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348 Steven Hoelscher & Derek H. Alderman

gestions to build an educational museum andpeace centre. Here, museum planners sought asite on which to concentrate criticism of apart-heid: public remembering of the horrors of theprison was to be part of a project of post-apart-heid reconstruction (Deacon 1998).

These debates of the 1970s and 1980s overhow to remember Robben Islands past heldconsiderable importance for national identityand, in turn, helped focus the worlds attentionon the systemic injustices of South Africaspolitical apparatus. By the early 1990s, thehigh-security section of the prison had becomea place of pilgrimage and homage, visited bydignitaries from all parts of the globe. With therelease of Nelson Mandela and other politicalprisoners, its status as a global symbol of tran-scendence over oppression had been all butassured. 1 In 1997, it became a National Mu-seum and National Monument, and two yearslater, UNESCO listed Robben Island as aWorld Heritage Site. Since then, it has beenvisited by over one million people, who, how-ever well intentioned, have placed a differentset of demands on the site, forcing museum

ofcials to ask how to package the islands pastfor large-scale tourist consumption without ir-reversibly changing it (Mandela 1994; UN-ESCO 2000).

Although few places are as electried withsymbolic power and political contestation asRobben Island, the site brings to the fore manyof the central themes of this special issue.These include, among others: the continuallyunfolding nature of memory; the importance of forgetting in every act of remembering; thepressures of the marketplace and com-modication of the past; the unpredictability of group memory and its centrality in the mainte-nance and contestation of political identity; thefact that memory is often both particular anduniversal; and the inextricable link betweenmemory and place. This last point is especially

important, for, as the anthropologist NathanWachtel (1986: 216) notes, the preservation of recollections rests on their anchorage in space.Places like Robben Island bring such claimsinto immediate and vivid focus, and serve toprovide a point of departure for this issuesexamination of a critical, geographical relation-ship.

The social and spatial nature of memory

The transformation of Robben Island fromhellhole into a symbol of freedom not onlyfor South Africa and the African continent, butalso for the entire world (Deacon 1998) cap-tures two overlapping areas of interest thathave inuenced disciplines across social sci-ences and humanities: the shared dimension of remembering, and the equally social nature of how space is produced. Both have triggeredextremely vibrant and sweeping work that haschallenged basic understandings of space andtime. Together, social memory and social spaceconjoin to produce much of the context for

modern identitiesand the often-rigorous con-testation of those identities.

Once the sole preserve of psychology, thestudy of memory now extends to anthropology,sociology, cultural studies, literary studies,communication, history and, increasingly, togeography. Taking their cue largely from thework of the French sociologist Maurice Halb-wachs (1992 [1951]), many scholars, includinggeographers, have come to see memory as asocial activity, as an expression and activebinding force of group identity (Crang andTravlou 2001; Dwyer 2000; Edensor 1997; Till2001). Whether one refers to collective mem-ory, social memory, public memory, his-torical memory, popular memory or culturalmemory, most would agree with Edward Said(2000: 179) that many people now look to this


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Memory and place 349

refashioned memory, especially in its collectiveforms, to give themselves a coherent identity, anational narrative, a place in the world.

This is a key contention, for it suggests thatthe surging scholarly interest in memoryreects larger, societal changes. Said continuesby arguing that the

study and concern with memory of a specicallydesirable and recoverable past is a specially freightedlate twentieth-century phenomenon that has arisenat a time of bewildering change, of unimaginablylarge and diffuse mass societies, competing national-isms, and, most important perhaps, the decreasingefcacy of religious, familial, and dynastic bonds.(2000: 179)2

Ours is an age of both rapid social transform-ation and a search for roots, of time-spacecompression as well as people looking for apast seemingly removed from the unrelentingsocialpoliticaleconomic forces that havecome to be called globalization (Harvey 1989;Lowenthal 1996). That social groups today em-ploy various recollections as vehicles for their

constitution, or for their dissolution, Said re-minds us, points to the usability of thisfreighted phenomenon.

Eventually those uses intersect with power.The study of social memory inevitably comesaround to questions of domination and theuneven access to a societys political and econ-omic resources. Paul Connerton (1989: 1) putsit this way: control of a societys memorylargely conditions the hierarchy of power. Seenin this light, social memory is inherently instru-mental: individuals and groups recall the pastnot for its own sake, but as a tool to bolsterdifferent aims and agendas (Fentress and Wick-ham 1992; Le Goff 1992; Trouillot 1995).

Representatives of dominant social classeshave been most adept at using memory as aninstrument of rule. This is perhaps the central

point of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence RangersThe Invention of Tradition (1983), a now-canonical work that has inspired much researchin the area of memory studies. Moreover, it isoften the case that memories of ordinary peopleare appropriated by elites and pressed into theservice of conquest and domination (Bodnar1992; Gillis 1994). In most cases, Barbie Zelizer(1995: 220) writes, power wins out. Recentresearch suggests, however, that less-privilegedgroupssuch as the anti-apartheid leaders be-fore the collapse of white rule in South Africa,or AIDS activists in the USA (Sturken 1997) are becoming ever more adept at making use of memory to challenge their own subordination.

What subaltern and dominant groups sharein their efforts to utilize the past is the nearuniversal activity of anchoring their divergentmemories in place, a point increasingly recog-nized in the scholarly literature. Here, the workof French historian Pierre Nora (1989) has beenespecially inuential. His notion of sites of memoryor lieux de memoire gives promi-nent attention to the various ways in whichmemory is spatially constituted. For Nora,

memory is attached to sites that are concreteand physicalthe burial places, cathedrals,battleelds, prisons that embody tangible no-tions of the pastas well as to sites that arenon-materialthe celebrations, spectacles andrituals that provide an aura of the past. Sites of memory therefore encompass geographicalplaces (the site of New Yorks World TradeCenter, the city of Hiroshima), monuments andbuildings (San Antonios Alamo, the Auschwitzdeath camp), historical gures (Abraham Lin-coln, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin), and public dis-plays and commemorations (Emancipation Daycommemorations among newly freed slaves inthe American South, Peace Day celebrations inIreland). Research on these and many moresuch sites of memory reveal that most validateand authenticate consensual notions of the past


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while they simultaneously invite alternativereadings (Charlesworth 1994; Clark 2000; Flo-res 2002; Forest and Johnson 2002; Johnson1999; Schwartz 2000; Sturken 2002; Yoneyama1999).

Monuments, memorials and museums haveproven to be fertile grounds for investigatingplaces of memory (Till 2003) and here geogra-phers have been especially productive. Wide-ranging works by Mike Heffernan (1995),Nuala Johnson (1995) and Charles Withers(1996) on monuments dedicated to nationalismand war, by Kenneth Foote (1997) on Americanmemorials of violence and tragedy, byJonathan I. Leib (2002) on the politics of raceand memorials, and by Karen Till (2001) onGerman history museums only begin to hint atthe extraordinarily rich literature that is emerg-ing. As spaces explicitly designed to impartcertain elements of the pastand, bydenition, to forget otherssuch lieux dememoire are the sites where, as Nora (1989: 7)puts it, memory crystallizes and secretes itself.

More generally, monument- and museum-re-lated activities have themselves become a

model for remembering. Governing elites,whether in late nineteenth-century Rome(Atkinson and Cosgrove 1998), New Orleans(Boyer 1994) and Milwaukee (Hoelscher, Baw-den and Zimmerman 1997) or in twentiethcentury Taipei (Leitner and Kang 1999), Bu-dapest (Foote, Toth and A rvay 2000) and NewYork (Zukin 1995), often make or preservehistorically inected urban landscapes as a wayto bolster a particular political order, and as ameans to capital accumulation. One of themost intriguing avenues to explore the meansby which memory and place are woven into thefabric of everyday life follows the widespreadcommemorative practice of street namingandthe bitter controversies that can sometimes fol-low (Azaryahu 1996). If the social memory of Martin Luther King, Jr, is given concrete form

in street names throughout the AmericanSouth, so too are those spaces redened bycompeting memories of the slain Civil Rightsleader (Alderman 2000, 2002).

While the constitutive relationship betweenmemory and place is most obvious in the realmof material culturein landscapesit is also,and no less, performative. Through bodily rep-etition and the intensication of everyday actsthat otherwise remain submerged in the mun-dane order of things, performances like rituals,festivals, pageants, public dramas and civic cer-emonies serve as a chief way in which societiesremember (Connerton 1989). Thus, as Thriftand Dewsbury (2000: 420) argue, performanceis a means of carrying out a cultural practice such as memorythoroughly. Civic celebra-tions like St Patricks Day parades (Marston1988) and historic pageantry (Glassberg 2001;Hoelscher 2003; Woods 1999) are always em-bedded in place and inevitably raise importantquestions about the struggle of various groupsto dene the centre of urban politics and publiclife.

If geographies of memory circulate both in

material form (i.e. landscapes) and through thebodily repetition of performance and culturaldisplay, they are frequently called upon to sup-port the specic kind of conquest and domi-nation associated with colonialism. Here,again, Said (1995 [1978], 2000) is especiallyrelevant as he showed how the conuence of memory, place, invention and power added upto what he termed imaginative geographies the construction of geographical spaces thatpaid negligible attention to the actuality of theregions geography or its inhabitants, but moreaccurately reected the fantasies and preoccu-pations of colonizing agents. While Said fa-mously described the geographical-imaginativeconstruction of the Orient, his critical insightshave been applied to Egypt (Gregory 1995),Ecuador (Radcliffe 1996), British-occupied


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picture, however. Two cases presented by Fen-ster show Jewish Israelis honouring places of Palestinian memory and belonging. The mem-orial process at this scale is one of negotiationrather than sheer exclusion.

Although Selma, Alabama (USA) is thou-sands of miles from Israel, Owen Dwyer has asimilar desire to understand the complexities of commemorating antagonistic histories in thesame place. In Selma, memorial activists associ-ated with the Civil Rights Movement and theNeo-Confederacy have collided over how andwhere to commemorate the career of NathanBedford Forrest, a Confederate general and afounding member of the Ku Klux Klan.Dwyers paper uses the concept of symbolicaccretion to advance understanding of howdifferent political actors attach new and some-times conicting commemorative meanings andagendas to established memorial landscapes.The notion of accretion suggests that althoughcommemoration is marked by a spirit of delib-erate construction, the outcomes of commem-oration cannot be not set in stone.

Like many commemorative struggles, the

conict over the Forrest monument in Selmacannot be assessed outside the context of thegrowing heritage industry. The three remainingpapers in the special issue offer useful ways of thinking about the relationship betweentourism and the representation of the past.Luke Desforges and Joanne Maddern showhow heritage institutions, particularly muse-ums, are actively engaged in producing andcirculating historical knowledges. An analysisof actors involved in the creation of the Mu-seum of Immigration at Ellis Island, New Yorknds that the museums landscapes and textualspaces reect a number of different, sometimescontradictory discourses about the past. Theresearch challenges traditional criticisms thatthe museum presents a single, master-narrativeon the immigration experience.

Deforges and Maddern demonstrate that astudy of the heritage industry requiresanalysing the social actors and negotiationsthat surround the production of memory andplace. Stephen Hanna, Vincent Del Casino,Casey Selden and Benjamin Hite contribute tothis idea further. According to them, the every-day representational practices of tourism work-ers are essential to the reproduction of heritagespaces such as Fredricksburg, Virginia (USA).By conceptualizing representation as work, theauthors give authority to the ways in whichtourism professionals embody and communi-cate representations of the past through theirperformances. Seemingly mundane perfor-mances such as driving tourist trolleys andconversing tourists construct Frederickburgshistoric past, helping weave personal and localmemories with established national and re-gional historical narratives.

While Hanna and his colleagues advocate fora more critical perspective of tourism workers,Dydia DeLyser encourages readers to examinethe often under-analysed memorial practices of tourists. Throughout the early twentieth cen-

tury, the southern California landscape wasdotted with tourism sites identied with HelenHunt Jacksons famous novel, Ramona . DeLy-ser focuses on the agency of tourists in shapingthese attractions. Her article is also a methodo-logical statement on the difculty of recoveringsocial memories of the past and the great con-tribution that tiny archival traces can make tothe process of retrieving memory.

DeLysers paper demonstrates how analysingthe relationship between memory and placerequires paying attention to small things suchas peoples photographs, postcards and storiesin addition to their more visible monumentsand museums. It and all the papers of thisspecial issue are dedicated to furthering ourunderstanding of how cultural memory worksthrough detailed empirical analysis. Together


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they contribute to a growing project in whichsocial and cultural geography plays asignicant, perhaps even decisive, role.

Acknowledgements

We thank Owen Dwyer for help organizing theLos Angeles AAG sessions, and for bringingthis issue to fruition.

Notes

1 Nelson Mandela rst arrived on Robben Island in 1962,before it was fully established, and remained there until1982, when he was transferred with a few other prison-ers to Pollsmoor Prison in the white middle-class CapeTown suburb of Tokai, and then, in 1988, to VictorVerster, where he was nally released in 1990 (Mandela1994).

2 Other scholars like Pierre Nora (1989), Anthony Gid-dens (1990), Andreas Huyssen (1995) and DavidLowenthal (1996) have made similar claims, while EricHobsbawm (1983) has famously described the turn of the twentieth century as a period of mass-producingtraditions. In either case, the key point is that periodsof rapid social transformation are often accompanied,

in the modern world, by moments of intense collectiveremembering.

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Abstract translations

Le souvenir et le lieu: les geographies dunerelation critique

Dans les dernieres annees, les explorations me-nees sur le souvenir social et culturel sontdevenues un champ detudes important dans leshumanites et les sciences sociales. Letude dusouvenir ne se resume plus qua la psychologie,

mais se prolonge maintenant vers les champs delanthropologie, la sociologie, les etudes cul-turelles, les lettres, la communication,lhistoire, et de plus en plus la geographie. Cetarticle evalue quelques-unes des grandes ten-dances qui caracterisent cette litterature enebullition. Nous nous penchons notamment surles travaux concernant lespace qui, a notresens, sont interessants du point de vue de latransdisciplinarite. Cest lunion entre le sou-venir et le lieu qui produit les elements qui

structurent le contexte dans lequel les identitesmodernes existent. Le survol de cette relationcritique et dynamique nous permet de presenterles grandes lignes de cet enjeu particulier quitouche la geographie sociale et culturelle.

Mots-clefs: souvenir, lieu, paysage, perform-ance.

Memoria y lugar: geograf as de una rela-cion cr tica

En recientes anos, cuestiones de memoria socialo cultural han llegado a ser campos de inves-tigacion a traves de las ciencias sociales y lashumanidades. La memoria ya no es un tematratado exclusivamente por la piscolog a ycomo tema se ha extendido a la antropolog a,sociolog a, estudios culturales, estudios de liter-atura, comunicaciones, historia y, cada vezmas, es un tema tratado por la geograa. Estepapel evalua algunas de las tendencias princi-pales de esta literatura creciente y en particular

los trabajos de naturaleza espacial. Nosotrosconsideramos que estos trabajos son de sumaimportancia para todas las disciplinas. Juntos,memoria y lugar producen mucho del contextode identidades modernas. Por un breve estudiode esta relacion crtica y dinamica, este papelsirve como introduccion a este numero de So-cial & Cultural Geography .

Palabras claves: memoria, lugar, paisaje, actua-cion.

2. hoelscher and alderman memory and place-libre

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