28 MEMORY AND COMMEMORATION

Juliane Tomann

Memory, commemoration, and historical reenactment are closely related to one another. In a theoretical sense, all three terms refer to ways of representing the past in the present, both on an individual as well as a collective level.

Yet this relationship can also be understood in a practical sense: the motivation of reenactors to perform past events is often deeply rooted in a need to preserve memory. This ranges from remembering ancestors and their communities to the commemoration of specific historical events, including battles, encampments, massacres, and disasters. Thus, it could tentatively be argued that reenactment is a bodily expression of memory situated in a concrete space in the present. However obvious the connection between memory and reenactment might seem, it remains a challenge to precisely define the relationship between reenactment as a social practice and the theoretical discourse on memory. While reenactment has become an object of systematic study only during the last two decades, the study of memory has been flourishing for the past four decades in the humanities. The field of memory studies has been institutionalized and incorporated into teaching programs and have developed a complex theoretical and interdisciplinary framework. Scholarly interest in reenactment has also increased, and reenactment studies are developing into an autonomous field. This entry will describe the different theoretical approaches to memory and explain differences and overlaps with the emerging field of reenactment studies.

The vocabulary of memory studies embraces a multitude of terms used to describe the object of study: individual and collective ways of recalling and representing the past in the present as well as the intersections, relations, and interdependencies between the individual and collective levels. The dichotomy between individual memory and collective approaches to representing the past is a bone of contention in the field.

The contemporary discipline of memory studies has been largely inspired by the rediscovery and rereading of the works of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945). Halbwachs was Emile Durkheims (1858-1917) student, and was influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1961) and by his own critical engagement with the work of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). As early as 1925, Halbwachs had challenged the very notion of individual memory, claiming that social context has an overwhelming impact on what individuals remember. In his understanding of social memory, the individual act of remembering is closely intertwined with memories of other family members and social groups that are communicated or otherwise transmitted to the individual and in turn serve as his or her frame of reference. Halbwachs further laid the groundwork for drawing a strong distinction between the notion of collective memory and professional historiography’s concept of history. Almost 60 years later, French historian Pierre Nora picked up this idea. Concerned about the waning of French national collective memory, Nora’s concept of “sites of memory” (lieux de memoire) can be characterized as a response to this development. According to Nora, memory and history are opposed. At one end of the spectrum, he situates professionalized academic history and its claim to objectivity, which he thought had become a mere “representation of the past,” a “universal” form of recounting detached from social groups (Nora, 1989, p. 8). At the other end, Nora placed his own view of memory as something that is always related to and rooted in a social group, where it is relevant for the construction of identity on both a collective and individual level. For Nora, the interest in sites of memory, which he mapped and described in a large-scale project on France, is a compensation for “the loss of authentic, embodied, and embedded memory” (Assmann, 2006, p. 88).

While the social dimension of memory has not lost its importance in more recent theories concerning forms of collective memory, German scholars Jan Assmann (Egyptology) and Aleida Assmann (English Studies) analyzed a different, cultural dimension of the phenomenon in the 2000s.

In his works on ancient Egyptian cultures, Jan Assmann drew on concepts developed by the Belgian ethnologist and historian Jan Vansina (1929—2017) and distinguished between communicative and cultural memory. The former is based on everyday communication about the meaning of the past and is characterized by instability and disorganization. Communicative memories are strongly related to those who were alive during the remembered event and are defined by a short-term durability of around 80 to 100 years. In contrast, cultural memory consists of objectified culture, which includes texts, rites, images, buildings, and monuments that are all made to recall important events in the history of a group. Cultural memory refers to events of a pre-biographical past, which cannot be experienced by living individuals and thus has to be mediated by culture. The key claim is that cultural memory of the past is not randomly produced by social groups, but is a product of cultural mediation, primarily via visualization and textualization (Tamm, 2013, p. 461). Cultural memory positions the individual within a community that refers to events in the past to gain meaning, sense, and orientation for the present.

Aleida Assmann further elaborates on Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory and distinguishes between three dimensions of memory: neuronal, social, and cultural memory (Assmann, 2006, p. 33). The first term belongs to the realm of individual memory, while the latter two characterize processes of collective memory. Because neuronal memory is individual, it is the least durable. Social memory is constructed over multiple generations of people who share, communicate, and narrate similar perceptions and worldviews; it can vanish with its carriers as it is not institutionalized. Cultural memory, on the other hand, is materialized in symbols and institutions, in texts, rites, pictures, and monuments. This culturally produced dimension of memory is transgenerational and stable, and it has a strong influence on group identity.

Collective memory is thus characterized by overlapping terms: Aleida Assmann’s concept of social memory is more or less synonymous with Jan Assmann’s communicative memory (Tamm, p. 426), and both scholars refer to cultural memory as the symbolic, materialized, and institutionalized system of referring to and representing the past.

In order to understand how cultural memory comes into being, Aleida Assmann provides us with two more terms: functional memory and storage memory (2006, p. 55). Storage memory is defined as a cultural archive that stores the material remains of the past, which, in the present, have lost their vital force and can thus be considered as being temporarily forgotten. While storage memory can be conceived of as a set of temporarily unused and unincorporated memories, functional memory has an active component that relies on repetition and is primarily operative in various symbolic practices like traditions, rites, and processes of canonization. The key

Juliane Tomann

distinction between the two forms of cultural memory is that of actualization (functional) and non-actualization (storage memory), from which follows that functional memory has the ability to produce meaning, while storage memory does not.

Based on these seminal definitions of communicative and cultural memory, other approaches highlight the relationship between past and present and attend to sociocultural context and its influences on the ways in which individuals remember (Erll, 2017, p. 6). Jeffrey K. Olick distinguished between “two radically distinct ontological [phenomena]” of collective memory, claiming that the analysis of “collected memory” and “collective memory” requires different epistemological and methodological tools (Olick, 1999, p. 336). Olick defines “collected memory” as socially framed, aggregated individual recollections (for instance, those collected during an oral history study). Based on the individualistic principle, its study requires the methodological tools of social inquiry (survey, interviews) as well as psychology.

“Collective memory,” on the other hand, refers to the cultural frames (symbols, objects, public practices) that exist beyond processes of individual remembering and define collectivities over time.

Reenactment is then strongly connected to individual and collective forms of memory. As a commemorative act, reenactments revive past events in the present and thus (re)shape the memory of these events. However, as a social practice, reenactment does not exclusively fit into any single dimension of memory, as defined by the theorists. Different kinds of reenactment contain elements of the various categories. According to Aleida Assmanns theoretical framework, reenactments belong to the active mode of representing the past. Because reenactment seeks to actualize past events and establish connections between past and present, it can be conceived of as part of functional memory. By referring to important battles and events in a nation's or group's past, it also sustains and reshapes collective memory. As a performance of past events, reenactment further contains aspects of communicative memory, for example, when war veterans or other eyewitnesses take part in a battle situation. Studies of reenactment must therefore carefully examine the attribution of a given reenactment to a particular type of memory and provide empirical evidence to support the respective categorization.

Thus, conceptualizing reenactment wholly within the discourse of memory studies does not provide sufficient insight into the specificity of reenactment as a social phenomenon that addresses and represents the past. Even though the practice of reenactment is closely related to memory and commemoration, the term reenactment as such is rarely used within memory studies, which seems to lack a deeper understanding of its characteristics. Aleida Assmann, for instance, states that the strategies of repetition observable in embodied performances of myths, storytelling, music, dance, and ritual can help establish temporal continuity and store information.

However, she relegates such strategies of repetition (reenactment) to indigenous societies exclusively, believing that cultures that use writing rely on external, non-embodied systems like media, images, and texts to store information in an enduring way. In his seminal work How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton describes commemorative ceremonies as ritualized “re-enactments of prior, prototypical actions” (p. 61). In general, commemorations as a distinctive form of collective memory contain the most similarities to reenactment as a social practice. Commemorative practices are said to be a vehicle of collective memory: They help constitute collectivity by emotionally inducing “people to experience past events vicariously and thereby imagine their secondhand knowledge of those events as living memory that they possess as members of a social group” (Saito, 2010, p. 637). Commemorations make use of the affective power of ritual “to prompt participants to generate mutual identifications as members of a social group” (Saito, 2010, p. 630). Despite general agreement on the link between commemoration and processes of identity construction, scholars of commemoration still debate the question

of how participants of a commemorative act can be agents of memory without possessing firsthand experience. Sharon Macdonald stresses the performative dimension of ritual commemoration, drawing an analogy with speech acts that, according to Austin, “accomplish what they utter” (performance). Second, Macdonald underscores the importance of a sense of performance in commemoration and its similarities to theater, pointing to the significance of staging, scripts, acting, and props (2013, p. 201). While commemorations reinforce group identities and focus mostly on positive events in the past, it is a much more difficult endeavor to publicly commemorate ambiguous or controversial events. There is a comparison with reenactment to be drawn here, as it is similarly difficult to properly address controversial events in hobby reenactments. Reenactments that adopt a more explicitly artistic approach, such as Deller's The Battle of Orgreave (2001), have a greater ability to adequately grapple with controversial events of the past.

To conclude, it can be said that despite their differences, memory studies—and scholarly work on practices of commemoration in particular—share some common features with the study of reenactment. With its emphasis on the personal, bodily experience of an imagined past, reenactment is often located within a larger shift from analytical to experiential ways of understanding the past and as a backlash against purely cognitive modes of historical representation. Reenactment's representation of past events as a physical and personal experience and its inclusion of characters that history may have neglected makes it closely related to the discourse of memory.

28 MEMORY AND COMMEMORATION

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