Appel à communication : “Memory and Recovery”, Anthropological Association of Ireland Annual Conference, Sligo Institute of Technology, Ash Lane, Sligo (Irlande), 14-15/02/2014 — LIMITE : 16/12/2013

http://www.anthropologyireland.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/AAIConferenceMemory-andRecoveryCFP.pdf

Paul Connerton, among others, has analysed the ways in which societies
strive to remember and forget. This body of work draws attention to the
techniques by which remembering and forgetting are accomplished and
distinguishes between different forms and functions of forgetting. Focusing
on the ‘recovery’ of social memories, this conference examines how memory
is dis- or re-interred through social processes, how recovered memories are
challenged or legitimised, and how processes of recovery relate to
particular historical moments.

The idea of ‘recovered memories’ reflects the ambiguity and creativity of
memory processes, suggesting a reclamation or expression of buried truths
or lost experiences, yet also the possibility of memory being obscured,
repressed, re-covered. The term carries with it anxiety about the reality
of past experiences and the legitimacy of contemporary claims about them,
not least because of controversy surrounding the idea of ‘recovered
memories’ in individual psychology and therapeutic settings; such memories
lie between shared grief and triumph. ‘Recovery’ is associated with
healing, and the idea that memory can heal, or be healed, is a familiar
response to individual or collective trauma.

‘Recovery’ is currently the goal of many governments and international
bodies. Within the Republic of Ireland, attempts at economic recovery are
accompanied by the reassessment of collective beliefs about the nation’s
past, the Celtic Tiger era and the crisis. Ireland is undertaking it’s
economic recovery in an era of commemorations and anniversaries, from the
Dublin Lockout to the Easter Rising. Equally in Northern Ireland the
signing of the Ulster Covenant and the Second World War loom large in
contested centenary memories that feed into broader European and global
processes of remembering.  Such events provide space for the recovery of
memory, sometimes at the expense of suppressing others, and often with the
potential for personal and collective healing, for contested political
claims and ontological challenges, which recovered memories can provide.

*We invite contributions on themes related but not restricted to: *

●      How do public commemorations and anniversaries engineer the recovery
of social memory? To what extent is this process intentional, consensual,
negotiated, or imposed?

●      As archaeology unearths elements of the ancient past, how are its
discoveries being harnessed to present day concerns and future economic
recovery?

●      What would recovery from the recent crisis of capitalism look like?
Does ‘recovery’ mean: a resumption of ‘business as usual’; a re-concealment
of problems that have been revealed; a regaining of lost wealth; the
healing of a diseased system? How can remembering be an ‘antidote’ to
current economic ills?

●      When ‘recovery’ is accepted as a collective national goal, what is
it we believe we have lost?

●      How does nostalgia shape the kind of memories which are recovered?

●      How does ‘recovery’ – as it features in the language of addiction –
relate to other, more collective, forms of recovery?

●      What events will not be remembered in this period of centenary
celebration? What memories are going to be covered over once again?

●      What types of memory are involved in commemoration processes:
heritage, national, biographical, embodied, neurological modes of memory?
What stages of memory are involved, and what places of memory will become
important in the coming decade and why?

●      What is the role of place in conjuring, stabilising and preserving
memory? What places will become important for remembering in the coming
decade and why? Where are these places that define particular relationships
to the past and what tools can we use to chart the moral geography of such
‘lieux de memoires’, e.g. the tomb of the unknown soldier (a clear example
of recovering what is ‘unrememberable’)? What other sites are important in
collective remembering, e.g. archives?

Please submit a 300 word abstract with your name, email address and
affiliation to s.carden@qub.ac.uk <s.carden@qub.ac.uk> by Dec 16th

Dr. Siún Carden
Queen’s University Belfast
E-mail: s.carden@qub.ac.uk