Social Memory

This course introduces students to the processes of remembering and forgetting in various contexts. Through an analysis of relevant literature, students will explore how memories are constructed, preserved, used, abused, altered, and erased in diverse cultural and social settings. Students will become familiar with key concepts, definitions and distinctions, and the interactions between individual and collective or social memory. They also learn about the complex relationship between the past and history.
Through analysis of a variety of materials, the course examines a range of sites and media involved in the construction and transformation of social memory (narratives, monuments, rituals, street names, symbols, music, film, landscape, school systems, archives, the Internet, social networks, etc.). Special emphasis is placed on the politics of remembering and forgetting. The course addresses the influence of various ideologies (especially nationalism) on memory narratives, as well as the heterogeneity of memory and alternative memory as an important site of resistance and opposition.
Students explore contemporary ethnographic studies that address contemporary issues related to remembering and forgetting in specific places: Memory of violence and traumatic events, silencing, transgenerational transmission of memory, connection between memory and imagining the future (hope), nostalgia, technological innovations and memory, use of memory in the construction of the Other and in identification processes, memory and emotions, etc.

Students will become familiar with the basic concepts, terminology and theories that allow understanding the complexity of the memory process in different contexts and highlight the importance of memories in the formation of different imaginations of the future.

Connerton, P. 1989. How societies remember. Cambridge University Press. [COBISS.SI-ID-28583010]
Halbwachs, M. 1992. On Collective Memory. University of Chicago Press.
Jezernik, B. 2013. Nacionalizacija preteklosti. Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba FF. [COBISS.SI-ID 269928960]
Middleton, D. in D. Edwards, ur.. 1990. Collective Remembering. London: Sage. [COBISS.SI-ID 643927]
Verdery, K. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. [COBISS.SI-ID 916877]
Loewenthal, D. 1985. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [COBISS.SI-ID 48259426]
Angé, O. in D. Berliner, ur. 2014. Anthropology and nostalgia. New York, Oxford: Berghahn. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xww&AN=71416…
Todorova, M. ur., 2004, Balkan Identities. Nation and Memory. London: Hurst. [COBISS.SI-ID 9098061]
Jackson, M.. 2002. Politics of Storytelling. Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen.
Jansen, S. 2002. “The Violence of Memories. Local Narratives of the Past after Ethnic Cleansing in Croatia”. Re- thinking History 6/1: 77–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642520110112128
Antze, P. in M. Lambek, ur. 1996. Tense Past. Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge. [COBISS.SI-ID 9868130]
Petrović, T.. 2017. “Nostalgia for Industrial Labor in Socialist Yugoslavia or Why the Post-Socialist Affect Matters”. V: Nostalgia on the Move. Mitja Velikonja, ur. Beograd: The Museum of Yugoslavia, 14–29. [https://www.muzej-jugoslavije.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Nostalgia-…]
Wertsch, J. V. 2002. Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://nukweb.nuk.uni-lj.si/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/logi…
Argenti, N. in K. Schramm, ur. 2010. Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission. New York, Oxford: Berghahn books. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781845459703-004