War Memory and Commemoration

Brad West

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367362997
• eBook ISBN: 9781317163923
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In a period characterised by an unprecedented cultural engagement with the past, individuals, groups and nations are debating and experimenting with commemoration in order to find culturally relevant ways of remembering warfare, genocide and terrorism.

This book examines such remembrances and the political consequences of these rites. In particular, the volume focuses on the ways in which recent social and technological forces, including digital archiving, transnational flows of historical knowledge, shifts in academic practice, changes in commemorative forms and consumerist engagements with history affect the shaping of new collective memories and our understanding of the social world.

Presenting studies of commemorative practices from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Middle East, War Memory and Commemoration illustrates the power of new commemorative forms to shape the world, and highlights the ways in which social actors use them in promoting a range of understandings of the past. The volume will appeal to scholars of sociology, history, cultural studies and journalism with an interest in commemoration, heritage and/or collective memory.

1 War commemoration and the expansion of the past

Brad West

DOI: 10.4324/9781315572802-1

The study of the way societies remember war has been a key part of the broader growth in the study of memory. However, the multidimensional cultural relationship between war, memory and commemoration is under-appreciated within cultural studies. As will be outlined below, the significance of war for the nation-building project is not simply pragmatic, through the historical role of modern armed conflicts in establishing unity among once-disparate states, nor only mythological in providing a sacrificial event early in the life of a nation around which social solidarity and ritual unity is subsequently built. While both of these are significant, modern wars themselves provided the mechanisms for imagining nationhood. It is for this reason that despite the vast differences today in the automation of weaponry, the professionalisation of the military forces and the rise in cosmopolitan pacifist worldviews, past episodes of modern warfare remain culturally significant for comprehending the past as well as our present. Yet the way we remember past wars is not only in reference to the cultural needs of society today, but it is also altered by the way in which we go about remembering the past, through the availability of and access to a variety of historical traces (Benjamin, 1969) and the engagement we have with these through particular commemorative ritual forms. While commemoration is typically thought of as something reflecting other social forces and structures of power, it will be argued that the meaning and the resonance of war memories is something altered by the particular types of commemorations utilised, with different commemorative types giving certain affordances to the way we remember war and, as a consequence, the nation and the world.

This opening chapter provides a platform for reading the case studies that make up the substantive component of this book. It does this by outlining a context in which to comprehend the cultural significance of warfare and its prominence in conceiving of society. In doing so it will make a case for a new understanding of the relationship between war, memory and commemoration. I start by outlining established work on warfare and remembrance that emphasises it as illustrative of dominant ideologies. The study of commemoration is not absent in the cultural studies on war. Studies of war history, for example, have emphasised how religious iconography and political propaganda have been extensively used in the mobilisation for war, both in legitimising the decision to wage armed conflict as well as in the recruitment of soldiers. In the West this involved an exaltation of a masculine national type, Judaeo-Christian notions of sacrifice and redemption, and imperial notions of exploration and adventure. In colonial societies like the United States and Australia, such narratives also contributed to a “collective amnesia” (Walsh, 2001) about the violent dispossession, decimation and dehumanisation of indigenous people (Howe, 2012; Moreton-Robinson, 2010; Reynolds, 2013). The specific remembering of warfare also has an ideological underpinning, providing a way to naturalise the nation, giving it a primordial character, legitimising particular ideologies of race, social class and gender.

Such ideological analysis, though, easily fails to appreciate the deeper inter-relationships between war, memory and commemoration. It is not simply a matter of ideological politics getting applied to the armed conflicts of the twentieth century but that these various ideologies are largely a product of modern warfare and these actively shape commemorative form. For example, Winter (1995) has insightfully argued from a historical perspective that rather than the First World War commemoration simply being a reflection of cultural politics in the early twentieth century, it is illustrative of the military conflict and its cultural context that itself provided us with the cultural templates for the commemoration and remembering. This is not to argue that hegemonic meanings and political ideological clashes are not a key part of commemoration but that we cannot reduce our understanding of ritual to them, with the First World War providing the cultural context and commemorative forms in which such power plays occur. The founder of collective memory analysis, the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1992, p. 138), explains this transition in the First World War as involving a forgetting of bourgeois traditions of heroism, for example an exaltation of valour among the military hierarchy and the historical focus being on military strategy, and the replacing of such beliefs with egalitarian mythologies such as romanticising the duty and sacrifice of rank-and-file soldiers.

Such egalitarian notions of citizenship were under way prior to the twentieth century, being part of the rise of nationalism and democracy that we can date to at least the English Civil War, but it is only within the discursive construction and commemoration of the First World War that we see a decisive ideological shift in this area with egalitarianism become enacted and embedded in the social structure. In this cultural environment, commemoration of the fallen had to mirror the democratic ideal, as a failure to do so would not only undermine the war effort through the recruitment of soldiers but likely result in a challenge to the power of the state and its claim to legitimately use violence. This is evident in the First World War with the Allies adopting an unprecedented policy of non-repatriation of the dead, no matter the rank of the soldier or command. From this decision sprang two new commemorative forms, the foreign battlefield pilgrimage and decentralised orientated memorialisation on the home front. The two commemorative forms are intimately interconnected, with selective and limited access to the graves of the fallen, affected by international political stability and the cost of travel, creating the conditions for an unprecedented memorialisation craze in which Allied nations attempted to find solace through ritual activity at these invented symbolic sites (Winter, 1995). Unlike previous grandiose memorials to military leaders and victory, these memorials were dispersed within the community, allowing for local mourning and remembrance to occur relatively independent of the state. In the Australian context, for example, Inglis (1987, p. 36) notes how memorials to the First World War can be found in every town, no matter how small, with them functioning in the decades after the conflict both as a symbol of national and imperial sacrifice but also as a substitution for the graves of individuals.

Where memorial activity to the First World War did occur in a centralised manner, it typically occurred under the guise of egalitarianism. There is no better example than the establishment of Tombs to the Unknown Soldier (Anderson, 1983, p. 17). Whereas tombs had previously been restricted to the domain of gods, emperors, kings and queens, and military leaders, the unknown soldier provided a centralised monument in which the protagonist is not demarcated by age, race, class or ideology, only by gender and nationality. By 1922 such tombs were located in the capital cities of Britain, France and the United States. Such was the culture of recognition surrounding the dead, however, that the United States even had trouble in identifying someone unidentified (Inglis, 1999, p. 258). In Australia, which did not establish a Tomb to the Unknown Soldier until 1993, there were debates around location and access to such a site and a sentiment that soldiers are best left buried with their mates, whether identified or not (Inglis, 1999).

For commemoration to successfully provide a symbolically powerful context for legitimising particular cultural understandings of the world, the ritual form through which commemoration is undertaken must be consistent with the social environment itself. As such, we can think of commemoration as being shaped by cultural forces but, in turn, through ritual enactment it has a role in shaping culture. While this notion of commemoration and ritual as being a social force in its own right has never been taken to its full extent for comprehending social change, seeds of this idea can be found in the work of ritual theorists who have been concerned with particularist rites. The most prominent scholar in this area is Victor Turner. Through his theorising of social dramas (1974) Turner highlights the ways in which ritual factors start to play themselves out during episodes of conflict rather than merely after the fact. For Turner, social dramas involve a time where there is a disruption to the normal rhythms of social life, such as during a political crisis, catastrophe, crime wave, moral scandal. This is a time characterised by cultural ambiguity in which new cultural understandings can become established and for which social outcomes are not fixed or predetermined. Turner discusses ritual commemorations in similar ways. Rather than commemorative ritual being a time that reflects social structures, Turner points out that in many cases the distinguishing character of this time is its “in-betweenness” or liminality, where the normal norms and rules are temporarily suspended, and in many cases behaviours that would otherwise be deemed deviant are legitimised or at least tolerated. Rather than necessarily always enforcing social structures, this cultural environment provides a “realm of pure possibility” (1967, p. 97). In Turner's terms ritual has a “anti-structural” characteristic, marked by a strong sense of community, what he terms communitas, which inverts existing powerful structures and champions anti-authoritarian sentiment. It is not that such times necessarily bring about change, and in many cases liminal rites simply provide a kind of a release valve that allows the normal social structures to go on unchallenged, but it does highlight the transformative possibilities of commemoration and the need to understand ritual in terms of its own logics and cultural significance.

The failure to comprehend the power of ritual form to affect meaning is also related to the social theorising of ritual, with concern lying with its universal characteristics rather than a phenomenon open to historical variability, both in terms of symbolic density and form (Bell, 1997). This universalist concern in ritual studies is in part explained by the early analysis of it by the classical sociologist Emile Durkheim. Studying rites in Australian indigenous societies as a basis to comprehend the “elementary forms” of culture that apply in all societies, Durkheim argued that social integration is caused by the celebration of and simultaneous action oriented towards symbols held as sacred. For Durkheim, “[T]here can be no society that does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make up its unity and personality” (1968, p. 427). Durkheim's emphasis on the significance of ritual is important for the argument I will make, and which is highlighted in the chapters in this volume, which is that commemoration is at the very heart of our understanding of past wars and, as a consequence, present warfare. However, the mistake that those cultural scholars working in the Durkheimian tradition have made is not appreciating how different ritual forms very much affect meaning.

The concern of the Durkheimian tradition on commemoration has been to emphasise how ritual illustrates the essential meaningful nature of modern social life, countering the Weberian tradition of thought that points to disenchantment and rationalisation being at its core. While the emphasis on cultural universals in the Durkheimian tradition should have resulted in an exploration of alternative ritual forms we find in the commemoration of the past, in its aim to directly emphasise the significance of ritual it typically has concentrated on mainstream, state-sponsored rites. As a result it has failed to appreciate the emergence of new commemorative forms in recent decades and broader shifts in the type and level of engagement with history. As a student of Durkheim, the founder of memory studies, Maurice Halbwachs, would go on to comprehend the function of commemoration in relation to keeping the collective memory of the past in some kind of equilibrium. While commemoration has a role in embedding meaning, it is seen to have little role in shaping it.

Since the 1970s this Durkheimian conceptualisation of ritual in which commemoration is conceived as a essential function of society has been widely challenged by a critical intellectual paradigm that points to society not having a life of its own, what Durkheim referred to as sui generis, but that society is something produced and shaped in line with the interests of the powerful (Bodnar, 1992; Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). From this perspective commemoration favours the interests of elites and the ideologies related to gender, class and race from which they benefit. While this work has pointed to issues of social agency and cultural production that were absent in the Durkheimian tradition, it too has tended to emphasise the universalist nature of ritual and has empirically concentrated on state-based rites, though with the objective to denaturalise them by pointing to the ways they are constructed. Hobsbawm's (1983) theory of the “invention of tradition” has been particularly influential in conceiving of the instrumentalist nature of commemoration. Hobsbawm uses this term to refer to traditions that emphasise being primordial whereas in fact they are fairly recent initiatives. For Hobsbawm these invented traditions have a hegemonic effect as they attempt to draw on an earlier age and its values, and as such can work counter to the democratic ideals of our current age. As a cultural historian Hobsbawm is principally interested in the way our established traditions have become embedded into the social fabric of society. As he points out, the origins of these invented traditions are concentrated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and are part of society seeking some certainty and ritual richness during a time in which many of the real traditions and rites of the past were being lost. However, the process of producing tradition is an ongoing one. This is not only in terms of collective memory, where the past is revised in ways that are made relevant to the present, but in terms of the development of new commemorative forms or the reinvention of established types of commemoration.

For these critical intellectual perspectives, such contemporary rites, when compared to those invented in modernity, are typically dismissed as illustrating the commercialism of culture and history. As Catherine Bell (1997, p. 223) notes, there has been an assumption in the analysis of ritual not only that they tend not to change but also that they are difficult to invent, and that any that are simply dreamt up are essentially different and cannot have the same functions as traditional rites. This is something that will be essentially challenged by the case studies outlined in the chapters in this volume. In fact, in many cases the power of contemporary commemoration and ritual, unlike the invented traditions that have been the focus of Hobsbawm and other historians, is that they do not attempt t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 War commemoration and the expansion of the past
• Part I War travels
• Part II Commemoration and eventness
• Part III Genre and the re-writing of war
• Index