Forthcoming special issue of History & Memory, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): Landscapes of Violence: Memory and Sacred Space
In this special issue guest editor Katharina Schramm (Martin-Luther-University, Halle-Wittenberg) brings together a number of scholars to reflect on a specific aspect of the relationship between violence, memory, body and landscape, namely, the dynamics of the sacralization of memorial space.
Careful not to attribute agency solely to the physical environment, the authors carve out the shifting interface between symbolic forms, narrative strategies and material practices that becomes apparent in the politically charged realm of commemoration. In order to account for the underlying complexity, this collection privileges a comparative and translocal perspective. It includes contributions from anthropology and comparative religion, with case studies from Croatia (Michaela Schäuble, Martin-Luther-University, Halle-Wittenberg), Israel/Palestine (Jackie Feldman, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva), Ghana (Katharina Schramm) and Germany (Insa Eschebach, Ravensbrück Memorial Museum).
Schäuble examines the ways in which the commemorative landscape of the border region of the Dinaric mountain range, a site of historic battles and deaths, is currently being reappropriated in Croatian religious nationalism. Feldman also deals with a border situation: that of the Separation Wall between Israel and Palestine, which has profound impact on how various groups of Christian pilgrims perceive and construct the sacred landscape of the Holy Land. Schramm’s focus is on the Northern Ghanaian landscape that is currently being redesigned as a destination for African American pilgrimage tourists in search of the transatlantic slave trail, while at the same time serving as a reference to more localized (and religiously connoted) memories of the inner-African slave trade. Eschebach demonstrates how the seemingly timeless symbolism of ashes and soil at the former concentration camp Ravensbrück in eastern Germany is contested by different groups of survivors in shifting constellations of state memorialization.
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