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Introduction As the ritual articulations of myths, commemorations play an important part in creating a usable national history. 1 Goa may be a minor pimple but it is a pimple that disfigures
6 Our Scottish past: commemorations The pipers and athletes examined in the previous two chapters do not imitate the past. While it is important to most of them that the musical, athletic, and sartorial traditions they engage with are ‘old’ and solidly rooted in history, they do not attempt to reproduce that history. They perform in what they hope is an ancient but living Scottish tradition. Commemorators and historical re-enactors have a totally different objective. As the next two chapters demonstrate, they seek to recall or even recreate the past in the
4 The commemoration of Muharram: negotiating community One snowy afternoon in February 2005, my assistant Hiba and I went to the seventh day of the annual ten-day commemoration of Muharram. The event was being arranged by Umm Ali, who had rented a small mosque for the occasion. If I had not been there before, I would have had difficulties in finding the place. The mosque is located in a former garage in an industrial area and from the outside it looks more like a car repair shop than the setting for a religious event. However, once we entered the courtyard, we
Chapter 7 Mis-commemoration after the Restoration S peech and writing were not the only means by which British people articulated memories after the Restoration. Historians have shown that the mnemonic landscapes of the four kingdoms during the reigns of the later Stuarts were also characterised by a culture of annual commemoration. Together with the anniversaries of the Gunpowder Plot and the coronation of Elizabeth I on 5 and 17 November, people were called to remember the execution of Charles I on 30 January and the Restoration of his son on 29 May.1 These
This article considers how the reburial and commemoration of the human remains of the Republican defeated during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) is affected by the social, scientific and political context in which the exhumations occur. Focusing on a particular case in the southwestern region of Extremadura, it considers how civil society groups administer reburial acts when a positive identification through DNA typing cannot be attained. In so doing, the article examines how disparate desires and memories come together in collective reburial of partially individuated human remains.
memories projected through various acts of commemoration retain a political intensity and relevance to everyday life that are almost impossible to overstate, and the consequences for contemporary social and political relationships and formations remain with us. Such deposits of memory rest on a series of exclusive community myths and understandings; memories which add to long-standing adversarial readings and understandings of the past, and those narratives which different groupings draw on to reinforce their sense of self-identity and Self. This
This chapter examines Irish republican uses of commemoration, and will show how, in utilising public memory, mainstream republicans associated with Sinn Féin are engaging in a diligent fostering of political legitimacy and continuity. In a post-conflict setting, this has been of particular importance both in deflecting political attacks and maintaining cohesion within their own political ranks. Through the ‘Troubles’, Irish republicans espoused revolutionary, separatist goals and were prepared to sanction the use of force
that famous slave chaser is an envelope filled with brown dust in the Public Record Office’. 3 The evanescent existence of this nondescript packet of dust symbolises public engagement with, and commemoration of, the British involvement in this aspect of the transatlantic slave trade. The envelope, and its contents, is a tangible reminder of the role
Representations of Rwanda have been shaped by the display of bodies and bones at Tutsi genocide memorial sites. This phenomenon is most often only studied from the perspective of moral dimensions. This article aims in contrast to cover the issues related to the treatment of human remains in Rwanda for commemorative purposes from a historical perspective. To this end, it is based on the archives of the commissions in charge of genocide memory in Rwanda, as well as interviews with key memorial actors. This study shows the evolution of memorial practices since 1994 and the hypermateriality of bodies in their use as symbols, as well as their demobilisation for the purposes of reconciliation policies.