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REMEMBERING WITHOUT COMMEMORATION: THE MNEMONICS AND POLITICS OF HOLOCAUST MEMORIES AMONG EUROPEAN ROMA
Author(s) -
Stewart Michael
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
journal of the royal anthropological institute
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.62
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1467-9655
pISSN - 1359-0987
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9655.2004.00202.x
Subject(s) - presentism , the holocaust , mnemonic , forgetting , politics , politics of memory , rhetoric , history , memory work , nazism , sociology , aesthetics , epistemology , psychology , law , political science , art , linguistics , cognitive psychology , philosophy , archaeology
Much has been written in recent years about the ways Gypsies (Roma) relate to their past. One important study of Holocaust memory has used the Roma as a paradigmatic case of a people who forget rather than remember their history. Rather than examining processes of ‘obliterating’ or downplaying the past, the approach taken here is to consider ways in which, despite Gypsy ‘presentist’ rhetoric, the past is ‘remembered’ among Gypsy populations. Following Maurice Bloch's call for greater integration of psychological and anthropological work, this article considers what can be gained from seeing memory as a socially distributed function in which the role of ‘implicit’ memories, embedded in dealings with others, is significant. This approach enables us better to grasp how Romany communities, which were persecuted by the Nazis and their allies during the Second World War, ‘remember’ the past even though they may not commemorate it.