Draft 1, Chunk 3 (Memory)

[This was first written on 11 September 2011]

Power and Rembrance (contd)

Another example of the way that OFFICIAL pressures intervene in supposedly private acts of REMEMBRANCE would be a dispute that arose between the private company that runs East Herringthorpe cemetery and the parents of children who had died in infancy and were buried there. The following article in the South Yorkshire paper, The Star, explains what happened.

http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/grieving_parents_fury_at_untidy_graves_row_1_290228

The parents had decorated the graves with windmills, toys, and images of fairies, butterflies, and flowers, but the company, Dignity, objected on the grounds that it made the site look ‘untidy and cluttered’. The dispute led to the creation of a facebook site in opposition to Dignity’s policy and so computer-mediated communication became relevant as a way to present oppositional views about REMEMBRANCE and the practices surrounding it.

Acts of REMEMBRANCE are not always so closely intertwined with OFFICIAL or INSTITUTIONAL practices and a possible example is the impromptu ‘shrine’ that often appears at the site of road accidents. There is one in Rotherham, at the bottom of Rawmarsh Hill, below the border between Parkgate and Rawmarsh itself. The shrine consists of flowers and texts attached to a tree and it marks the place where a young local man, Rob ‘Bean’ Crook, died in a road accident. Steve and I saw the ‘shrine’ on our first walk in Rawmarsh and I learned more about it when I did another walk with an ex-student of mine who has always lived in the area. She told me that Crook’s friends started a music festival in his memory and that there is a facebook page to provide information about it, computer-mediated communication again emerging as a resource for local people to take collective action. The festival, Beanfest, also has a website here:

http://www.beanfest.co.uk/

Hearing about this project raised certain questions about POWER in my mind because I suspect that it is exactly the sort of initiative that would appeal to advocates of the ‘Big Society’ and I wonder how the organisers would respond if they found that their work was being appropriated in that way. At any rate, acts of REMEMBRANCE can be initiated from many different points – from national government at one end of the scale to autonomous local groups at the other.

Power and Archiving

Turning now to ARCHIVING, I think it is also clear that ARCHIVES can be collected at many different levels of organsiation. There are, of course, national archives and collections as well as ones funded by local government. (Digressing for a moment, in 2009 I spent two weeks in the archives of the Minnesota Historical Society in St Paul. The state of Minnesota has spent an enormous amount of money building a museum and library for the society’s collections and so the display of the collection has emerged as an act of REMEMBRANCE shaped by the state itself.) However, individuals and families also collect materials as a way way of preserving the past and the interaction between the narratives emerging from OFFICIAL and INSTUTITIONAL contexts and the ones preserved within the family is of crucial importance here. Will and Irna have talked about this in terms of FABLES, which relate both to the DOCUMENTS that have been preserved – passports, medals, and so forth – and also to an ORAL TRADITION about the events to which the DOCUMENTS relate. Looking at the relationships between DOCUMENTS and ORAL TRADITIONS is a technique that has been used in a number of historical projects, including the one cited by Will and Irna relating to the DOCUMENTS such as sterilisation certificates issued during the Emergency [Will: can you let me have a reference for this?] and work I know of by the Italian oral historian, Alessandro Portelli. [See Alessandro Portelli, Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (State University of New York Press, 1991), The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).] Significantly, the work in Rotherham locates this type of research within a family setting to look at the way in which collected DOCUMENTS and ORAL TRADITIONS relate in the FABLES produced in family narratives.

At this point I think it is worth noting that our own research also leads us into the process of archiving. On one level, when Steve and I return from a walk with a memory card full of digital photographs, we have created an archive of texts and the same is true when the participants in Kate’s research take photographs of material that might otherwise be ephemeral. I think I want to postpone reflection on these processes until later because they relate to some of the other key words that I want to think about. I just include this comment as a place holder because, if we are talking about ARCHIVING, I think we need to bear in mind that this something is something that we do ourselves in the course of our own interventions.

One last point about the relationship between ARCHIVING and POWER: I have talked about the distinction between ARCHIVING by institutions and ARCHIVING by independent people, groups, or families (in line with the distinction I made when I was writing about POWER). It is important to recognise that institutions such as national and local archives, museums, and libraries, while they do tend to project an ‘OFFICIAL’ account of history, also have a brief to do work that is relevant to users, who may well have their own, independent reasons for engaging with history. This policy is no doubt connected to the rise in importance of social history in comparison with political and other kinds of ‘elite’ history. So, again, we have a space in which institutions and independent people come into contact over questions of MEMORY and how those questions are handled. Within our team, there is plenty of experience of this because of the projects we have been involved in that mediate between university, museum, and individuals – ‘Writing British Asian Cities’, for example, and ‘Every Object Tells A Story’. It is, of course, difficult to develop, house, and exhibit a collection without funding and so this kind of interaction has a particular significance because, without it, it is difficult for independent individuals to project their own MEMORY practices into the public domain.