Grave Matters: Emergent Networks and Summation in Remembering and Reconciliation

We examine British war veterans' involvement in practices of remembering and reconciliation. These veterans were prisoners of war (POWs) in the Far East in World War II, building the Thai–Burma Railway before transfer to a copper mine in Japan. Some 50 years later, they participated in a “reconciliation visit” to Japan. We discuss how and in what ways their postwar lives and wartime experiences are gathered up in the processes of remembering and reconciliation. In particular, we focus on how memories are transformed through processes of circulating reference in networks associating people, places, and things. We then examine how accounts of redemption involving claims to the consequences of experience as being other than expected, create the basis for emergent forms of remembering and reconciliation. [remembering, reconciliation, network, POWs, World War II]