being on the winning side, the border communities end up losing the memory battle. While it questions the conventional notion that memory is the postcolonial state's prerogative, it also recognizes that counter-memories are by no means monolithic. It makes the case for acknowledging alternative constructions and communities of practice that imaginatively decenter the construction of memory in the borderlands. Without connecting with the lives, and in turn, the memories of the border communities who inhabit the physical sites of the war, the cliché of the "forgotten war" will remain an overused, and ultimately, an offensive trope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of European Journal of Psychotraumatology is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Govindjee, Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Plant Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1999, is renowned for his pioneering work in the light reactions of photosynthesis and important accomplishments as educator, editor, historian and advocate of photosynthesis. In his honour, we review his contributions over the last twenty years, which were often achieved in collaboration with scientists working in laboratories around the world. We start with a short presentation about Govindjee's career and continue with a section highlighting his passion and dedication to teach the younger generations of students and researchers about photosynthesis. His research work is grouped under different areas, including primary photochemistry; the relationship of chlorophyll a fluorescence to photosynthesis; short time-scale regulation processes of photosynthesis; studies toward improving photosynthesis and biomass yields; and, mathematical modelling of photosynthesis and artificial photosynthesis. He is best known for the discovery of the key role of bicarbonate on the electron acceptor side of Photosystem II. We also present his active involvement in the recognition of scientists at conferences and beyond, as well as of those who are no longer with us. He is committed to keeping alive the pioneers and discoverers in the field of photosynthesis in the collective memory of those in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Critical African Studies is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Rebecca Walkowitz's observation that contemporary novels tend to be "born translated" involves the notion that they equally tend to be "born in motion"; they are often already, conceptually, on the road to faraway readers during their moments of conception. A first, more narrowly defined objective of my essay is to examine the narrative strategies used in Dave Eggers's What Is the What (2007) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) that facilitate and respond to this dimension of motion in particular travels of memory. In a broader scope, this analysis will be embedded into an appraisal of the potentials of recent theorizing both in narratology (i.e. the study of narrative) and in memory studies to understand the dynamics at play in the reception of far-travelled narrative memory media. It is a central proposition of this essay that the two research fields share an amplitude of common concerns with regard to questions of reception and should therefore be brought into a close dialogue. The present study explores how some of these intersections between narratology and memory studies can be approached through the notions of "distance" and "proximity." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The postdisaster landscape is replete with memorials that help communities collectively remember destructive events and recover psychologically. Although commemoration is intrinsic to all stages of recovery, little research from the disaster‐science field engages memorial texts across disasters. Meanwhile, a rich body of work on memorials and their functions exists in the cultural geographic tradition. Drawing from this literature, the current study examines a sample of U.S.‐based memorials to discern patterns within the postdisaster commemorative landscape. This research leverages discourse analysis to interrogate the meanings and mechanics of postdisaster memory work. Findings revealing that disasters catalyze remembrances that remake places, postdisaster memorial texts construct wide‐ranging degrees of intimacy, and memorials distilling survivor memories impel community recovery differently than memorials that reconstruct imagined pasts. These identified patterns in postdisaster commemoration enable further systematic exploration of memory work in the long‐term recovery process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relevance of employing an oral history method and narrative interview techniques for business historians.We explore the use of oral history interviews as a means of capturing the expression of subjective experience in narrative and metaphor. We do so by analysing interviews concerning the transition of East German identities following reunification with West Germany. Self-expression emerges as critical to the vital identity work required for social integration following transformation, metaphor providing a means of articulating deep-rooted patterns of thought. We demonstrate that employing an oral history methodology can benefit business historians by affording access to the human dimension of a research project, unlocking the subjective understanding of experience by low-power actors among the non-hegemonic classes. Hence, employing an oral history methodology provides a valuable means of countering narrative imperialism, exemplified here by the dominant West German success story grounded in Western-style individual freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1961 and 1996, more than 200,000 people in Guatemala lost their lives as a result of state-orchestrated acts of terror denied still by the national security forces who committed them. A U.N. Truth Commission was repeatedly obstructed by army and police personnel from gaining access to official records, being told that no documentation of the type sought existed. Bureaucracies do not work that way, even ones with good reason to destroy or conceal evidence of an incriminating nature. It was nonetheless of startling import when an attorney working for Guatemala's Human Rights Office stumbled upon an archive recording the deeds of the National Police. Known now to contain an estimated 80 million documents, the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional is a cabinet of atrocities that reveals conspiracy and complicity on the part of police officers engaged in a ghoulish network of surveillance, intimidation, abduction, torture, and murder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The attempt to write extreme violence, or to reco[r]d[e] traumatic cultural memory - the representation of horror - tests both the representational capacity of language and the rationality of subjecthood. Much narrative endeavour is spent trying to narrativise or 'structure' horror into story. However, because traumatic memories resist the narrative framework of the novel, questions are posed not only about the reliability of the narrator's memory and his/her ability to narrate a credible story, but also about the suitability of the fictional form of the novel to represent historical events such as extreme violence. How does language in narrative, with its insistence on order and sequence, 'capture' the de-structuring nature of violence? Where is the subject or the idea of rational subjectivity in these de-structuring acts of violence? I will attempt to address these issues through a critical 'reading' of Moses Isegawa's novels Abyssinian Chronicles (2000) and Snakepit (2004). In these novels, Isegawa recasts and reenacts a period of recent Ugandan history marked by violence and chaos, emanating from the dictatorship of Idi Amin. However, both novels stretch the limits of 'factual' or historical credulity, reminding the reader that they are in fact works of historical fabrication. I am of the view that the narrative endeavour in these two novels is not only to record the chaotic events experienced during the years before and after the fall of Idi Amin, but to recode, through the tropes of language (symbol, imagery, and metaphor), the devastating effects of those years on the literary landscape of Uganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination into the social concepts and practices of history and historiography within minorities of Argentina and Belgium. Details are given outlining the ritual funeral practices of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo of Argentina and the group memory culture of right-wing Flemish nationalists. In both cases the social concepts of history, memory, and control are addressed through analysis of their minority practices and their underlying philosophies of opposition to their respective dominant cultures.

The article examines the memory narratives of women who were displaced from the village of Artas in the West Bank during the Arab-Israeli war in 1967 and migrated to Amman's working-class neighborhoods. The nostalgia for their homeland and village values, which contributed to their survival while exiled and during a second displacement by the Gulf War of 1990-1991, are discussed in the context of the "peasant past" social framework identified by researcher Rosemary Sayigh. The process of becoming a refugee, the rural urban differences encountered by the women, and the social values of simplicity, contentment, and solidarity are discussed.

This article analyses the report issued by the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania in January 2007 within the context of the politics of memory and justice in post-communist Romania. Crucial aspects of the work of the commission, such as its history and formation, mandate and make-up, methodological and conceptual framework, and the political reactions that it generated are examined. This leads to the conclusion that while the publication of the report brought some progress in revealing the truth, it is less likely to have a similar impact on transitional justice policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Korea is Japan's most logical ally in East Asia. Both nations share the same primary military benefactor, the United States. Their geographic proximity makes them natural allies in offsetting China's growing power and unknown intentions. In spite of the many reasons to ally, relations remain strained, primarily because of Japan's historical occupation of Korea. In this article, the authors examine the political issues that must be resolved for Japan and South Korea to work together and the potential for such reconciliation in light of South Korea's on-again/off-again drift away from the United States and Japan's open embrace of U.S. protection and occasional political distancing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In sizing up the notion of public memory, rhetoricians would be remiss not to consider the increasing influence of new media on today's remembrance culture. This article addresses memorial functions of the internet in light of recent scholarly debates about virtues and drawbacks of modern "archival memory" as well as the paradoxical link between the contemporary public obsession with memory and the acceleration of amnesia. To explore the strengths and limitations of the internet as a vehicle of collecting, preserving, and displaying traces of the past, the article examines The September 11 Digital Archive, a comprehensive online effort to document public involvement in recording and commemorating the tragedy of 11 September, 2001. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the portrayal of prisons in art and popular culture as described by the artist Ashley Hunt. It comments on prisons in television programs and discusses the fact that prisons are hidden geographically which parallels the collective unconscious of U.S. culture regarding punishment. The fact that art can visually portray this unconscious is explored.

In this article, I examine configurations of space and time in memory texts written by men and women who lived at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II. These accounts each use somewhat different parameters to frame their recollections, drawing attention to the gendered hierarchy of space-times involved in the work of the Manhattan Project. Despite their heterogeneous authors and motivations, however, these frameworks circumscribe memories within a narrow time and space - the physical boundaries of the Los Alamos site and the frantic tempo of wartime work. In this way, they construct a collective memory of Los Alamos that overlooks the broader spaces and times within which the development of the atomic bomb was situated. Far from being neutral, like dates on a calendar or coordinates on a map, space and time function ideologically to shape memories in ways that support the ideological interests of scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tying into Halbwachs's theory of the social framing of memory and the Freudian conception of repression, the authors introduce the concept of non-memory. It is broader than the categories of forgetting or repression, for it also encompasses ignorance caused by different types of secrets, taboos, and falsifications of history. The key here is the concealment of certain "shameful" events by older generations or even contemporary, well-informed individuals--witnesses, politicians, journalists--in the name of personal interest or the interest of a broader collectivity. The centerpiece of analysis is the nation, a collectivity based primarily on a selective, honorific memory, yet at the same time we argue most effective at producing non-memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of sociological studies conducted in Poland since the 1970s researchers have concluded that family is the most widely accepted social frame of reference and the nation occupies second place. The contemporary Polish family continues to straddle the boundary between private and public spheres in a manner that permits it to take on certain public functions of other institutions. Given its historical role, the family possesses a legacy of norms that have placed the family in the space belonging to national society, which since 1989 has operated within the structures of a sovereign state. The stock of memories in certain families "pushes" members of those families into life in local communities even as other families limit, block, or withdraw their members from participation in the worlds beyond the family. Using the results of field research this article analyzes the family in terms of how its members remember the family's past: first, by taking into account the two ways of interpreting family memory, that is, object-oriented (focused on material memorabilia from the past) and subject-oriented (focused on the orientations and attitude of the family's members toward its past); second, by concentrating on those elements of memory that pertain to the family's broader social environment, that is, local and regional community as well as national setting. We then conclude this review of local variations of family memory in Poland actively rooted in a local setting with a brief discussion of the phenomenon of collective memory deficit. Individuals characterized by such a deficit long for the era of the communist system, demand welfare guarantees from national and local authorities, objectify themselves, and ultimately exclude themselves from local communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Polish collective memory of World War II integrates the Soviet occupation of the eastern areas, and the Nazi occupation in the west. Analysis of mass media communication shows that both pre-1989, and after that date different interpretations of events from that era were presented. Surveys carried out from 1965 to 2004 demonstrate that for the majority of Poles World War II gives them reason to be proud, and few see any cause for shame. The war experience of family members is also a common topic between family and friends. Recalling or passing down war experiences in a private, family setting stems from the fact that in Europe World War II affected everybody, civilians included. The presence of "personal perspectives" in the memory of World War II is a sign of the development of the "postnational" attitude toward the past. Another expression of this attitude is the drive to preserve the memory of concrete individuals, victims of the war, as well as to accept the remembrance of those who fought on the other side. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]