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10 - Enlisting Lived Memory: From Traumatic Silence to Authentic Witnessing
- Edited by Thomas DeGloma, Hunter College, City University of New York, Janet Jacobs, University of Colorado Boulder
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- Book:
- Interpreting Contentious Memory
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 28 June 2023, pp 197-216
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Summary
In one of his most seminal texts, Clifford Geertz depicts the ethnographer's search for a “thick description” – a description of lived experience “on the ground” that would capture otherwise tacit cultural meaning worlds as practiced and experienced in everyday lives (1973). Although subsequent readings of Geertz's theory have highlighted his focus on the interpretive lens of our interlocutors in the field, far less attention has been given to Geertz's assertion (long before anthropology's critical turn) that the ethnographer too must reflexively consider how scholarly discourse and personal ideological perspectives frame and therefore selectively interpret our ethnographic gaze and thick descriptions. In the spirit of Geertz's call for academic and personal self-reflexivity, in this chapter I explore the evolution of my own interpretive lens when doing field work and publishing about Holocaust memory and commemoration in Israel. I will consider the way my scholarship has been shaped by the following frames or lenses: (i) critical constructivism and hegemony theory, (ii) critical perspectives on trauma theory and potential pathologization of trauma victims and their descendants, and (iii) personal positioning as Holocaust descendant protective of survivor family “privacy,” silence, and authenticity. After a brief literature review I will present vignettes illustrating three different “turns” in my scholarship each followed by a discussion of personal positioning, scholarly framing, and my resultant moral dilemmas.
Epistemological frames of Holocaust memory
Critical memory scholars have proposed that all memory is social, partial, and strategically constructed and “put to work” to amass and sustain governmental and elite power and capital (Halbwachs, 1980; Schudson, 1997). Despite the ethically loaded nature of Holocaust and Genocide memory, Holocaust memory is no exception. Holocaust commemoration and public forms of memory work are selectively instrumentalized in national ceremonies, museum exhibits, and commemorative trips to Poland. In the service of Israeli statecraft, Holocaust memory deploys embedded value-laden collective Jewish-Israeli narratives of survival and national redemption, unifying an increasingly politically homogenous, critical, and individualistic society (Bauman, 1998; Handelman, 2004).
5 - Embodying the Distant Past
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- By Carol A. Kidron, University of Haifa
- Edited by Devon E. Hinton, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Alexander L. Hinton, Rutgers University, New Jersey
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- Book:
- Genocide and Mass Violence
- Published online:
- 05 November 2014
- Print publication:
- 10 November 2014, pp 137-156
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Summary
In accordance with diverse scholarly epistemologies, surviving traces of mass violence and human suffering are carried over beyond the individual psychic experience of the direct victims of violence. The legacy of genocide is thought to live on inevitably in the intimate social milieu of familial relations and consequently in the everyday lived experience of descendant generations. Foundational paradigms in psychology and Holocaust and genocide studies have explored descendant legacies and their subjective experience of the traces of difficult ancestral pasts. Highlighting the experience of distress and at times disorder, these paradigms have asserted that trauma descendants share a legacy of PTSD-related psychosocial scars (Danieli, 1998; Rousseau & Drapeau, 1998) and childhood memories of a familial “conspiracy of silence” (Bar-On, 1992). Familial genocide history of parental suffering is considered to be shrouded in oppressive silence. The legacy of genocide descendants is thereby portrayed as one of potential suffering in the face of the silent and haunting presence of psychosocial distress and disorder. They are also portrayed as searching for narrative voice and historical knowledge regarding foundational events that have shaped their lives. Talk therapy and public forms of verbal articulation and testimony are put forth by mental health practitioners and genocide scholars alike as not only psychically healing but also sociopolitically redemptive.
The anthropology of genocide (A. Hinton, 2002) and the relatively new field of anthropology of memory have explored descendants’ resistant passage from oppressive silence to liberation through voice. Research has examined this shift toward voice within collective monumental forms of testimonial commemoration, or local ritual performative forms of religious or artistic representation (Kwon, this volume; Argenti, 2007). Social historians and family studies scholars have also documented and interpreted the preceding processes of narrativization, however, within the more private domestic practice of intergenerational transmission of pivotal parental tales of survival (Hollander-Goldfein, 2002). It may be claimed, however, that the scholarly focus on voice has overshadowed the phenomenon of silent, tacit, and visceral multisensorial forms of mnemonic representation. Consequently, we know little regarding the taken-for-granted processes in which these corporeal representations may have been intergenerationally transmitted from genocide survivors to their descendants (Kidron, 2009). Aiming to explore this tacit and sensorial legacy of descendant memory, this chapter will present an ethnography of Holocaust descendant embodiment of the Holocaust past.
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