Introduction

RememberingViolence:Anthropological Perspectives onIntergenerationalTransmission

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm

How does violence affect remembering? How are the largescalecataclysms, crises, disasters and dispersals that befall communitiesentrusted by one generation of witnesses to the next? If bearing witness toviolence cannot be a disinterested act, and if memory despite itsrelationship to the past is always deployed in the present, a questionarises regarding the mediation of memory, or the relationship ofremembering to forgetting: How is memory partially (and necessarily)constituted by forgetting? What is the exact nature of the Faustian bargainbetween transmission and obliteration? Looking at howIf memories oflargescale manmade catastrophes are passed on from the originalgeneration of victims and perpetrators to their children, the question ariseshow do inchoate, individual experiences of political violence devoid asthey often are of any logic, structure or narrative sense coalesce into anaccepted body of knowledge that can be coherently uttered and investedin collectively as legitimate and representative: how, in other words, doindividual memoriesy contributes to social memory before social memorycan once again now in the shape of postmemories (Hirsch 1997, 1999;Hirsch and Spitzer 2006: 85) shape individual subjective experience inthe dialectic of self and society?.The last few decades have seen a veritable explosion of studies of

memory, not only in the humanities and the social sciences but also andfirst of all in public culture and contemporary politics. In popular cultureas in academia today, memory sometimes seems to apply to abewilderingly widening array of phenomena, some of which areapparently only tangentially or metaphorically related to what wecommonly understand by memory. Increasing anxiety in academiaregarding what constitutes memory (or remembering, remembrance,commemoration, and their everpresent antonyms, forgetting, obliterationand oblivion1) and what qualifies as trauma or as posttraumatic stresshighlights the role of memory as a site of struggle outside of academia andclinical practice, in society itself.

Memory is not a simple, unmediated reproduction of the past, but rathera selective recreation that is dependent for its meaning on theremembering individual or communitys contemporary social context,beliefs and aspirations (Huyssen 1995). Indeed, individual memoriesdevoid of such contextualisation and the selective amnesia, telescopingand transformations they entail are considered pathological in theirsolipsistic detail and isolating particularity. At the collective level,similarly, we could not imagine a social reality in which all of the events ofthe past and all of the manifold ways in which those events wereexperienced and interpreted by a multitude of different individuals,factions and interest groups are somehow preserved in the present. Bytheir very nature, the recreations of the past produced by memory arepartial, unstable, often contested, and prone to becoming sites of struggle.As Matt Matsuda puts it, memory is not a generic term of analysis, butitself an object appropriated and politicized (1996: 6). At the individualand the collective level alike, these can even be false memories, but thisdoes not mean that they are not memories for all that, nor does it meanthat the very real emotive and political salience with which thesememories can be endowed and deployed are somehow void. In this sense,as Stephan Feuchtwang (2006) has recently demonstrated, even falsememories bear a relation to truths beyond their supposed originaryevents; a form of metatruth about the present that is projected back intime.Anxieties about the reliability of memory give rise to concerns

regarding the aims and consequences of focusing on memory.2 Theseconcerns have been played out in part in a strict separation betweenmemory and history (cf. Halbwachs 1992, Nora 1989, 1992), the formerconsidered subjective, living, continuous and organic, and the latterobjective, distanced, transformative and critical. Often, this distinction isaccompanied by a dichotomy between nonliterate or simple (i.e.nonWestern) and modern or complex (i.e. Western) societies (e.g. Nora1989, 1992). Some writers have refuted this essentialist view, insisting onthe areas of overlap between the two fields. Hirsch and Stewart (2005), forinstance, very usefully distinguish between history and historicity; thelatter term highlighting the manner in which persons operating underthe constraints of social ideologies make sense of the past, whileanticipating the future. Where history refers to an assumed empiricallyverifiable past, historicity concerns the ongoing social production ofaccounts of pasts and futures. (Hirsch and Stewart 2005:262).The focus on memory in much emerging research similarly highlights

the social construction of the past across cultures. In his attempt to extendthe concept of memory beyond Maurice Halbwachs presentist theory ofsocial framing, JanAssmann (1992) distinguishes between communicativememory which is actively produced in social groups through everyday

2 Introduction

interactions and what he calls cultural memory, which reaches muchdeeper into the past and is expressed in myths, genealogies or traditionsand lies outside the realm of the everyday. To him, the distinction betweensocieties that remember and those that have history, which underliesPierre Noras (1989, 1992) conception of lieux de mmoire, is a falsedichotomy that elides the historical consciousness of nonliterate societies.Writing on the dynamics of memory, history and forgetting inMadagascar,Jennifer Cole (2001) also blurs the clearcut boundaries between memoryand history, showing how historical consciousness might influencememorial practice and vice versa. Joining the sceptics in questioning thenew ubiquity of memory, Michael Lambek (2006: 21011) warns us that thevery project of trying to locate a field of enquiry that escapes thehegemony and the monolithic essentialisations of history mightparadoxically result in new discourses of authority that are themselvesreifications of the oppressed and marginalised to whom the researcherseeks to give a voice:

The risk is that we assume that somewhere there exists pure andunsullied memory, memory which accurately reproduces theexperience of its subjects and that is their unique possession, that holdsand moulds their essence, that is itself an essence. In making memorythe object of study, we run the risk of naturalising the veryphenomenon whose heightened presence or salience is in need ofinvestigation (2006: 211).

Clearly, memory cannot be assumed to represent an objective past thathas been excluded by historical practice and historiography. This would beto reproduce the essentialisation of some historical writing from incontradistinction to which memory is looked to as an escape.Nevertheless, it may still be the case that memory in all of itsheterogeneity, its instability and its liability to contestation representsthe history that cannot be written (Lambek 2006: 211, see also Gold andGujar 2002). It is precisely because memory cannot be trusted as historythat it needs to be explored, not as a record of the past, but of the presentof those whose interests, views, experiences and lifeworlds are somehowinimical to or have fallen outside of the historical project.The contributions to this book restrict themselves to the specific

question of how political violence is remembered, how memories of thisviolence are transmitted, and the uses to which the memories are put. Sofar, despite the allpervading memoryboom, few collections have beenexplicitly concerned with an anthropological exploration of this subject.One of the early efforts in the field has been Richard Werbners (1998)seminal edited volume onMemory and the Postcolony, the scope of which islimited to African(ist) perspectives on the violent configurations of the

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 3

postcolonial state. Another, more recent volume, edited by Baruch Stierand J. Shawn Landres (2006), is concerned with the connection betweenreligion, violence, memory and place, whereby the focus lies on mutualimplications between the sacralisation of violence and the violence ofreligion, and not so much on the specifics of the relationship betweenviolence andmemory. Silverstein andMakdisi (2005) make the connectionbetween violence and memory explicit; yet again their analyses arerestricted to one contemporary situation, namely that in the Middle Eastand North Africa, where violence is a major factor of presentday politics.Our This volume, which is global in its scope, aims to contribute to thenascent anthropology of memory by focusing in particular on the issue ofthe intergenerational transmission of memories of violence.3

In an age in which discussing the subjective experience of politicalviolence is impossible without reference to trauma and to posttraumaticstress disorder (PTSD), this volume raises questions as to whether thetrauma paradigm is to be understood as an empirical description of auniversal human psychic response to violence, as a Westernculturebound syndrome, as a folk model of suffering, as a socialmovement, or as a global discourse as manifold in its interpretations as itis pervasive in its reach. Is trauma an analytical model, or the latest socialmovement to which students of memory should devote their analyticalattention? Can one move from an analytical model of individual, psychictrauma to one of collective or social trauma as one can between individualand collective memory?4 Can trauma (in its association withdisruptiveness, inescapability and repetitiveness) and memory (in itsconnotations with identity, continuity and selectivity) be analyticallyjoined to address the impact of past violence on the present?And if so, canthe collective trauma of a generation of victims be passed to their offspringin the next generation, and howmight this transference exactly take place?To Ron Eyerman (2001) it is precisely the phenomenon of

intergenerational transmission that produces what he calls culturaltrauma. In his discussion of African American collective identity hedistinguishes cultural from psychological or physical trauma as follows:

Cultural trauma refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, atear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achievedsome degree of cohesion. In this sense, the trauma need not necessarilybe felt by everyone in a community or experienced directly by any orall. While it may be necessary to establish some event as the significantcause, its traumatic meaning must be established and accepted, aprocess which requires time, as well as mediation and representation.(2001: 2)

4 Introduction

In this model, presentday discrimination reproduces the trauma ofracism, while slavery is nothing more nor less than the historical referencethrough which the ongoing contemporary experience is framed.Thoughtprovoking and enlightening as humanist interpretations of

the trauma paradigm such as these are, they are culturally and historicallyspecific. Although the contributors to this volume, all of themanthropologists, are cognisant with and, to a greater or lesser degree,informed by recent theories of trauma, they have not started off with aclearcut definition of what constitutes trauma or the memory ofviolence, but rather inductively explored those questions on the basis ofconcrete ethnographic case studies.

From History to Memory and Back Again

Despite the controversy surrounding the term, the origins of the notion ofcollective memory in the social sciences can still be traced back to the workof Maurice Halbwachs (1992) and ultimately to his mentor Durkheimsnotion of collective consciousness. Halbwachs method is not to look toindividual memories as the building blocks of collective memory, butsimply to point out that individual memories cannot exist on their own, asdreams do, but are the result of regular intercourse with others. It thereforefollows that what psychologists often take to be the most intimate realm ofhuman thought and experience is in fact a result of collective socialinteraction. Individual memories are necessarily shared memories, andmemories that are not shared are rapidly forgotten; they are therefore notmemories at all (1992: 53).Not only did Halbwachs make the case for collective memory, but he

also broadened the range of phenomena that were to be considered asmemories. In his case study concerning the Catholic rite of communion,for example, he argues convincingly that a contemporary practice that isengaged in and understood as such in fact reenacts the death andresurrection of Christ that is believed to have happened in the past (1992:90119).5 Unlike historical recording, this form of remembering orcommemoration is embodied, and as such it collapses the distance and thelinearity that history introduces to time; juxtaposing the past and thepresent and returning a body of believers to the originary events of theirfaith from which the passage of time would divorce them. Nor does suchcommemoration necessarily entail a conservative outlook or a reactionarystance. Halbwachs makes the argument that memory serves the purposeof facilitating change in society even revolution by masking thatchange in the guise of continuity. Hence, old rites and religious customsoften serve to give a sense of continuity and legitimacy to new politicalsystems. Halbwachs observes that the patrician titles, ranks and manners

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 5

of the feudal nobility in France were preserved even as the entire feudalsystemwas being radically supplanted by a bureaucratic one. In this way,he tells us, the new structure was elaborated in the shadow of the old The new ideas became salient only after having for a long time behaved asif they were the old ones. It is upon a foundation of remembrances thatcontemporary institutions were constructed. (1992: 125)Halbwachs goes on to argue that in time, the memories that had been

held by or attributed to the nobility were passed on to the bourgeoisie, andto society as a whole, which became the new repository of memory in ameritocratic, republican France. Halbwachs thus demonstrates that socialpractices or beliefs are also memories, and that it is because thecontemporary or synchronic can also be seen from a diachronic point ofview that it can be bathed in the hallowed aura of sanctity associated withthe timeless and traditional. To the contention that rites and embodiedpractices are not memories because they serve only contemporarypurposes and interests, Halbwachs responds that the apparenttimelessness of ritual in fact conceals a chronology that makes the pastessential to the negotiation of the present.6

Halbwachs pioneering work on collective memory led to what wemight term a democratisation of history and of memory (Bahloul 1996;Radstone and Hodgkin 2006: 2; Samuel 1994), in which some historians(especially those of the annales school) used Halbwachs insights to suggestthat not only the elite, but also ordinary people, the illiterate and theoppressedmight be able to construct histories for themselves, and to act asthe guardians and repositories of accepted forms of knowledge about thepast. Accepting the voices of informants as valid sources, alongsideobjective textual sources, signalled an ethnographic turn in history thatwas later paralleled by a historical turn in anthropology a newpreoccupation with memory which once again was concerned withestablishing an alternative to histories seen to be too closely associatedwith patriarchal discourses of the state and practices of state formation.7

In anthropology and history alike then, an emphasis on memory andon oral history can be seen as an attempt to privilege voices that have beenmarginalised or silenced by projects of stateformation and empirebuilding. Such a position can also implicitly be seen to privilege thesubjective experience of individuals and communities over the objectivesocial and historical processes that elide individuals and their fallible andpartial knowledge, experiences and beliefs. Additionally, the notion ofcountermemories (Foucault 1977; ZemonDavis and Stern 1989; cf. Baker1994) points towards the continuous struggle between dominant andmarginal voices in the production of history/memory. Where critics of theannales school would object that the latters histories are based onanecdotes and hearsay and consequently lack analytical rigour andhistorical authority, advocates of the turn to memory would reply that

6 Introduction

orthodox historical approaches are needlessly positivistic in theirinsistence on evidence and that their search for facts as a means ofshedding light on what really happened is pursued at the cost of elidingthe experience of ordinary people, which is ultimately the only historicalfact that there is (see Wilson 2002).As Jan Vansina (1985) has argued for SubSaharan Africa, one of the

consequences of this turn to memory has been what one might term thedetextualisation of history and the replacement of often rather slenderarchives with more loquacious informants. As recognition has spreadamong historians that the past is not only encoded in written records andarchival documents, but that it can also be remembered in oral history, oraltradition and other nontextual narratives and accounts, many peopleswho were deemed in academia not to have a past worthy of the namewere subsequently considered to be able to produce one, often inpartnership with (Western) ethnographers.8

As an historian interested in supplementing his knowledge ofobjective history by means of oral tradition, Vansina remains faithful to aconception of history in which the past and the memory thereof areassumed to correspond with each other unproblematically. However,others such as Jolle Bahloul (1996), Ann Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar(2002), Jean Comaroff (1985), Peter Geschiere (1997), John Peel (1979),Charles Piot (1999), Rosalind Shaw (2002), and Ann Stoler and KarenStrassler (2000) have been more interested in the ways in which the pastcan live on perdure and take on new life in the contemporary contexts intowhich it is recalled. Replacing the relatively static storage or hydraulicmodel of memory (Stoler and Strassler 2000:7) with a processual oneenables us to see howmemories are a source of negotiation and conflict insociety, perpetually open to revision and effectively rendering past andpresent consubstantial (Wilce 2002: 159; Casey 1985: 254). Bridgingbetween these two poles, Marita Sturken keeps a close eye on the historicalveracity of the past in the collective memory of United States citizens whilerecognising its presence as a political force in the present. The title of herbook Tangled Memories refers to her critique of Pierre Noras oppositionbetween memory and history. Memory and history are not opposed, sheargues, but rather entangled (1997: 47; cf. Cole 2001: 10234).9

The interest in the social transformations to which memory is proneand in the political salience of the past in the present rather than inmemory as a historical record is not restricted to the field of verbalaccounts, but also finds its expression in the field of nonverbal, embodiedmemory. Indeed, while the bodily practices exhibited in rites, dance andeveryday life are curiously gnomic with respect to the past they areassociated with, they are undeniably powerful factors in the socialrelations of contemporary societies. Paul Connerton (1989) was among thefirst to address the importance of bodily practice in and for social memory.

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 7

According to him, there are two dimensions to embodiment: on one hand,he highlights the importance of ritual and ceremonial performances ascommemorative acts which allow a community to reassure itself; on theother hand he refers to habitual memory through which a mnemonics ofthe body (1989: 74) finds its expression. What was once referred to asbodily techniques (techniques du corps, Mauss 1936) or as habitus(Bourdieu 1990) becomes memory in Connerton. David Berliner (2005b)has criticised this extension of the memory vocabulary for its uncriticalconvergence with problematic notions of culture as mainly concernedwithcontinuity. Indeed, Connertons interpretation of embodiment does notleave much room for a conceptualisation of memory which allows forsocial transformation. Yet if one considers the impact of violence onpeoples cultural and political identities, as do the authors of this volume,it becomes clear that embodied memory is not only relevant in terms ofsocial stability, but perhaps even more so as an indicator of socialdisruption (cf. Argenti 2007; Shaw 2002; Stoller 1995; Kleinman andKleinman 1994).

Trauma, Time and CounterTime

Nietzsche, who says that only that which never ceases to hurt stays in thememory (1899, in Sturken 1997: 15), also depicts the historical past as adark invisible burden that travels with man, preventing him from livingwholly in the present. For this reason, one must learn to forget the past inorder to be able to act in the present (Nietzsche 1957: 5, see also White1973: 347). Here, Nietzsche lays the foundation for a theory of memory andforgetting that pays particular attention to the importance of pain andsuffering in the relationship between past and present, an aspect thatwould inspire and preoccupy later writers. As Maurice Bloch later put it,the devices which select from the past what is to be remembered alsoinevitably involve selecting what of the past is to be obliterated (1996:229). Two years after Bloch published his observations, Marc Augdeveloped this insight to its ultimate conclusion, radically challenging thenotion that forgetting is a failure of memory, and arguing instead that itmust be understood as constitutive of memory. In Augs fitting andbeautiful metaphor, memories are crafted by oblivion as the outlines ofthe shore are created by the sea (2004: 20).10 James Wilce (2002) has addedconcrete data to these insights by revealing how the genre of lament isbeing systematically and wilfully forgotten in Bangladesh as a response toglobal modernity and Islamisation. If oblivion is part and parcel ofmemory in normal circumstances, however, its importance appears to bemagnified by experiences of colonial domination and of political violence.

8 Introduction

Looking at the effect of violence on memory and oblivion, LaurenceKirmayer warns that if a family or a community agrees that a trauma didnot happen, then it vanishes from collective memory and the possibilityfor individual memory is severely strained (1996: 18990).Indeed, a good deal of the early psychological research on trauma,

starting in the nineteenth century with that of Charcot, Erichsen, Freudand Janet amongst others on the victims of train accidents and shell shock,suggested that there was something about the experience of violence by anindividual that placed it somehow outside of memory, beyond the normalprocesses of remembering.11 According to this view, the psychicphenomenon of trauma itself engenders amnesia and silence. This viewhas been transmitted from early clinical theorists of trauma, through latergenerations of physicians such as Bessel van der Kolk (see van der Kolkand Grenberg 1987; van der Kolk and van der Hart 1991; Van der Kolk andFisler 1995; Van der Kolk, McFarlane and Weisath 1996), to contemporarysocial scientists and literary critics, who have all dwelled on the silencesand the aporia brought forth by violent pasts (cf. Agamben 1999;Bettelheim 1943; Caruth 1991a, 1991b, 1991c; Derrida 1976, 1986;Friedlander 1992; LaCapra 2001; Felman and Laub 1992; Laub 1991, 1992;Lyotard 1990; Unnold 2002; Vickroy 2002). According to this theory oftraumatic silence, one of the paradoxes of trauma is that those who livethrough events of excessive violence seldom react to them emotionally atthe time of their occurrence or in their immediate aftermath.Janet and Freuds research in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

century showed that some trauma patients became amnestic, believing since they could not recall them that the events that had caused theirdistress had never happened (van der Kolk and van der Hart 1991: 427).Others, while they remembered the horrific events they have livedthrough, reported a total lack of emotional connection to them.12 And yet,Janet and Freud also noted that the traumatic experience clearly waspresent at some other level of consciousness, for, unaware as their patientswere of the events that had precipitated their crises, they were compelledregularly to reenact them with complete precision. Far from forgetting,these patients seemed to be suffering from the inability to forget, or thefailure to realise they were perpetually remembering.Following Janet, van der Kolk and van der Hart (ibid.: 427) argue that

familiar and expectable experiences are automatically assimilated withoutmuch conscious awareness, but frightening experiences may not fit in withones cognitive schemata. The memories of these experiences are thenstored differently and are not available for retrieval under normalcircumstances. These memories become dissociated from consciousawareness and voluntary control. Fragments of these unintegratedexperiences may later manifest themselves as behavioural reenactments.According to van der Kolk and van der Hart, one of the characteristics of

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 9

such embodied traumatic memories is that they take too long (ibid.: 431):as long in fact as the original event that they reproduce integrally. Wherenarrative memory could describe an accident or crime in thirty seconds,traumatic memories last exactly as long as the events originally suffered they are therefore to all intents and purposes nothing less than the returnof the event.13 The second point about narrative memory, as opposed toreenactment, is that its summative role necessarily introduces revisions,deletions, elisions and transformations to the original event, which arerelated rather than reproduced. These transformations introduce differenceto an event, making it lose its original accuracy and completeness, but bythe same token making the event amenable to the victims psyche and tothe social life of the community in which the retelling takes place. Thus,where narrative memories are integrative, traumatic memories areintrusive and literal; they have no social component, but rather seem tospring upon their victims quite outside of their volition or control.14

The amnestic nature of traumatic memory and its later involuntaryintrusions and reenactments points to another purported paradox oftrauma: that it is never experienced as it happens, nor enters properly intothe realm of experience, except, at times, after a protracted delay often ofdecades. Hence, the division of the self to which Bruno Bettelheim attestsis reported by many Holocaust survivors. Van der Kolk and van der Hart(ibid.: 43738) argue on the basis of these reports that Freuds model ofrepression is too weak to describe the phenomenon, and they suggestinstead a model of dissociation. The concept of repression suggests avoluntary or willed suppression of a memory that one possesses butwishes to ignore or forget. In the dissociation model, however, the causalevent(s) never enter into consciousness as they happen, so they cannotlater be repressed. The dissociation allegedly takes place as an inherentpart of the original (non)experience of the event it happens at the sametime as the event as one of its effects, and is inseparable from it it does nothappen afterwards as the result of a decision.15 This suggests that whiledissociative experiences may be subconscious, unlike the repressed, theymay also dominate consciousness, for example during traumaticreenactments. This clinical model happens to fit nicely with the reports ofmany holocaust survivors, who attest to the experience of living in twodifferent worlds simultaneously: the place and time of the trauma, and theplace and time of their contemporary lives.In his 1991 work, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, Laurence

Langer provides multiple and compelling examples of Holocaustsurvivors who perceive their lives and often their bodies as a duality.As the Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo records in her memoir of thewar, Auschwitz et Aprs, the camp exists for her in a perpetual present thatproduces a countertime that impedes her normal progress throughordinary time. In her film interview for the Yale Video Archive for

10 Introduction

Holocaust Testimonies, which Langer uses as part of his source material,Delbo is asked by one of her interviewers if she still lives with Auschwitzsince her liberation (a term that many survivors see as misleading giventhe psychological permanence and inescapability of the camps). Shereplies: No I live beside it. Auschwitz is there, fixed and unchangeable,but wrapped in the impervious skin of memory that segregates itself fromthe present me (Langer 1991: 5). Another informant who also passedthroughAuschwitz puts it very similarly: I dont live with it [Auschwitz],it lives with me (Langer 1991: 23).16

For those such as Langer working within the trauma paradigm, thedoubling of the self to which Charlotte Delbo and others refer entails theperpetual presence of a past that refuses to become memory, but remainsforever that which it never fully was in the first instance: an experience. InMaurice Blanchots words, the absent experiences of holocaust survivorscannot be forgotten because [they] have always already fallen outsidememory (1995: 38). Langer (1991: 95) speaks similarly of a permanentduality or a parallel existence in which survivors are doomed to dwell,and van der Kolk and van der Hart lend clinical weight to thisinterpretation of traumatic ellipsis and silence when they state thattraumatic memory is not transformed into a story, placed in time, with abeginning, a middle and an end (1991: 448).In the realm of traumatic memory, the theory goes, the triggering

events have taken place in a realm that is so utterly removed from anyknown set of ethics or values as to remain forever inconceivable in the termsof society outside the realm of the trauma not only for those around thevictim who escaped trauma, but even to the victims themselves insofar asthey try to live lives predicated on takenforgranted moral principles.This is, according to the PTSD model, one of the reasons for the initialsilence of the first generation of victims of trauma. Nor are theincommensurable memories from these two realms totally separated indissociation. Despite the testimonies of the Holocaust survivors andothers, deep or traumatic memories and common memories becomeintertwined, or dialectically related to one another.17

In a preface written for Nicolas Abraham and Maria Toroks work onFreuds Wolf Man case, Cryptonymie: le Verbier de lHomme aux Loups,Derrida (1976) brings out the relationship of traumatic memory tocommon memory in all of its paradox when he refers to the realm of deepmemory by analogy as a crypt, or a forum, a place hidden within orbeneath another place, a place complete unto itself, but closed off from thatoutside itself of which it is nevertheless an inherent part. Derrida thusemphasises the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of traumaticmemory. The crypt is formed in violence, by violence, and yet also insilence. In order for this act of violence to remain silent and unheard, oneplaces it as far as one can apart from oneself, but this place is in fact deep

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 11

within oneself. The cryptic enclave thus becomes a space of incorporationrather than of introjection, as is the case with normal experience andnarrative memory. This failure of introjection, in other words, is at the rootof a somatic embodiment of memory. It is parasitical, a sort of psychiccyst: an inside heterogeneous to the inside of oneself (Derrida 1976: 15,trans. Nicolas Argenti).18 In the case of the death of close family members,the memory of the loved one may take up residence inside the crypt,forum, or for, where s/he will remain safe: dead, safe (save) in me(Derrida 1976: 17).19 By means of incorporation, the dead thus become thelivingdead inside oneself. Where introjection progressive, slow,mediated, effective fails, incorporation imposes itself fantasmatic,immediate, unmediated, magical, sometimes hallucinatory (ibid). Lyotard(1990: 16), referring to traumatic memories as unconscious affect,similarly describes them as a bit monstrous, unformed, confusing,confounding. As the traumatic amnesia of events never experienced in thefirst place, traumatic memories are doomed to return only as experiences,and not as discursive memories they can never be representations, butonly presence. In other words, memory is not possible where there lies anabsence of meaning, and it is not possible to give meaning to experiencesof extreme violence.20

Nicolas Abraham (1975) draws parallels between such incorporationsand the experience of ghosts and ghostliness or haunting in Westernculture. He likens ghosts to the effect identified as Nachtrglichkeit byFreud, or latency: a core symptom that has been repeatedly remarkedupon in the literature on trauma across disciplines. JeanFrancois Lyotard(1990) brings out this aspect of Freuds research on trauma, againidentifying the paradox of silence at the heart of the initial traumaticshock: it is a shock which is not experienced. This is not to say, however,that it is consigned to oblivion that, psychically speaking, it neverhappened. We can say, rather, that it is encrypted, or entombed, within thesubject. Far from being a mere absence, this crypt or tomb will come toinfluence the conscious life of the person later.21

Following Freud, Lyotard describes Nachtrglichkeit as a double blow:the first blow upsets the mind with such force that it cannot be registered. Itis not (yet) meaning, but rather dispersed and undetermined (ibid.: 16).But what happened at the time of this first blowwill be given at a later date:the second blow. This second blow is a symptom of the first blow, butbecause it will be the first one to have been experienced, the second blowwill have occurred before what happened earlier, which can only come tobe known through the second blow. Dori Laub (1991a) thus refers to psychictrauma as a record that has yet to be made, and Agamben has called thetask of recording trauma listening to something absent (1999: 13).Of interest to our explorations in transgenerational transmission,

ghosts are not laid to rest with those who create them (or in whom they are

12 Introduction

created). Abraham (1975), Torok (1975), Abraham and Torok (1976) andDerrida (1976) all argue that the inherent silence of incorporation reifies itas a presence or an object that is then handed down from generation togeneration. In some situations (though by nomeans in every case, as someof the chapters in this volume demonstrate), children may thusincorporate the ghosts of their parents as bodily practices. In the case ofmass traumatic events, these bodily memories can eventually becomeestablished in the community as social practices (Abraham 1975: 17576;Erikson 1991). Rosalind Shaw (2002: 56) thus notes Comaroff andComaroffs (1992: 38) aphorism that history involves a sedimentation ofmicropractices into macroprocesses, as well as Kleinman and Kleinmansrepresentation of memory as processes sedimented in gait, posture,movement, and all the other corporal components which together realisecultural code and social dynamics in everyday practices (1994: 71617).Phantoms or ghosts may thus take the form of bodily practices handeddown as transgenerational traumatic memories, or transgenerationalhaunting what Nicolas Abraham terms the tombs of others (1994: 76).How can history take account of the return of repressed or dissociated

events that were never experienced normally in the first place? What doesa fragmented or cyclical temporality imply for the possibility of historicalrepresentation? Is historical representation predicated on leaving the pastbehind, and is the most inescapable feature of traumatic pasts that theywill not be left behind because they exist only in a perpetualpresent?22These problems lead Cathy Caruth to envisage a history that isno longer straightforwardly referential (1991a: 182), and Lyotard to arguethat standard narrative histories do violence to histories of violence. Inpurporting to reinstate the positivist chronology separating the first blowfrom the second causal effect from secondary affect such positivisthistory is false to subjective experience. It instantly occults what motivatesit, and is made for this reason (1990: 16). This is history asmemorialisation, which courts forgetting by attempting to bring falseclosure to events that will not stay where they belong in time and whichrefuse to be forgotten. From the perspective of the double blow, thepresent is the past, and the past is always presence (ibid). In CathyCaruths words: For history to be a history of trauma means that it isreferential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of itsoccurrence (1991a: 187). In her historical view of trauma, Caruth alsomoves from the position that violent events are remembered differentlyfrom ordinary experiences by the individual, to a theory oftransgenerational transmission, which brings her to view trauma as a formof collective memory with a diachronic dimension. As she puts it, History,like the trauma, is never simply ones own, history is precisely the waywe are implicated in each others traumas (1991a: 192).

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 13

Violence and Collective Memory

However convincing and apparently wellsupported this model oftraumatic silence and repetition may seem, benefiting as it does from bothpositivist medical research and postmodern literary theory, it is notwithout its detractors. Despite the fecundity of the theory of traumaticsilence, it may therefore be time for a reevaluation of the assumption thattrauma automatically engenders amnesia, paradoxically obliterating itselfat the very moment of its creation, or that traumatic memories can onlyrecur as identical reenactments. Like Aug (2004) and Bloch (1996),Kirmayer (1996) argues for a sociological understanding of traumaaccording to which forgetting is not a clinical inevitability that occurs atthe individual level (and therefore a precultural universal physiologicalphenomenon), but rather part of particular social and political processesthat belong to what Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin haveaptly termed regimes of memory (2006). While not losing sight of thesuffering entailed in violence and its sequellae in the body social and thebody politic, Radstone and Hodgkins model of social memory allows fora more voluntaristic and agentive, if quite a strategic, understanding ofmemory in which forgetting and remembering are not individualpathologies, but collective processes of representation and identityformation.The work done by Cathy Caruth and others in transposing the clinical

research on trauma into the field of literary criticism has had a seminaleffect on the humanities and social sciences more broadly. Many recentworks on slavery and political violence parallel the notion of socialmemory with what we might call social trauma. This model takes as itsstarting point the assumption that individual PTSD, like individualnonpathological memory, can and does become collectivised over time ina traumatised population, leading to cultural trauma or cultures oftrauma that may be passed down over generations (cf. Alexander et al.2004; Erikson 1991). Alternative views on the mechanisms of trauma andits effects on individual and social memory suggest, however, that wemight not be able to take the aetiology of posttraumatic stress disorder forgranted as a universal psychoneurological syndrome, but rather that thissyndrome too must become one of the social phenomena of the culture ofmodern violence that we analyse.Among the more important criticisms levelled at the humanist

appropriation of trauma is the argument that a model premised ontraumatic silence perversely exculpates perpetrators of violence fromresponsibility for their crimes. To Sigrid Weigel (2003: 8788), in itsgeneralisation to stand as a model for all history, the presumption of theliteral unspeakableness of trauma as articulated by Caruth leads to theperverse annihilation of the traumatic event (i.e. the Shoah). Weigel, in

14 Introduction

contrast, takes German National Socialism and the Holocaust as theunique starting point for her theory of transgenerational traumatisation inGermany (1999). She argues that the subconscious memory imprints ofNational Socialism have been consolidated over the decades and turnedinto a kind of archaic inheritance that engenders displaced and distortedmemories across the generations (quoted in Fuchs 2006: 170).23

In another important critical review of trauma theory focused on thework of van der Kolk and Caruth, Ruth Leys (2000) argues that there is infact no consensus regarding the aetiology or the symptoms of PTSD, thatthis syndrome is of dubious validity as a psychological model (2000: 7),and that its appropriation by poststructuralist literary critics and otherhumanists is more problematic still. In particular, Leys is concerned thattrauma theory andwriting on trauma ultimately conflate perpetrators andvictims of violence as identical victims of changes in brain function ofexternal origin over which the individual has no control. She critiques thistheory for two main reasons; in the first place, she finds the clinical modelof traumatic memory grossly reductionistic in its positivistic depiction ofthe mind as a mechanistic entity in which unmediated memories can belodged like computer files quite outside of reflection and symbolisation(2000: 22965, 27297). Secondly, she argues that this reductive model hasthe perverse effect of removing any agency or responsibility fromperpetrators of violence allegedly suffering from PTSD, thus eroding oreliding the ethical dimensions of violence by equating them with victims PTSD theory, in other words, equates perpetrators and victims ofviolence by depicting both uniformly as victims of trauma (2000: 7, 297).24

Similar critical precursors have been pioneered by Alex ArgentiPillen(2003), Ian Hacking (1986, 1995), Derek Summerfield (1996, 1998), andAlan Young (1995), and within anthropology byAlexArgentiPillen (2003)and Peter Loizos (2008). According to their critiques, the PTSD paradigmhas mutated into a global discourse, but individual and collectivereactions to extreme violence, over both the short and longer term, maynot be universal but rather socially or culturally informed or determined.;a This point that is taken up in this volume by Carol Kidron with respectto the different forms and effects of memories of violence amongCambodian and Israeli children of genocide victims, and by StephanFeuchtwang, who also questions the universality of traumatictransmission.Several other authors have pointed out that the concept of healing,

which is implicitly articulated in the trauma approach, is connected to atypically Western concern with closure (see van der Veer 2002) andtherefore cannot adequately represent the actual terror and the attendantsense of fragmentation, entropy and meaninglessness that experiences ofextreme violence may entail. For a number of reasons, experiences ofterror may preclude the possibility of dividing populations into

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 15

perpetrators and victims, assigning blame and punishing culprits. When,as just mentioned, violence reveals itself primarily in its senselessness andincomprehensibility, the experience of extreme violence may not bereducible to such formulations. Furthermore, in a social context in whichvictims are forced to continue living alongside perpetrators, as iscommon in postconflict situations of following civil war, it may not begood to talk, and efforts may be focused on silencing the past rather thanvoicing polemical and divisive interpretations of it (ArgentiPillen 2003,Passerini 2006, Hamilton 2006).25 Here again we are faced with theinseparability of forgetting and remembering, obliteration and continuity these equations do not oppose a minus to a plus, but rather amount toone single bifurcated process which only in its entirety can be constitutiveof a liveable present.Criticism against the excessive employment of trauma and memory

models has also been voiced by some of the authors of a recent specialissue of Representations entitled Grounds of Remembering (2000). In theirview, memory, alongside identity,26 has been turned into a fashionablecommodity (Zertal 2000: 97; cf. Gillis 1994) that prevents us from criticallyrelating to the past. Kerwin Lee Klein, for example, warns against thematerialization of memory (2000: 136), by which memory appears to bean independent social actor. According to him, psychological andquasireligious categories, such as pain, healing, ritual, trauma etc., nowdominate the analytical vocabulary, whereas social, economic and culturalconnections are being neglected. The ensuing discourse of sacrality(Lacqueur 2000: 4) is counterproductive as it prevents inhibits criticalhistorical scholarship.The discomfort articulated by Klein and others is bundled togethergoes

along with a claim to scientific objectivity on Kleins part that is alsoquestionable, however, since it tends to overlook aspects of individualsuffering and embodied practice. The critique is nevertheless importantbecause it reminds us to consider sociopolitical and economic factors inour analysis of the emergence of violence in the past and its repercussionsin present situations.27 Moreover, if applied to the specific case of thememory of violence, it cautions us against the danger of pathologisinghistorical experience, whereby people are first turned into victims andthen into patients (Kleinman and Kleinman 1996: 10). Any approach thatfocuses on pain alone does not leave ample space either for theconsideration of political agency or the complex societal arrangements inwhich violence, as well as its reformulations in and through memory,unfold.Despite these valid objections, then, we might ask why the

preoccupation with questions of memory continues to be so popular notonly in academic discourse, but even more so among social actorsthemselves. To give but three examples, Penelope Papailias (2005) has just

16 Introduction

unveiled the astoundingly widespread (if controversial) practices ofpopular historical research among amateur archivists and historians inmodern Greece.28 Where one might expect academic historians in Greeceto be delighted with the free services effectively offered by innumerableindividuals from all walks of life who have selflessly devoted their time(and in some cases their fortunes) to amassing written documents and oralaccounts relating to the wars and dislocations of the twentieth century, onefinds an atmosphere of simmering hostility dividing these two groups afissure that represents nothing more nor less than a struggle over memoryin a country that has only recently begun to come to terms with its civilwar, its ensuing rightwing dictatorial regime and its silencing of thecommunist contribution to the resistance against German occupation inthe Second World War.29

Secondly, from Africa and many other southern theatres of thepostcolonial world as well as from the internal others the aborigines ofAustralia, the Maori of New Zealand, NativeAmericans and First Nationsin the United States and Canada (not to mention Greeces war of attritionwith the British Museum over the Parthenon Marbles) metropolitanmuseums and scientific institutions are being besieged by restitutionclaims, often for human remains (cf. Cantwell 2000; Bray 2001).30 The keyargument made by claimants in these cases is not couched in legalisticterms based on formal ownership, but rather expressed in terms of aspiritual discourse emphasising continuity with the past: a discourse ofreligious identity and kinship ties that must be memorialised in reifiedphysical remains. Of course, as with the fierce debate raging betweenamateur and professional historians in Greece, such spiritual discourseshave clear political undertones; they seek not only to reconstitute a pastfragmented by colonial violence, but in the act of restitution, to force themetropolis and former colonial master to recognise past wrongs and toforce new postcolonial states belatedly to recognise their first peoples orconstituent ethnic groups, who now so often find themselves marginalisedand powerless.31 Here more than ever we are reminded that rememberingis oriented not to the past, but to coming to terms with the past in a presentthat is continuously troubled by it.Thirdly, the widening gap between rich and poor, the Balkanisation of

Europe into a series of ethnic conclaves, and the spread of organised crimethat have followed the demise of the Soviet block have engenderedinnumerable micropractices of remembering that implicitly critique theneoliberal doctrine that capitalism generated democracy. Whether theseare revealed in the affectionate preservation of communistera statues, asNadkarni has shown in the case of Budapest (2003), or in the more sinistermovement of dead bodies in a macabre game of postmortem musicalchairs, as Katherine Verdery reveals (1999), or in the resurgence ofOrthodox Christianity and the recognition of Soviet atrocities (Merridale

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 17

2000), Glasnost and the passing of the Soviet era were marked first andforemost by acts of recollection that sought justice by looking back in timerather than forward, transforming individual memories silently encryptedwithin individuals into collective acts of remembrance.From elaborate commemorative rituals to personal genealogies, from

the apparently anodyne pastimes of local archivists to the ritual concernsof indigenous groups, from the restoration of once neglected cathedralsto the resurgence of ethnic identities round the world, memory seems to beeverywhere (and not only in the minds of researchers). Such omnipresencecertainly calls for critical attention. Instead of completely doing away withmemory as an object of concern, as the approach of Klein and other criticsseems to suggest, we ought perhaps to pay still more attention to thepolitics of memory, or in other words to processes of appropriation,conflicting interests and overlapping discourses.32

The past is always a contested site and its evocation by means ofcommemorative rituals can be regarded as a strategy of legitimation andselfaffirmation for various groups (Young 1989). When a violent pastbecomes the ground on which to build the future, a hegemonic narrativeis often created that first cuts out everything that does not fit into thedominant storyline (of victimisation, heroism etc.) and secondly puts thepast at a somewhat comfortable distance from the present. In much of theexisting literature, a Foucauldian dichotomy is assumed between theofficial (and presumably artificial) narrative, usually associated with thestate, and the more authentic countermemory or memories of the people(e.g. Bond and Gilliam 1994, Bodnar 1994, Swedenburg 1995, Taussig 1987,Werbner 1998).Somewhat destabilising this dichotomy, Derrida (1986) points to the

crucial differences between an original cataclysmic event and its futureremembrance, emphasising the ways in which memories introducedifferences diffrance and ambiguities to their exemplars that maytransform them in important ways, most crucially by turning essentiallyapolitical, inchoate experiences of violence and oppression into politicisedmemories that can take the form of a calltoarms or a call for justice. Hegoes on to warn, however, that such memories precisely because of theirambiguity can also be appropriated by perpetrators of violence andturned into reactionary or revisionist forms of selfjustification (cf.Bauman 1993, 1995).Derrida thus usefully questions models that would essentialise groups

of perpetrators and victims, or state and people, and seek to pit themagainst one another. The state is not a monolithic or timeless body andcannot always be neatly separated from or opposed to society which ofcourse is in itself heterogeneous (cf. Herzfeld 1997; Mitchell 1991; Papailias2005). Indeed, not only is society heterogeneous, but it may also be helpfulto see it in Bakhtinian terms as constitutive of the state, in relation to which

18 Introduction

it nevertheless exists in a state of tension (Bakhtin 1967). The fixation ofsubject positions in a memory/countermemory approach, even ifaccompanied by an emphasis on contestation or negotiation (cf. Nuttalland Coetzee 1998), tends to obscure the complexities entailed incommemorative praxis. For example, the status and perception of a groupas marginal or hegemonic may differ according to the prevailing socialsetting. It can also change in the course of time, and such changessometimes depend on precisely the way in whichmemories of violence arerepresented (Schramm 2008). A nice example of this is encapsulated in theSoviet Russian aphorism the future is certain only the past isunpredictable. Intended in the Soviet era as a wry comment on themonotonous permanence of the singleparty state and its predilection forrevisionist history, it can be read with postSoviet hindsight as referring tothe appropriations of the past that oncemarginalised peoples withresurgent interests in local histories and ethnic identities may are nowelaborating for themselvese.The contributors to this volume likewise avoid dichotomistic views

and examine the processes that may lead to such memorial shifts andtransformations as well as the possible interfaces between official andpopular memory. In a similar manner, together with Frances Pines recentwork on the entanglement of personal and historical memories incommunist Poland (2007), we regard individual and collective memory asmutually constitutive.As we have seen, then, the trauma paradigm as deployed in the human

sciences has its limitations: in particular, its possible blurring of victim andperpetrator status and its lack of recognition of the human agencyinvolved in remembering violence. Remembering violence especially atthe collective level is not only a pathology, it is a political act, and itrepresents not a mere repetition over which the patient has no controland to which they can attribute no meaning, but more often a constructiveengagement with a fractured past and a moral judgement of its politicalsignificance. Engaging with these trenchant critiques of the traumaparadigm should not, however, lead us to throw out the baby with thebath water: we can recognise the limitations of the PTSDmodel withoutdismissing the suffering that it aims to record. While questioning modelsof literal memory, reenactment and involuntary or intrusive recall, we cannonetheless enquire into the ways that violence is remembered. A faultyseismograph does not mean that there has been no earthquake, nor that itsaftershocks will not be felt in the future. In other words, though ourinstruments may not be perfect, there is still a need to question howextreme political violence is experienced by individuals, enculturated atthe collective level and passed down through the generations, and todevelop methodologies and theories that can examine this phenomenonwithout being ethnocentric, Procrustean, or unduly positivist and

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 19

universalisingtic. We believe that it is precisely this role that ethnographicresearch and anthropological exegesis can play. A great deal of the PTSDdebates are based on shortterm laboratory experiments, brief formalinterviews and written texts rather than on the longterm observation ofpopulations over the course of years and it is precisely the data resultingfrom longterm participant observation of this kind that has the potentialto move the memory debate forward.Michael Lambeks (2002, 2003) rich description of the effects of

precolonial and colonial violence on present generations in Madagascarprovides an apt example. His analysis of spirit possession among theSakalava demonstrates that the remembering engaged in by mediumsmight evoke the violence of the past in a form that is in fact truer to itsoriginal experience than empirical historical texts would be (2003: 70). Hisanalysis may initially be thought to replicate the PTSD model in itsemphasis on the intrusive and embodied nature of memories of violence,but Lambek shows that such memories depart from the symptomatologyof PTSD in significant ways. Most importantly, he shows that the past doesnot recur in the present in the form of mere phobic avoidance or as anuninvited and debilitating irruption of a forgotten past in the midst of awholly incommensurate present, but rather that the past is wilfullybrought forth and made to engage with the political present in the seancesof the mediums; the latter appropriate the past to address the present in anagentive and openended way that is aimed at the present and the future,and is very far removed from the pathologising discourse of trauma (2002:194, 25657).Nicolas Argentis work on embodied memories of recent

statesponsored violence in Cameroon and of slavery and colonial forcedlabour (1998, 2007) also bears superficial affinities to the trauma paradigm:in this case, young men and women seem to reenact episodes of extremeviolence in dance performances that come close to possession states. Hereagain, however, the reenactment of the original trauma(s) differs cruciallyfrom that of typical trauma patients as described in Freud and Janetswork: the reenactment is not an involuntary repetition emergingintrusively into the psyche and the body of the isolated patient, but rathera mimetic interpretation of the original event that is shared, learned andreenacted consciously and voluntarily. Far from reproducing the originalevent in all its unmediated horror, the mimetic appropriation of pastviolence introduces to its exemplar the sense of communion, of mastery, ofcelebration and of pleasure associated with dance no longer a traumaticreenactment, it is pregnant with the supplementarity of performance.33

The importance of the consideration of multiple factors in grasping themeaning of violence for those who are affected by it is demonstrated inAllen Feldmans (1991) insightful analysis of political terror in NorthernIreland. In his book, he looks at the different levels on which violence has

20 Introduction

been (and continues to be) articulated in this conflict: from symbolic formsand material practices to narrative strategies and changing spatialformations. What emerges from his analysis is the insight that, at least inthe case of Northern Ireland, one cannot speak of a straightforward orlinear narrative of violence. Rather, such narratives develop situationallyand relationally, with a strong impact on everyday life.34 Feldman treatsthe oral recollections of violence that were voiced by his informants asdata, that is, he is not so much concerned with the processes ofremembrance and commemoration as such. Nevertheless, his work evokesthe principal methodological challenge of combining phenomenologicaland constructivist analytical perspectives;, a challenge that also concernsthe study of the memory of violence (or the violence of memory) as a socialphenomenon. The following chapters attempt to build on this recent butgrowing body of ethnographic data and analysis.

Memory in Practice

The case studies brought together in this collection cover a widegeographical spectrum (Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe andSouth East Asia) that invites a comparative analysis.35 By choosing acomparative approach, this collection engages with questions ofmethodology and of interpretation that are at the core of theanthropological analysis of the memory of violence, where, amongst otherthings (as highlighted by Nordstrom and Robben 1995), the limits ofparticipant observation become obvious. This is not to say that thiscollection makes claims to establishing a new, homogeneous or monolithicparadigm in the field of memory studies. The new paradigm is memoryitself, but it is and must at this nascent, seminal stage of its evolution inparticular be allowed a plurality of voices, a multiplicity ofinterpretations and analytical approaches. Just as this collection clearlyhighlights the richness and complexity of the phenomena that come underthe aegis of memory, so too its authors have approached their data fromdiffering, and sometimes even apparently contradictory, standpoints.Rather than trying to iron such differences out, we have sought to presentthem here in all their incommensurability, showing the extent to whichsome fundamental questions regarding the psychodynamics of memoryand their manifold cultural mutations are not reducible to a single grandnarrative. The evidence on whether and howmemories of violence or theirtraumatic enactments are passed from one generation to the next, onwhether specific marginalised groups in society can or do developcountermemories with which to confront dominant models, on whetherthe experience of violence leads to the suppression of verbal exegesis, oreven with what cultural practices can be considered memories in the first

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 21

place seems to differ from one social setting to another, and so too mustour interpretative approaches to such complex data avoid any prematurereductions.

Bodies of Memory

The chapters of the first section of the book Bodies of Memory deal withnondiscursive, embodied or practical aspects of memory. As discussedabove, one of the key symptoms of memories of violence highlighted inthe psychoanalytic theory and often observed by researchers andsurvivors alike since has been their apparent inexpressibility. As RosalindShaw has argued for the effects on the Temne of Sierra Leone of thetransatlantic slave trade, memories of violence often seem to cursoryobservers to produce only an unplumbed silence (Shaw 2002: 89).36

Though such discursive lacunae have at times been assumed to evince notmerely the silencing of memory, but its total obliteration, this sectionpresents two case studies that examine the possibility that catastrophicevents can be remembered, transmitted, experienced and expressed inways other than or in addition to discursive modes, and in particular bymeans of embodiment.Again, this is not to say that they present analogues of one another. In

chapter two, Janine Klungel shows how rape was not only endemic to thepolitical relations of the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe underFrench colonial occupation, but how these relations have lasted beyondthe occupation of the French and the ownerslave relationship, infectingthe social body to this day. Her examination of the lasting fear of rapeexposes the practice of virginity testing, by means of which mothersregularly assure themselves of the virginity of their daughters, ironicallyand tragically by means that effectively reenact rape. A vicious cycleseems thus to have been set in place by means of which the trauma ofcolonialism, symbolised most mordantly on the bodies of its victims interms of the pervasive fear of rape, is repeated from generation togeneration by the very avoidance practices that its victims deploy on theirchildren. This is not to say, however, that rape is a silent memory inGuadeloupe; Janine Klungel also records the autobiographical rapenarratives of her female informants, depicting a cultural idiom in whichrape spirits appear to women in their dreams and are then given voice asthese women recount these dreams, attesting to the violent resurgence ofthe past in the intrusive predatory form of the incubus.In contrast to the eloquent discursive memories of Guadeloupian

women, the Chilean victims of the Pinochet regime described by DortheKristensen in chapter three embody their memories of this monstrousperiod of their past in somatised illness experiences rather than discussing

22 Introduction

them overtly. The symptoms presented by the torture victims of thePinochet era and their relatives including anxiety, sadness, lack of energy,intense pain and insecurity, often combined with the experience of ghostlypresences are routinely diagnosed by medical doctors as depression oranxiety, or simply nerves (nervios).37 Such dismissal (or biologicalreductionism) on the part of the medical profession compels sufferers toseek out indigenous healers, who explain such suffering as a product ofspiritual and/or human aggression due to fright (susto). Comparing thebiomedical model of traumatic memory with that of shamanistic healingpractice, Dorthe Kristensen considers the ways in which indigenous illnesscategories and their treatment by traditional healers allows for what couldnever be said explicitly, nor perhaps even remembered in literal terms,nonetheless to be confronted by other means. In so doing, DortheKristensen suggests that the total obliteration of memory, which alltotalitarian regimes seek to impose, has its limits.

Performance

If embodiment applies to the ways in which memory is sedimented inbodily practices that are all the more takenforgranted and thereforeeffective for being mundane, the realm of performance, ritual andpossession marks a sphere of embodied memory that also merits specialattention. While embodied memory is often unnoticed and all butinvisible, performative memory is set apart from everyday life,collectivised, often conservatively nurtured, and selfconsciouslyentrusted by one generation to the next by means of initiation,apprenticeship and other rites of passage. These cultural phenomena areas formal, explicit and marked as nonperformative embodied memoriesare informal and inconspicuous.Performative genres enable their practitioners to collapse time and to

shed light on the historical continuities between past and present byjuxtaposing one onto the other, using deep wells of cultural knowledge tointerpret contemporary injustices that are often as extreme, ineffable andinchoate as were those of the past.38 Moreover, performances may alsoleave deep and longlasting impressions on participants, which may thenbecome the actual subject of transmission and consequently form the coreof new memorial practices. The chapters that are brought together in thissection analyse this transformative process from two very different angles:while David Berliner looks at the ongoing performance of secrecy in thecommemoration of initiation violence in GuineaConakry, JackieFeldmans chapter on youth pilgrimages to Polish Holocaust sites focuseson a case where witnessing and the need for revelation of violentexperiences are constantly emphasised. Both authors deal with the effects

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 23

of remembered violence on intergenerational relationships. Suchmemories may be called vicarious (see Climo 1995, quoted in Berliner, thisvolume) in other words, they are memories that have a profound impacton the identity of a generation of people who have not directlyexperienced that which is being remembered.In chapter four, David Berliner discusses the case of Bulongic initiation

memory in GuineaConakry. Prior to the 1950s, the Bulongic ofGuineaConakry initiated their young boys into manhood, a rite ofpassage described today as a very brutal one. A process of Islamisationthat reached its climax in 1954 brought these practices to an abrupt end.However, the social reality of initiation could be said to have survived thedemise of the rite: in the absence of initiation rituals, the pain inflicted onyoung boys fifty years ago is still a crucial delineator in contemporaryBulongic society. First, the violence of initiation plays a central role in oldmens memories. But, for these elders who have suffered the pain andknown the privilege of initiation, talking about their memories is far froma rhetorical or nostalgic gesture. David Berliner looks at the ways in whichelders present these memories as narratives of initiatory violence as wellas at the response of todays youths to those narratives. He argues thatdespite the fact that initiation violence no longer takes place, its socialfunction as a means of supporting the position of elders as guardians of avery powerful secret knowledge continues to hold.Whereas David Berliner thus describes the memory and transmission

of ritualised acts of violence, which includes the imposition of voluntarysilences, Jackie Feldman in chapter five discusses ritualised acts ofcommemorating unspeakable violence, that is, attempts to break thesilence surrounding traumatic events. By investigating the testimony ofHolocaust survivors in Israeli youth pilgrimages to Auschwitz, heillustrates how through the shared bodily presence and ritual performanceof elderly witnesses andmasses of youths at the sites of extermination, theyouths become witnesses of the witnesses and come to appreciate theirtakenforgranted lifeworld as an object of desire. The designation ofsurvivors as witnesses (and that of Israeli youths as victims by proxy) isa way of giving sense to the Holocaust: in the commemorative frameworkthat is established at the Holocaust sites in Poland, the Shoah appears asthe foundation of the Israeli nationstate. National symbols, worn,displayed or performed by the students and witnesses, become chargedwith emotion. Through such totalistic ritual commemoration, the traumaof the Holocaust (which continues to haunt survivors) ought to be broughtto redemptive closure.The commemorative performances described by Jackie Feldman not

only depend on the copresence of witnesses and youths, but they alsoderive much of their power from the sense of being there (cf. Urry 2000)that is generated by the actuality of the Holocaust sites at which the

24 Introduction

groups are gathered, as if those sites themselves could give testimony.The spatial and material dimension of memory that is suggested here isfurther developed in the following section.

Landscapes, Memoryscapes and the Materiality of Objects

The connections between memory and spatial inscriptions in places andlandscapes have been widely discussed, often in connection with thecontested notions of belonging that go along with them (see Lovell 1998;Bender andWiner 2001; Steward and Strathern 2003). As Tim Ingold (1993)has argued, the very perception of a landscape can be seen as an act ofremembrance, since all landscape is humanmade, processual (cf. Hirsch1995) and shaped by a history of past dwelling. Landscapes and places arethus not simply containers or screens to which memories are attached,but rather they can be said to work as memory (see Kchler 1993). Thisconception is even more fitting in the case of the memory of violence,where landscape denotes a geography of pain (Mueggler 2001: 199), be itin topographic or imaginary terms (or both). Even if the violence may havetaken place in the past, such geographies are often maintained and(re)produced by means of narratives and performances, as the followingtwo chapters indicate powerfully.In chapter six, Adelheid Pichler is concerned with memories of the

violence of colonial plantation slavery in Cuba. Evincing the silencingeffect of traumatic political pasts on contemporary memory practices,Pichler delineates the nonverbal as well as narrative means by which thePalo Monte ceremonies of contemporary Cuba reenact in graphic indeed slavish detail the punishments to which agricultural slavelabourers used to be subjected in the colonial era. Through a carefulanalysis of the performances, songs andmaterial objects of the PaloMonterituals, Pichler also demonstrates how adherents reenter the landscape ofslavery in their evocation of landmarks that highlight the plantations aswell as sites of freedom and resistance, such as the fortifications of thecimarrones in the hills. In addition to those references to Cuban spatial andhistoric markers, paleros also incorporate memories of the Africanhomeland into their rituals. As Pichler argues in relation to Appadurai(1996), such rituals are not only indicative of an ongoing memory ofviolence, but at the same time they serve as a means of generating powerin the production of locality, and thereby of giving meaning to a violentand disruptive past across the generations.Whereas in PaloMonte, landscape is but one symbolic referent through

which the memory of violence is articulated (together with body, kinshipand religious hierarchy), the memorial practices discussed by PaolaFilippucci in chapter seven focus on the violent destruction of settlements

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 25

and landscapes in war. Through a case study of rural Argonne in France,which was devastated during the First World War, she demonstrates howthe war has turned the landscape into a ruined country. Despite carefulreconstructions, past destruction and loss continue to mark both thephysical fabric of villages and local representations of the past, oflandscape and of place. Filippucci shows that in case of the Argonne, thevery reconstructions can indeed be said to act as reminders of pastdestruction. Moreover, as the war recedes from living memory, localmemorial practices become closely intertwined with national andinternational forms of remembering the Great War, be it through heritagepreservation efforts or the tourism spectacle of battle reenactments.Filippucci accords great centrality to the materiality of place, arguing thatpast violence is remembered in the places of destruction because it isremembered through them. To her, landscapes may play a role in the socialremembrance of violence by acting as a bridge between private, individualexperiences of violence and violent loss and public discourses andrepresentations about them, making the experience of violencecommunicable and transmissible.

Generations: Chasms and Bridges

Even thoughall chapters address the issue of transgenerational transmission inone way or the other, the final section aims explicitly to draw critical attentionto that problem. It opens a forum for debate, centred on the question ofwhether or not past violencemayhave a traumatic impact ongenerationswhohavenot directly experienced it; and if it does, how this impactmay take shapeaccording to different cultural and political settings.In chapter eight, Carol Kidron analyses two unrelated communities of

genocide survivors and their descendants, theCambodianDiaspora inCanadaand the survivors of the Shoah and their families in Israel. Through thiscomparative approach, she explicitly examines the silencing effect of violenceon two generations of survivors. While silence or lack of verbalisation is anaspect of survivors reactions to their experiences in both the Cambodian andIsraeli communities of survivors, Carol Kidrons Jewish informants speak ofwhat she sums up as a perpetual amorphous sense of genocidal presence inthe home. This silent, embodied and interactive presence of the past is notattested to byherCambodian informants, however, forwhomthe silence of thepast does not equatewith its nonverbal presence, but is rather symbolic of thesuffering of the past having been overcome and placed behind oneself. Deny

26 Introduction

as they might the effects of the genocide on their own worldview, however,Kidron notes how memories of the past can work their way into the socialfabric even of those who would wish otherwise, in this case influencing inindirect but important ways the worldview of secondgenerationCambodians in Canada.The final chapter by Stephan Feuchtwang is a case study of an event that

was wounding and disrupting for the families of Luku, a remote mountainarea in Taiwan. The event, known as the Luku Incident (Luku Shijian), tookplace in thewinter of 195253 and can still be recalled as their own experienceby the survivors. Even though not all of them present symptoms of what isnow called posttraumatic stress disorder, the event could still be described astraumatic by all standards. Feuchtwang asks about the ways in which theevent is remembered and transmitted through time.Hedistinguishes betweenthree different temporalities that are constitutive for such transmissions: first,the time of simultaneity and progress; secondly, the temporality ofcommemoration and eternity, both ofwhich are connected to the nationstate;and thirdly, the longterm time of family, which includes its own rituals ofdeath, distinct from those evoked in official commemorations and historicalaccounts. In his discussion of the Luku incident, Feuchtwang demonstrateshow survivors (traumatic) memories are incorporated into official narratives.In that process, recognition of past violence not only enables victims toarticulate their pain, but it also leads to forgetting and closure. Whencommemoration takes over, so Feuchtwang argues, transmission of traumaceases.

Notes

1. The latter term from the French oubli, forgetting, which gives the cognate term oubliette,a dungeon.

2. For recent discussions of this issue, see Berliner (2005a, 2005b), Huyssen (1995: 6), Stewart(2004), Olick and Robbins (1998), Radstone (2000).

3. On the problem of generations, cf. Mannheim (1964).4. For a discussion of the relation of the PTSD / trauma paradigm to the western legalsystem and to the concept of damages, see Hodgkin and Radstone (2006: 99). Hodgkinand Radstone (ibid.) refer to the relationship between individual and collective trauma asa sliding scale that is only negotiated with difficulty. For Janet Walker (2006) in the samevolume, the theory of traumatic memory provides a means of bridging between theindividual and the collective poles of suffering, relocating the psychic within the socialand historical context from which violence had removed it.

5. As Halbwachs puts it: The sacrifice through which [Christ] has given us his body and hisblood did not take place a single time. It is integrally renewed every time believers areassembled to receive the Eucharist. What is more, the successive sacrifices celebrated atdistinct moments and in distinct places are but one and the same sacrifice. (1992: 90)

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 27

6. He illustrates this point with a defining metaphor:The frameworks of memory exist both within the passage of time and outside it.External to the passage of time, they communicate to the images and concreterecollections of which they are made a bit of their stability and generality. But theseframeworks are in part captivated by the course of time. They are like thosewoodfloats that descend along a waterway so slowly that one can easily move fromone to the other, but which nevertheless are not immobile and go forward. And so it isin regard to frameworks of memory: while following them we can pass as easily fromone notion to another, both of which are general and outside of time, through a seriesof reflections and arguments, as we can go up and down the course of time from onerecollection to another. Or, to put it more exactly, depending on the direction we havechosen to travel, whether we go upstream or pass from one riverbank to the other, thesame representations seem to be at times recollections, at times notions or generalideas. (Halbwachs 1992: 182)[end EXT]

7. In Bahlouls (1996) critical feminist ethnography of such a context in colonial andpostcolonial Algeria, memory even reverses gendered power relations. Emigrantwomens narratives about their lost home in the town of DarRefayiltransform a dominated world into a haven of social cohesion. It is as if the word andremembrance had given voices to those who had not had them in the past that theywere recounting. The effect of nostalgia is equivalent to a reversal of status. The mainproducers of DarRefayils memoirs are those who could not speak in the past. Timehas empowered them, and memory produced authority. The small become great andthe weak mighty. (1996: 132).

8. For an attempt at such collaboration, see Price (1983), and for a critique of Pricesrepresentational strategies, see Scott (1991).

9. In Sturkens words: There is so much traffic across the borders of cultural memory andhistory that in many cases it may be futile to maintain a distinction between them. Yetthere are times when those distinctions are important in understanding political intent,whenmemories are asserted specifically outside of or in response to historical narratives.(1997: 5) Sturken acknowledges her debt to Foucault and to his concepts of subjugatedknowledges, nave knowledges, and countermemory, all of which identified the fieldof collective memory as a site of political struggle. In contrast to what she sees asFoucaults romanticism, however, Sturken warns that memory is not automatically thesite of oppositional knowledge or of resistance: Cultural memory is often entangled withhistory, scripted through the layeredmeanings in mass culture, and itself highly contestedand conflictual there is nothing politically prescribed in cultural memory. (1997: 7)

10.On the social importance of forgetting, see also Battaglia (1993), Carsten (19915), Forty andKchler (1999), Smith (1996).

11.On the early history of trauma studies, see the introduction to Ruth Leys (2000)monograph on the subject, and Claude Barrois (1988), and Paul Lerner (1996).

12.Thus, Bruno Bettelheim could describe how he felt that he was separated from his ownbody, watching it from another point in the train car while he was being tortured by theguards on his way to internment in a Nazi concentration camp. Similarly, he notes thatwhile camp inmates would be shocked and angered when they received amundane insultfrom a guard, reacting as they might to a similar occurrence in their ordinary lives, theyshowed no emotional reaction at all to the much more serious injuries and tortures thatthey suffered. Excessive acts of violence incommensurable with their previous experiencewere never registered emotionally, nor dreamed of afterwards (1943: 435).

13.Cf. Funes, the man with perfect memory, in Jorge Luis Borges eponymous story. Borgessituates the origin of Funes extraordinarily precise and unmediated memory in anaccident he suffers, when he is thrown from a horse and permanently crippled. He neverrefers to, and actually seems unaware of, the injuries he has suffered, which keep him

28 Introduction

bedbound for life, but other events return with total clarity. Two or three times, Borgestells us, [Funes] had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, buteach reconstruction had itself taken an entire day (Borges 1998: 96).

14.This forces us to face the very unPlatonic paradox that it is the more accurate memoriesthat are pathological and debilitating, while formally inaccurate memories are in facttherapeutic and socially integrative.

15.Van der Kolk and van der Hart (1991: 43738) argue that though Freud and others sincehave tended to blend repression and dissociation and to use them interchangeably, thereis a fundamental difference between them. The repression model is vertical; it posits alayered model of the mind in which unwanted memories are pushed downwards into theunconscious. The subject therefore no longer has access to it. The dissociation model positsa horizontally layered or divided model of mind in which traumatic memories are storedin an alternate stream of consciousness.

16.Nearly all of the informants refer to this ddoublement, or doubling effect of the Shoah.Another survivor quoted by Langer (1991: 5354) unknowingly uses the very sameanalogy of a second skin that Delbo does, putting it in its starkest terms:Its like like theres another skin beneath this skin and that skin is called Auschwitz,and you cannot shed it, you know We carry this. I am not like you. You have onevision of life and I have two. I you know I lived on two planets Its like the planetwas chopped up into a normal [part] socalled normal: our lives are not really normal and this other planet, and wewere herded onto that planet from this one, and herdedback again, having nothing virtually nothing in common with the inhabitants of thisplanet and we have these these double livesAnd its too much.

17.For instance, despite Bettelheims (1943: 435) statement to the effect that he did not dreamof the violence perpetrated against him immediately after it happened, many survivorsattest to accessing their deepmemory in dreams some years or decades after the triggeringevents (Langer 1991: 7). These dreams intersect with and inform common memoriesdespite their putative psychic isolation, in effect preventing a total dissociative split in theperson hence the doubling of the world to which extreme violence gives birth.

18. Une inclusion parasitaire, un dedans htrogne lintrieure du moi. For more on theemergence of the crypt as a secret vault within the subject, see Abraham and Torok(1980), Torok (1987), and Abraham (1994).

19. Mort sauf en moi (Derrida 1976: 17). Sauf, meaning both safe and save in the sense ofexcept.

20.As Agamben (1999: 12) puts it regarding Auschwitz, this truth is irreducible to theelements that constitute it a reality that necessarily exceeds its factual elements suchis the aporia of Auschwitz (see also Derrida 1986: 88).

21. Something will make itself understood, later. That which will not have beenintroduced will have been acted, acted out, enacted [in English in the original Trans.], played out, in the end and thus represented. But without the subjectrecognising it. It will be represented as something that has never been presented.Renewed absurdity This will be understood as feeling fear, anxiety, feeling of athreatening excess whose motive is obviously not in the present context. A feeling which therefore necessarily points to an elsewhere that will have to be located outsidethis situation And how can this site be localized without passing through amemory, without alleging the existence of a reserve where this site has been retained? (Lyotard 1990: 13)

Cf. Freud inMoses and Monotheism:At some later time it will break into their life with obsessional impulses, it will governtheir actions. The precipitating cause, with its attendant perceptions and ideas, isforgotten. This, however, is not the end of the process: the instinct has either retainedits forces, or collects them again, or it is reawakened by some new precipitating cause

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 29

[and it] comes to light as a symptom, without the acquiescence of the ego, but alsowithout its understanding. All the phenomena of the formation of symptoms mayjustly be described as the return of the repressed. (1939: 124)

22.Or, in Homi Bhabhas words: How does one narrate the present as a form ofcontemporaneity that is always belated? (1990: 308).

23.She regards the Historikerstreit and the more recent debates over Germanys regainednormality as signs of this ongoing traumatic distortion, and not ofVergangenheitsbewltigung, or coming to terms with the past. Such an overcoming of thepast might often be attempted, especially in official memorialisations (cf. Weissberg 1999),yet it necessarily remains an illusion (cf. Benjamin 1991; Bauman 1993: 224).

24.In making this second argument, Leys could be said to be opening a Pandoras box: in thefirst place, although the example of the US soldier in Vietnam she chooses is relativelyunambiguous (though even this is debatable), it is often unclear in situations of violentconflict who are the perpetrators and who are the victims, and the reality is that theseterms rapidly lose their meaning as survivors become morally tainted to one extent oranother. Another problem with her criticism regarding the elision of moral culpability isthat it can be applied to her own argument: in her chapter on van der Kolk, Leys points towhat she sees as the political bias of trauma theory. The source of trauma is said to belinked to a single violent event by trauma theorists, not because of firm evidence, sheargues, but because not to do so would seem to support US government bodies trying todiscredit the claims of trauma sufferers who served in Vietnam in the same manner as theGerman government tried to suggest that concentration camp survivors had always beenat risk of psychopathology, and that this had not been c