Between Memory Sites and Memory Networks

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How do societies remember their past? And how did they do so
before the age of computers, printing, writing? This book takes
stock of earlier work on memory in the fields of history and the
social sciences. Our collection also takes a new look at how past
and present social groups have memorialized events and rendered
them durable through materializations: contributors ask how
processes and incidents perceived as negative and disruptive are
nonetheless constitutive of group identities. Papers also
contrast the monumentalizing treatment given to singular events
imbued with a hegemonic meaning to more localized, diverse memory
places and networks. As case studies show, such memoryscapes
invite divergent, multivocal and subversive narratives. Various
kinds of these imagined geographies lend themselves to practices
of manipulation, preservation and control. The temporal scope of
the volume reaches from the late Neolithic to the recent past,
resulting in a long-term and multi-focal perspective that
demonstrates how the perception of past events changes, acquires
new layers and is molded by different groups at different points
in time. As several contributions show, these manipulations of
the past do not always produce the anticipated results, however.
Attempts at "post-factual history" are countered by the socially
distributed, but spatially and materially anchored nature of the
very process of memorialization. --- In der Reihe BERLIN STUDIES
OF THE ANCIENT WORLD erscheinen Monographien und Sammelbände
aller altertumswissenschaftlichen Disziplinen. Die Publikationen
gehen aus der Arbeit des Exzellenzclusters "Topoi. The Formation
and Transformation of Space and Knowledge in Ancient
Civilizations" hervor, einem Forschungsverbund der Freien
Universität Berlin und der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin sowie
den Partnerinstitutionen Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der
Wissenschaften, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Max-Planck-
Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Stiftung Preußischer
Kulturbesitz. Die Reihe ist Bestandteil der Publikationsplattform
Edition Topoi. Alle Bände der Reihe sind elektronisch unter www.edition-topoi.org verfügbar.