Concepts and Terminology Flashcards
To understand the concepts in the module
Who is the French historian in chapter 5 who talks about social memory, and what are his main points? Explain his project.
French historian - Pierre Nora, says that oral traditions in rural communities used to keep social memory alive. But effect of mass migration to cities have left a vacuum (1996).
Nora founded a project to encourage historians to write about ‘places of memory’. Since 1960s there is an increased in memorials, heritage sites and museums fills a need for a collective memory, which also serves to maintain identity. (p. 218)
How has personal identity changed since Treaty of Versailles in 1919 changed?
Modern nation state associated with ethnic and linguistic groupings. Most people have a strong sense of national identity hard to pin down why. Many feel sense of belonging to more than one nation because migration, circumstances of birth or religious allegiances. War and sporting evens server to place sense of national identity under stress, compounded in the face of racists ideologies and their definition of ethnicity. (p. 218)
Representing absence from Shoah
The Shoa created a unique issue for memorilisation of loss which could not be managed solely by conventional means. A spate of memorials attest that need to come to terms with what happened, in a context were many of the issues of racism have not been resolved. In context ‘authentic’ objects have often been see as problematic, and more abstract means of communication has been sought.
What is genocide?
Not all systematic murder of civilians are accepted as category of genocide. Democide is the description of the deliberate killing of civilians in war and peace. Genocide is ethnic cleansing, the deliberate killing of civilians based on ethnicity). Subset of Democide. Denial of widespread killing based on ethnicity is widespread, which explains part of the significant expansion of memorials and monuments in recent years. (p.231)
What are Counter Memorials in the Shoah?
This is the part of commemorating absence that stand against political leaders wish to create symbols of healing and closure on the Shoah. Whereas artists undermine that. In counter-monuments, the key space consists in the space between object and the viewer (not in the design). Viewer and each generation much interrogte themselves about what memory is and what they are doing when gazing at monument. American Historian James E Young did not want Germans to collectivly lock up their collective memory in the face of ongoing racial prejudice. He wants the holocaust memory to be perpetually unresolved.
