The revival of interest in collective cultural memories since the 1980s has been a genuinely global phenomenon. Cultural memories can be defined as the social constructions of the past that allow individuals and groups to orient themselves in time and space. The investigation of cultural memories has necessitated an interdisciplinary perspective, though geographical questions about the spaces, places, and landscapes of memory have acquired a special significance. The essays in this volume, written by leading anthropologists, geographers, historians, and psychologists, open a range of new interpretations of the formation and development of cultural memories from ancient times to the present day. The volume is divided into five interconnected sections. The first section outlines the theoretical considerations that have shaped recent debates about cultural memory. The second section provides detailed case studies of three key themes: the founding myths of the nation-state, the contestation of national collective memories during periods of civil war, and the oral traditions that move beyond national narrative. The third section examines the role of World War II as a pivotal episode in an emerging European cultural memory. The fourth section focuses on cultural memories in postcolonial contexts beyond Europe. The fifth and final section extends the study of cultural memory back into premodern tribal and nomadic societies.

Though we live in a time when memory seems to be losing its hold on communities, memory remains central to personal, communal, and national identities. And although popular and public discourses from speeches to films invite a shared sense of the past, official sites of memory such as memorials, museums, and battlefields embody unique rhetorical principles. Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials is a sustained and rigorous consideration of the intersections of memory, place, and rhetoric. From the mnemonic systems inscribed upon ancient architecture to the roadside acci

This volume explores the relationship between place, traumatic memory, and narrative. Drawing on cases from Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania, and North and South America, the book provides a uniquely cross-cultural and global approach. Covering a wide range of cultural and linguistic contexts, the volume is divided into three parts: memorial spaces, sites of trauma, and traumatic representations. The contributions explore how acknowledgement of past suffering is key to the complex inter-relationship between the politics of memory, expressions of victimhood, and collective memory. Contributors take note of differing aspects of memorial culture, such as those embedded in war memorials, mass grave sites, and exhibitions, as well as journalistic, literary and visual forms of commemorations, to investigate how narratives of memory can give meaning and form to places of trauma.

This book examines spatialised practices of remembrance and its role in reshaping societies from prehistory to today; it presents a reflection on the creation of memories through the organisation and use of landscapes and spaces that explicitly considers the multiplicity of meanings of the past.