Talking Stones

The Politics of Memorialization in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland

Elisabetta Viggiani

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782384083
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

If memory was simply about past events, public authorities would never put their ever-shrinking budgets at its service. Rather, memory is actually about the present moment, as Pierre Nora puts it: "Through the past, we venerate above all ourselves." This book examines how collective memory and material culture are used to support present political and ideological needs in contemporary society. Using the memorialization of the Troubles in contemporary Northern Ireland as a case study, this book investigates how non-state, often proscribed, organizations have filled a societal vacuum in the creation of public memorials. In particular, these groups have sifted through the past to propose "official" collective narratives of national identification, historical legitimation, and moral justifications for violence.

Chapter 1

COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORIALIZATION

A Theoretical Overview

The complex of practices and means by which the past invests the present is memory: memory is the present past.

– Terdiman 1993: 8

From antiquity, the process of remembering has fascinated humankind because it is central to our ability to conceive reality and to our cognition of the world we inhabit with its physical and logical relations. In the Western world, memory is fundamental to the formation of our identity as a person and to the perception of our uniqueness and difference from others, to the extent that ‘a really successful dissociation of the self from memory would be a total loss of the self – and thus of all activities to which a sense of one’s identity is important’ (Nussbaum 2001: 177). Since Sigmund Freud postulated in the early twentieth century the existence of an archive of memories in the unconscious of the individual psyche, processes of memory have been analysed by psychologists exclusively as acts performed by individuals in the secluded recesses of their minds. From the 1980s onwards, however, processes of remembering and forgetting have been ascribed to the social sphere and increasingly investigated from a variety of disciplines’ points of view, with literature on the topic flourishing in sociology, social psychology, anthropology, history and political science; a theoretical distinction has generally been postulated between active remembering (or performative memory), embodied in the concepts of tradition, ritual action and commemoration, and mental process, with its cognitive and emotional attributes.

Memory in the Social World: Collectiveness versus Individuality

The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1925, 1941, 1950, 1980, 1992) was the first to investigate mnemonic processes as primarily social practices, coining the term ‘collective memory’. A disciple of Émile Durkheim, Halbwachs (1992: 182) asserts that memory is structured by group identities and is, therefore, always ‘socially framed’. Individual memory, both autobiographical and historical, results from ‘the intersection of collective influences’ (Halbwachs [1926] 1950: 44), in the sense that it is the unique combination of one’s collective memories as a member of different groups, such as family, local community or political party. Individual memories cannot exist in isolation but must be communicated and shared in order to find confirmation in other group members’ remembrances. Collective memory, thus, amounts to ‘shared social frameworks of individual recollections, as we share our memories with some people and not others’ and is central to the social identity and cohesion of a group (Misztal 2003: 12). While individual memories change as an individual’s affiliations vary throughout the course of life, collective memory provides the group with a shared image of itself and its past, which is part of the group’s common (self-)consciousness and ensures its sense of unity and continuity (Halbwachs [1926] 1950). This is particularly significant in Northern Ireland where shared, yet opposing, images of the same past are central to the creation and maintenance of different groups’ collective identities and their sense of historical continuity.

Halbwachs’ original theorization – and more recent republication in English of his work La Mémoire Collective in 1980 – has opened up debate into the complex relationship between individual and collective memory.¹ Fentress and Wickham (1992) challenge Halbwachs’ emphasis on the collective nature of social consciousness, advocating for a more active role for the individual in the process of remembering. They introduce the term ‘social memory’ to distinguish between memory as ‘representation’ and memory as ‘action’: the individual retains ownership of the initial private cognitive process and network of ideas, but the memories he/she deems relevant become then social when communicated to others through ‘commemoration’, intended as ‘the action of speaking or writing about memories’ (ibid.: x). This book demonstrates how, while individuals retain personal memories of people and events related to the Northern Irish conflict, these memories are subsumed within shared social frameworks of remembrance that underpin the collective identity of the two opposing ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983) in Northern Ireland, the Catholic/Nationalist/Republican and Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist communities.²

In contrast to the idea of a total subordination of the individual to a collectivity, the intersubjectivist sociology of memory (Funkenstein 1993; Schudson 1997; E. Zerubavel 1997; Prager 1998; Sherman 1999) asserts that while it is the individual who remembers by means of an independent mental act, ‘his or her memory exists, and is shaped by, their relation with what has been shared with others . . . it is . . . a past lived in relation to other people’ (Misztal 2003: 6). A group’s collective memory is, therefore, ‘quite different from the sum total of the personal recollections of its various individual members, as it includes only those that are commonly shared by all of them’ (E. Zerubavel 1997: 96).

A second area of theoretical contention opened up by the republication of Halbwachs’s work is the significance of the present and the past in the formation of social remembering.

The Shaping of Collective Memory: Present versus Past

The role and relevance of the past and its influence in shaping collective memory can be broadly summarized in three main theories. One theory argues that collective memory is fluid and flexible, dictated by contemporary attitudes and historical occurrences, and can therefore be readapted or reconstructed (Halbwachs 1941). Several recent studies have accounted for changes in attitudes to the past (and its memory), for example in post-communist countries after the collapse of the USSR (Greenblatt, Rev and Starn 1995; Rosenberg 1995; Borneman 1997; Szacka 1997; Argenbright 1999; Verdery 1999; Foote, Tóth and Árvay 2000) and in relation to the memory of the Holocaust in Germany and other countries (Maier 1988; Hartman 1994; Koonz 1999). A second theory proposes that it is, instead, the past that shapes our understanding of the present (Shils 1981). Tradition, with its constant re-enactment and reaffirmation of the past and past beliefs, addresses the need of social groups to feel a sense of historical and cultural continuity, outliving changes in society. The third theory proposes that both change and continuity play a role in shaping collective memory. Based on an analysis of how the memory of George Washington developed in the American consciousness before and after the Civil War, Schwartz (1991) suggests that collective memories change as a consequence of shifting values, beliefs and circumstances, but that old beliefs and images are concurrently preserved and coexist with the new, reflecting dialectical tendencies universal in society to embrace and reject aspects both of its past and present. This study finds that Northern Ireland’s collective memory is heavily influenced by contemporary historical and political circumstances, and that the process of selective remembering helps to sustain different groups’ present claims of historical legitimacy and collective identification.

Lieux de Mémoire as Conveyors of Social Memory

According to Nora (1989: 8), living memory and milieux de mémoire (real environments of memory) characteristic of so-called primitive or archaic societies have been substituted in today’s Western societies by ‘sifted and sorted historical traces’, by memory ‘institutionalized through cultural means’ (Assmann 1995, in Misztal 2003: 130–31). Such ‘cultural memory’ is embodied in lieux de mémoire (places of memory), ‘objectifications that store meaning in a concentrated manner’ (Heller 2001: 1031), including artefacts (monuments, statues, films) and practices (commemorations, ceremonies, festivals and rites), that assume a central role as conveyors of collective memory. It is precisely through commemorative ceremonies and ritual bodily activity that social groups convey and sustain their collective memory (Connerton 1989). Commemorations become the elected social occasions where shared representations of the past are transmitted from old to young members of the group, and where all gather together to express and reaffirm a common sense of social identification and to legitimize present social institutions and practices.

In relation to Northern Ireland, considerable academic attention has been directed both to the commemorative practices of the Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist and Catholic/Nationalist/Republican communities and to the more ‘static’ form of remembrance of mural painting.³ Permanent memorials to the casualties of the Troubles have, however, been somewhat conspicuous by their absence in academic literature, if we exclude a brief report commissioned by the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council (Leonard 1997b) and some recent academic articles (Graham and Whelan 2007; McDowell 2007, 2008a, 2008b; Switzer and McDowell 2009).⁴ Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative research, this book aims to fill that gap, beginning with a survey of permanent forms of memorialization to the victims of the Northern Irish conflict in the city of Belfast.⁵

Politicized Remembering: The Nexus between Memory and Power

The growing weight of ethnic minorities in Western Europe and the United States as a result of immigration, the fragmentation of the Soviet bloc along ethnic lines and the upsurge of many intragroup conflicts throughout the world have given new momentum to studies on collective memory, particularly to the exploration of the nexus between memory and power in relation to ethnicity and national identity (see Ashplant, Dawson and Roper 2000; Müller 2002). Memory becomes a crucial factor in the construction and preservation of nation states, intended as communities of memory, in the sense that their members not only share similar traits such as ethnicity, culture and language, but are bound together by a common understanding and representation of a shared past that underpins their collective identity. Smith (1996), for instance, postulates that shared ‘ethno myths’ are one of the foundational elements of a nation state and must be taken into account along with economic and political circumstances in any analysis of modern nationalism. Similarly, Anderson (1983) indicates how ‘ghostly national imaginings’ are conjured up from the national past in order to make the present generation feel a connection with the dead who belonged to the same ‘imagined community’, thus securing and reinforcing the nation’s imagined continuity and transcendence beyond time and mortality. Although Northern Ireland cannot be considered a nation state as such, as its very ontological existence is contested between the two opposing ethnic communities who live within its official boundaries, it is possible to talk about two projected symbolic national identities – Irish and British – with which the Catholic and Protestant population of Northern Ireland can respectively identify. This book investigates how collective memory helps to shape and reinforce these two opposing projected symbolic national identities.

The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration

Since the invention of the ‘nation state’ in the late eighteenth century, the ‘political demands’ on memory have intensified, with ruling authorities in most Western European countries introducing a series of ritual practices which were ‘deliberately designed to symbolize national unity, to ensure state legitimacy and build political consensus’ (Misztal 2003: 38). Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) have famously coined the term ‘invented traditions’ to account for the sudden proliferation of national celebrations in Western Europe since the industrial revolution, and have classified them into three overlapping categories: ‘those establishing or symbolizing social cohesion or the membership of groups, real or artificial communities; those establishing or legitimizing institutions, status or relations of authority; and those whose main purpose was socialization, the inculcation of beliefs, value systems and conventions of behaviour’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983: 9). Invented traditions, despite being newly created, tend to use old models and materials for new purposes, in an attempt to establish continuity – in many instances, fictitious – with a suitable past. In Northern Ireland, for instance, the modern-day Loyalist paramilitary group Ulster Volunteer Force has successfully appropriated the name and symbols of the homonymous organization that fought in the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

War commemoration and memorialization have long been recognized by political elites as a crucial symbolic weapon to bind a nation’s citizens into a collective national identity and to enhance authority over them. From the French Revolution (1792–99) and the German Wars of Liberation against Napoleon (1813–14), mercenary armies are substituted by citizen armies; wars are no longer dynastic struggles between monarchs, but are fought for the abstraction of ‘the people’ by volunteers who enrolled in the name of the ‘motherland’ or ‘fatherland’ of the nation (Mosse 1990: 18). From the First World War, the ‘Myth of the War Experience’ and the ‘cult of the fallen soldier’ (ibid.: 7) become ‘a centrepiece of the religion of nationalism after the war’, ensuring that ‘the memory of the war [is] refashioned into a sacred experience which [provides] the nation with a new depth of religious feeling, putting at its disposal ever-present saints and martyrs, places of worship and a heritage to emulate’, thus justifying the nation in whose name blood had been sacrific...