Over the last thirty years, memory and commemoration studies have become one of the fastest developing interdisciplinary fields in the humanities, attracting the attention of, among others, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, literary critics and art-historians. This growth and the dizzying array of publications produced not only reflect what has been variously described as a memory boom, a memory industry, an addiction to memory and, perhaps most graphically, an ‘immersion in memory and its sites [that] may at times have the quality of junk-Proustian Schwärmerei’ (LaCapra, 1998, 8). They also attest to the dynamic, if at times confusing and confused, dialogues taking place across discipline boundaries. Among the most popular subjects addressed one might cite as indicative: the roles of the monument, the archive and the museum; the evolution of concepts such as the patrimonial and generation; the distinction between protomemory and metamemory; symbolic accretion; and the tension between memory and history (see Klein, 2000; Dwyer, 2004). Commentators have attributed the proliferation of forms of commemoration to a range of factors including democratisation and the development of mass culture; the disappearance of peasant culture; globalisation and regionalisation; the emergence of theory and anti-historicist discourses (see Klein, 2000; Foote, 2003 [1997]).

Reactions to the boom have been mixed. Some have embraced the promise it holds out to ‘[render] the “history” of the present’ (Matsuda, 1996, 17), as well as its accommodation of the subjective, the material, the fragmentary and the ‘disputatious’, and its responsiveness to the acceleration of history, to the fragmentation of knowledge, in short, to the postmodern condition (Sturken, 1997); others have commended its democratic inclusiveness and seen in it an acknowledgement of the validity and value of the voices and life-experiences of ordinary men and women and of the hitherto excluded or suppressed. Critics have urged caution and expressed concern about a range of observable tendencies or risks: the opposition set up between history and memory; the vagueness in the uses of the term ‘memory’ and the cavalier manner with which it is applied to collectivities, institutions and inanimate objects; the fetishisation of items of material culture; the sleights of hand camouflaging apparent tensions between postmodern anti-humanist discourses and the promotion of the subjective; the privileging of the interests and lifetimes of contemporary producers and consumers of memory;