‘It is memory that solders together the processes, scattered across time, of which we are made. In this sense we exist in time. It is for this reason that I am the same person today as I was yesterday. To understand ourselves means to reflect on time. But to understand time we need to reflect on ourselves’ (Rovelli, 2018: 203).
Time and how we conceptualize it, is a, if not the, foundational basis for creating and analysing memory. However, both theoretical proposals and case studies in memory studies are frequently built on time concepts which remain undiscussed and undefined. This Special Issue brings to the fore time as a basic notion of memory studies and questions the implicit and tacitly accepted understandings of time in the field. In doing so, we combine in this introduction insights from both natural sciences and the humanities, in order to overcome the Kantian divide between these two branches when it comes to the conceptualisation of time. Throughout this discussion, we will underscore the need to reconsider subaltern epistemologies if memory studies want to overcome the current hegemonic concepts of time.
The epigraph to this introduction – a quotation from Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time – exemplifies the important link between memory and time through the lens of modern physics. Interestingly, for Rovelli, the process of memory – as a subjective experience of time – is one of the central elements to constitute our identity. Memory comprises what Rovelli calls a ‘blurred’ vision of the universe, which is ignorant of the microscopic details of the world in which time as a variable does not exist (Rovelli, 2018: 163). Only a generic, macroscopic vision of the world – which due to the world’s complexity can never be complete – has some of the characteristics of time as we know it. Thus, only when we attribute a certain structure to the world in order to understand it we create a time variable: ‘Time emerges from a world without time’ (Rovelli, 2018: 83). However, even at this macroscopic level, time never portrays a universal time, but always depends on perspective. Rovelli brings together two time concepts – the one physically measurable and the other culturally construed – which for a long time have been treated as separate items. This division is a legacy from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1998). The idea behind this differentiation is the existence of an outer reality of things (themselves) which is not accessible to human thought in an unmediated way. Notwithstanding this dichotomy, new insights from both physics and the humanities have made this distinction obsolete. Rather, the cultural and the physical are deeply entangled. As Rovelli concludes, ‘causality, memory, traces, the history of the happening of the world itself can only be an effect of perspective’ (Rovelli, 2018: 178).
The intrinsically transdisciplinary field of memory studies holds the experience of time in the present as one of its central concerns and as such offers a productive ground to incorporate and develop these new concepts. In this spirit, collective memory could be defined as the sociocultural process of producing time in society. Where classical history promotes a dominant perspective of change over (linear) time, scholars of memory studies often target the imprint of the past in the present, portraying the coexistence of different time layers in the same moment (e.g. Huyssen, 2003; Silverman, 2013), or the multidirectional temporal movements between past, present and future (e.g. Rothberg, 2009; Erll, 2011b).
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Thus, to a certain extent, memory studies challenge and reframe the linearity dominant in the writing of history. However, the linear relation between the past, the present and the future is still implicit in the majority of memory studies’ theoretical work. Whereas time is central to memory, it has not been subject to much theoretical scrutiny in itself, be it in its sociological or its physical dimension. The implicit yet dominant concept of linear time might have led the field to incline towards concepts stemming from the Western world and to eclipse different and subaltern forms of memory work, which often relate to different conceptions of time.
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Linear time, however, is not always deployed in a homogenous fashion and should not be exclusively equated to ‘Western’ thinking, since, arguably, in the Western world too, time can be regarded as circular, for instance when analysing the importance of repetitive celebrations, while non-Western regions, such as the Caribbean and Latin America, had elaborated linear time concepts long before their colonisation (Hamann, 2016).
Nevertheless, there seems to exist a dominant discourse frequently related to Western thinking that foregrounds concepts of linear time and often neglects subaltern forms. This discourse is based on the Newtonian definition of an absolute, true and mathematical time. Modern physics, however, has redefined time and underlines its subjectivity and multiplicity, denying its universality. What is more, Rovelli invites us to a world without time. He explains that there is no single time per se and describes the world as a collection of events which have their own duration: ‘Time has loosened into a network of relations that no longer holds together a coherent canvas. The picture of spacetimes (in the plural) fluctuating, superimposed one above the other, materializing at certain times with respect to particular objects, provides us with a very vague vision. But it is the best that we have’ (Rovelli, 2018: 115). Thus, we only can describe how interrelations of events create local time and how local times evolve relative to each other. ‘The world is not like a platoon advancing at the pace of a single commander. It’s a network of events affecting each other.’ (Rovelli, 2018: 27). Subsequently, the distinction of past, present and future is not a mere illusion or mental construction. Indeed, singular events can have a temporal development. However, from the viewpoint of modern physics, such difference between past and future does not exist in the elementary equations of the world (Rovelli, 2018: 116). In this world without universal time, Rovelli recurs to memory to show the importance of time for society. We need to look at the cultural productions of time to understand its importance in this world. Or, as Rovelli phrases it, ‘to understand time, we need to reflect on ourselves’ (Rovelli, 2018: 203). Nonetheless, to prove his point, Rovelli dwells on his childhood memories and reconstructs a sense of linear relation between past, present and future, which is closely related to common Western conceptions of linear time.
Interestingly, Karen Barad also recurs to memory as a reference to count for the subjective experience of time. For her, however, remembering is not a replay of a string of moments, but ‘an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual’ (Barad, 2007: ix). Thus, for Barad, memory functions in a different way and opposite to the linear life story that Rovelli uses as an example. Whereas Rovelli refers to individual memory in the Western world as a way to show how we create a linear story involving the past, the present and the future to construct our personal identity, for Barad – through the lens of modern physics and in the absence of time as a universal given – memory presents itself as the enfoldings of space-time-matter written into the universe. As such, Barad offers a complex and theoretically developed apparatus that can help our field to introduce more sophisticated notions of the constructions of time and space, an apparatus which can accommodate subaltern approaches.
Marije Hristova proposed to introduce Barad’s new materialist theory within memory studies and hence defines ‘the practices of memory as the making and marking of (social) space and time in society’ (2016: 16). Hristova reflects on the way Barad understands the role of memory as part of the constant process of becoming, in which the past, the present and the future are enfolded. That is, there is no past moment that can be represented in the present, the past can only be performed in the present. Thus, time and space are literally produced in an iterative way, which Barad refers to as ‘spacetimemattering’. That is why Barad talks about an iterative becoming of the world, and not of a being. Accordingly, memory should be understood beyond the retelling of the past in the present, and comprise the ongoing openness of the narrative to future retellings (Hristova, 2016: 36–37).
The enfolding of the past and the future in the present is, according to Barad, best apprehended by Derrida’s figure of the spectre which is haunting the present. The ghostly figure captures the way ‘time is out of joint’ and points at the ways the past is constantly recreated through the intra-action
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of different agents (Barad, 2010: 244). Thus, the spectre resembles the entangled relationship between opposites such as continuity and discontinuity, disrupting the linear understanding of time. As such, the ghostly functions as a metaphor for the concept of temporal diffraction, the idea that a given entity can be in a state of superposition over different times. Diffraction is the pattern waves make when they interfere and is a term Barad uses to point at the differences ‘within’, and not the differences between two separate supposedly pre-existing items. By doing so, she acknowledges the profound entanglement of all phenomena in the world and how they produce each other through intra-action (Barad, 2017).
We have referred to the insights of modern physics to convey that the idea of linear and universal time does not hold. This understanding incites us to strengthen and further develop theories on the ways societies produce different concepts of time. At the end of his career, following his ideas on the social production of space, Henri Lefebvre, started working on non-linear conceptions of time and history, which were published posthumously as Rhythmanalysis (2004). According to Lefebvre, time, rather than being linear and progressive, should be understood in terms of change and cycles, or, rhythm. Similar to space, time only attains meaning when being ‘lived’. Thus, we can also speak of the social production of time.
In the field of memory studies, a similar approach to time is already present in concepts that capture the palimpsestic, travelling or multidirectional nature of memory. As such, Andreas Huyssen (2003) theorizes memory as the diachronic aspect of space by making use of the literary trope of the palimpsest that displays the temporal layers of spaces. His work resonates with Eviatar Zerubavel’s study of time, and particularly with his book Time Maps (2003), in which time, memory and space appear intertwined as a ‘sociomental topography of the past’ (2003: 1). Whereas Zerubavel upholds the Kantian differentiation between cultural and mathematical time, Huyssen not only questions the mathematical, measurable underpinning of space, but also the linearity of time. In his earlier work, Huyssen invokes the metaphor of twilight as memory’s privileged time. It is that moment of the day that ‘foreshadows the night of forgetting, but that seems to slow time itself, an in-between state in which the last light of the day may still play out its ultimate marvels’ (1995: 3). In this work, he analyses shifts in structures of temporality in the age of the information revolution. The acceleration of change in modern societies and with that the blurring of ‘grand narratives’, together with an upsurge of memories, has also been put to the front by Aleida Assmann (2013).
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According to her, in this context, the rise of the ethics of Human Rights has created a new awareness of a ‘long-term persistence of the past within the present’ (2013: 54). Overall, these works resonate strongly with on the one hand Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis and on the other hand Barad’s idea of memory as enfoldings of space-time-matter.
Michael Rothberg proposes to understand memory as multidirectional to ‘reject notions of purity and authenticity and draw our attention to dynamic transfers between diverse places and times during the act of remembrance’ (2009: 11). With that, Rothberg questions the implicit relation between memory boundaries and identity boundaries. His work is part of the efforts in memory studies to disentangle collective memory from the nation-state. These theories focus predominantly on the relation between memory and the (re)construction of space. Yet, non-linear notions of temporality are often implicit and entangled in multidirectional spatiotemporal movements of memory. Barad makes the entanglement of space and time explicit and shows that they do not only depend on each other, but also produce each other.
In this sense, in her recent article, Astrid Erll recognizes the way memory studies have favoured the category of space in its preoccupation with transcultural and transnational dynamics. In her recent work, she explores memory’s longue durée or ‘transtemporality’ in order to open up the boundaries of the ‘somewhat restricting canon of remembered times’ (2018: 276). The canon Erll refers to, is what she calls the ‘now’ of the contemporary globalizing society, which centres on the twentieth century, with a few offshoots to the nineteenth century and into the twenty-first. This limited temporal framework also biases the logic of memory work, mostly framed by the concept of trauma. Likewise, it influences the way we overlook ‘the production of memory across knowledge and belief systems, spatial imaginaries, temporal and emotional regimes other than those in our globalizing present’ (Erll, 2018: 276). To this she adds the eclipsing of forms of memory work beyond the ‘West’, which often relates to different conceptions of time, as we have mentioned earlier. With her relational mnemohistory of Homer, Erll introduces time as a critical category, breaking some of its unquestioned boundaries. However, Erll’s exploration of the longue durée does not explicitly question the underlying assumption of linear time as a universal variable.
We see a non-incidental relation between these theoretical proposals and these scholars’ academic background in literary studies, a field which Erll has defined as a long-term laboratory for the construction of the self and the Other, of memory and identity. As Erll eloquently sums up, ‘literary narratives mediate between pre-existing memory culture on the one hand and its potential restructuring on the other’ (2011a: 156). What is interesting about the study of narrative in its relation to time, is that literature has the capacity to unveil the mechanisms of the very construction of time as one of the building blocks of narration and to propose alternative constellations of time. This metanarrative function allows us to identify time as a critical category which is constructed and not necessarily linear.
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That is how memory’s multidirectionality, palimpsestic or travelling nature appear from the analysis of literary texts. At the same time, literary texts might provide a toolbox to remember, to narrate and to write considering the possibility of non-linear time. Barad’s scholarly work is an example of how the renunciation of linear time models ultimately asks for a different narrative.
In this special issue, we aim to pay close attention to alternative constellations of time in narrative but also in embodied practices, rituals and a myriad of memory devices embedded in social life when rearranging temporalities along the lines described above, while using narrative strategies such as for instance multivocality and condensation. This is why we want to connect reflections on time coming from physics and memory studies with insights from social and cultural anthropology – a discipline long keen on the analysis of non-hegemonic temporalities and memory making devices and practices, but whose explicit contribution to memory studies still has noteworthy blind spots – when it comes to considering and theorizing the understandings of time in different cultural realms. Our proposal to enrich the debates in the field of memory studies by questioning mainstream understandings of time and significantly incorporating non-hegemonic epistemologies of the past is hardly new, yet the earlier attempts may be insufficiently structured. Since its origin in 2008, Memory Studies has published a number of articles that are in tune with this text’s main theme. In their special issue ‘Materializing Times: From Memory to Imagination’ (2009), editors Michalis Kontopodis and Alexander Kozin curated a number of mostly case study-oriented contributions in which the materialisation of time and memory is discussed through concrete places of memory. These case studies, however, remain connected to the Western world and as such do not challenge hegemonic conceptions of time. The incorporation of a longue durée perspective, as proposed by Erll, is also promoted and adopted by Siobhan Brownlie (2012) in her article ‘Does memory of the distant past matter?’. The special issue ‘Memory and the Early Modern’ edited by Kate Chedgzoy et al. (2018), also includes a larger time perspective. When it comes to the inclusion of non-Western perspectives, we can see a clear development towards the publication of an increasing number of articles which study the production of memory beyond the West. What is more, some special issues are exclusively dedicated to non-Western regions, such as the special issues ‘Memory up close: Memory Studies in Australia’ (Kennedy and Radstone, 2013), ‘Memories of Violence, Social Life and Political Culture in the Maghreb and Mashreq’ (Hegasy and Saadi Nikro, 2019). Finally, the special issue ‘Cultural Memory Studies after the Transnational Turn’ (2018), edited by Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, seeks to extend the empirical purview of memory studies, proposing to expand temporal horizons and to go beyond Europe as a frame of reference.
In this volume, however, our purpose is to question hegemonic time frames and geographies viewing them as entangled in a process of timespacemattering. Hegemonic linear time has produced imminent entangled exclusions, and memory studies could unmask these mechanisms of exclusion and reveal the spectres of linear time. The linear time concept based on Newton’s idea of the universality of time has long been (ab)used for hegemonic purposes. The introduction of the mechanical clock and with it the spread and almost worldwide implementation of the linear time concept has allowed for the proliferation of a certain kind of chronopolitics – here understood as an important feature of power. Studies that explore the mechanisms of acceleration in modern societies often talk about the leadership of the fastest, which can lead to important desynchronisations of different segments within the same society as well as towards different societies, because ‘[o]nce [. . .] human beings are, so to speak, all put on the same clock, it is inevitable that in the big picture of human history some peoples will be viewed as ‘on time,’ ‘ahead of time,’ or ‘running late’’ (Daniel Wildcat, quoted in Barad, 2017: 60).
Due to its totalizing view, Barad regards linear time – understood as a succession of discrete moments, that replace one another – as the ‘time of capitalism, colonialism, and militarism’ (Barad, 2017: 60). Following this logic, land can be taken and colonized because it is declared a void in a universal spacetime grid, empty from any time connotations. If land is, in contrast, defined as a ‘time-being marked by its own wounds and vitality’ (Barad, 2017: 83) this highly effective tool of empire building does not hold. Occupying or colonizing would then mean the erasure of the ‘before’ which results in an impossible enterprise since the past, through the traces it leaves, is deeply entangled with the present and enfolded in the becoming of the world. This shows us that memory ‘is not merely a subjective capacity of the human mind; rather, ‘human’ and ‘mind’ are part of the landtimescape – spacetimemattering – of the world’ (Barad, 2017: 84). This understanding of time does not allow for an objective and value-free point of view but is closely linked to a claim of ethical behaviour. Thus, Barad underlines the ‘urgency to trouble time, to shake it to its core’ (Barad, 2017: 57). In that sense, the persistence of linear time conceptions is implicated in the continuous exclusion of non-Western worlds. In a similar way, in his recent work on the implicated subject, Michael Rothberg stresses how implication in violent histories works in both diachronic and synchronic ways. He points out that the past and the present are neither strictly continuous, nor clearly separated, but that the implication ‘emerges from the ongoing, uneven, and destabilizing intrusion of irrevocable pasts into an unredeemed present’ (Rothberg, 2019: 9). A thorough review of linear time using concepts such as temporal diffraction could not only help us to understand how different times ‘bleed through one another’ (Barad, 2017: 68) but also how linear time is implicated in these violent histories.
If modern physics helps us relativize and critically rethink conceptions of abstract time and literary studies have developed sophisticated analytical tools to decipher the narrative construction of time, social and cultural anthropology can offer equally valuable insights into the enormous richness of the myriad understandings of time in different cultural realms, contributing to a denaturalisation of Western historicity and a thematic and conceptual widening of the field. If, broadly speaking – and often times unconsciously –, memory studies has built a sort of analytical comfort zone rooted in Western epistemologies, it may be argued that to grow in richness and depth it needs to incorporate into its conceptual fabric other and ‘out-of-the-way’ visions of time, the past and historicity in a deeper and more systematic way (Tsing, 1993). It is not just important to acknowledge that the concepts of time and the past have different contours and contents in different cultural realms, but it is equally crucial to explore the different existing ontologies, frames and idioms; the ways, devices and circuits of transmission; their (dis)connection to hegemonic memory devices and practices and the processes of local re-appropriation; the differential handling of evolving heritages; or the different types of memory specialists – from shamans to bards to secret societies –, that have largely remained under the radar of conventional memory studies.
Paradoxically, even when today few of its practitioners would identify themselves as memory studies scholars, for decades anthropology has paid attention to different modes of engaging time and the connections to the past both beyond and in entanglement with Western hegemonic epistemologies. A paradox within a paradox, as in the many decades before that, anthropology considered cultural ‘Others’ as living in atemporal social milieus – a deeply rooted rhetorical device known in the discipline as the ethnographic present (Fabian, 1983: 80–87). The fallacy of this classic understanding of cultural others as living out-of-synch with the timing of progress, as if existing in temporal limbos, started to be dismantled after the 1960s by political-economy research This was the case of Eric Wolf’s influential book Europe and the People Without History (1982), where tribal groups and peasants were duly incorporated within the larger history of capitalism (Marcus and Fisher, 1986: 85).
Acknowledging that cultural others were a crucial part of global history, mostly as victims of colonialism, progress and the global spread of predatory capitalism, was soon followed by a growing interest in their alternative senses of being-in-time and the past, in parallel with the wide influence of the interpretative school focused on deciphering the native’s point of view (Geertz, 1983). In his important review on historicity as a cultural perception of the past in anthropology, Charles Stewart offers an overview of some of the key studies on culturally bound conceptions and representations of the past, an overview which should contribute to overcoming the implicit assumption of ‘chronology, temporal progression and pastness’ as human universals (2016: 81). In Stewart’s search for a genealogy of the intertwining between anthropological interests and memory studies, he calls attention to the different and highly nuanced regimes of historicity (see Hartog, 2015) contained in many of the cultural processes that anthropology has long studied, such as rituals, shamanism, spirit possession, dreams, dances, ghosts, treasure tales, or prayers. Stewart’s review of historicities and their specific chronotopes in an anthropological sense is highly dynamic and calls for us to pay due attention to the continuous frictions, hybridisations and crossovers between native and hegemonic ontologies of the past. This leads him to the conclusion that people around the world, of course Westerners included, ‘might entertain several different historicities in the course of a day, or combine them into novel composites’ (ibid. 83–88). Although coming from a different background and with a focus on alternate, marginalized or even waning epistemologies of the past, here we seem to be very close to Rothberg’s multidirectionality, Erll’s travelling memories, or Huyssen’s palimpsests.
Let us briefly discuss some instances of the ways anthropological studies may further coalesce and cross-fertilize both theoretically and empirically with contemporary memory studies in the reframing of too often out of focus modes of temporal entanglements and diffractions – an exercise that deserves to be expanded further and explored in more detail elsewhere. In some aspects, such as the interest in critically exploring the tensions and intertwining between hegemonic and subaltern modes of being-in-time and memory ecologies, the connections seem immediate.
Writing in an intellectual functionalist milieu the inspiring classic work of Victor Turner on Zambia’s Ndembu symbolism is an outstanding illustration of how tribal rituals can be interpreted as sophisticated multi-sensorial and heavily meaningful devices that both expose contradictions and foster integration. In his terms, the key symbolic themes displayed in these ‘social dramas’ work through meaning-making operations such as ‘multivocality’, ‘condensation’, ‘unification’ and ‘polarisation’, and partially function by rearranging temporalities and refreshing and repairing connections to times past and the ancestors (Turner, 1967: 27–28). In this sense, we may argue that such rituals, obsessively studied by anthropologists around the world, generally involve significant memory work, although in these early functionalist formulations the colonial context remained invisible and was mostly kept outside the analysis.
As another example of important literature, books like Tortillas for the Gods, a symbolist study of the ritual life of the Maya Tzotzil in Zinacantán (Chiapas, México), neatly showed how the highly patterned ritual sequences of feeding ancestral Gods not only connected the living with the deceased through commensality, but structurally replicated cyclic conceptions of time and the past in contemporary Maya societies (Vogt, 1976: 163–69; Hernández Castillo, 2020). Studies on rituals involving spirit possession and altered states of consciousness, a large subtheme in anthropology, are another clear example of the way deeply embodied rituals may also operate as sensuous time capsules where snippets of the past are reincarnated in mediums and allow direct engagement with selected memories, ancestors and broader social and historical processes – such as colonisation or marginalisation and everyday violence (Stoller, 1995; Ferrándiz, 2004, 2009). Ferrándiz’s dynamic notion of spirit possession as a sort of embodied kaleidoscope – or an embodied videoclip if the temporal layers at work predominantly seep into ritual from popular media –, collapsing and refashioning different temporalities in a ritualized space (2003, 2009), is in tune with Barad’s reflections on temporal entanglements and spacetimemattering. In all the examples above, the cultural analysis of ritual and particularly spirit possession proves the centrality of the body as an infinitely plastic and sophisticated sensuous memory device where, as Stoller describes regarding Hauka spiritism amongst the Songhay in Niger, ‘forces, smells, textures, sights, sounds and tastes all [. . .] trigger social memories’ (Stoller, 1995: 7; see also Connerton, 1989: 72–104).
In the Eighties, a series of well-known ethnographies started to deal more specifically with the study of native historicities and moved beyond notions [fictions] of the timeless primitive untouched by globalizing processes, living outside a pretended universal clock. Marcus and Fischer (1986: 84–106) highlighted the innovative work of authors such as Rosaldo (1980), Todorov (1982), Price (1983), and Sahlins (1985) in exploring allegedly desynchronous senses of time and the past. Renato Rosaldo’s Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History (1980) is a good example of the seminal genealogy established by Marcus and Fischer. His widely known book on headhunting in the Philippines is considered one of the first ethnographies to tackle this issue in a direct fashion. While initially interested in the synchronic study of kinship and social structure, during his fieldwork Rosaldo realized that the Ilongot had a sophisticated sense of memory and equally elaborate notions of the past. In Rosaldo’s words, ‘the scope of my project thus definitely moved beyond social structure to encompass the distinctive ways in which Ilongot conduct is culturally patterned, institutionally grounded and historically produced’ (ibid.: 19). Further, even when Ilongot memories had cleavages, rhythms and materialities largely alien to Western memory epistemologies and practices, they were not limited to remembering a tribal past but had incorporated historical events linked to colonisation. Works such as Rosaldo’s on headhunting in the Philippines reaffirmed the idea that all social groups live in history – indigenous timelessness is but an ethnographic and colonial fiction – and that they build and recreate the connections with the past on their own terms. Yet, though ground-breaking, Rosaldo’s attempt at bringing Ilongot memorial patterns into [Western] focus remains one step shy of epistemological equity.
Michael Taussig’s ‘History as Sorcery’ (1984), later elaborated on his experimental and highly influential Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man (1987) gave a novel twist on past studies on indigenous forms of memory work. Writing with Walter Benjamin in the rear mirror, and basing his reflections on ethnographic fieldwork on Indigenous shamans in Southwestern Colombia, he rejects the notion that indigenous practices are a ‘testimony to the tenacity of tradition’ – for example, in Turner’s or Vogt’s terms –, and puts the focus on the way in which colonial trauma and terror are actually crucial ingredients of native visions of the world and, more concretely, of the contemporary shamanistic practices and the magic associated with them. Ritual practices formerly regarded as priceless survivals-against-all-odds became expression of complex colonial trauma experiences– a kind of appropriation of the past that is ‘anarchical and rebellious in its rejection of chronology and historical accuracy’ – that required novel epistemological grounds to be correctly deciphered. Taussig emphasizes the importance of the technique of montage that is built into these colonial memories that dwell in unstable fashion in contemporary native magic, where ‘otherwise concealed or forgotten connections with the past’ are revealed through juxtapositions that operate in a ‘colonially constructed space of death’ (1987: 88–95), a dynamic, polyphonic and disturbing take on memory not so distant from Barad’s temporal bleedings. Thus, during the process of colonisation, Indigenous, West African and Western concepts of death blended in metaphysical entities such as the evil winds of history or certain memories of figures of savagery – connected to Christian demonology – that constantly and dangerously blow across temporalities. Using the hallucinogenic yagé, ritual specialists operate on these temporal devices where the memories of the victors and the vanquished are both intertwined and in tension, and thus act as mediators in the ‘privileged zone of transformation and metamorphosis’ associated with shamanic beliefs and practices.
If scholars such as Tuner or Vogt implicitly analysed the cross-temporalities contained in seemingly isolated native ritual forms, and Rosaldo represents a generation of researchers highlighting the extraordinary value and sophistication of native memory epistemologies, materialities and idioms, as well as their ability to embed elements and highlights of the colonial experience, Taussig showed how certain contemporary ritual practices can only be understood as a tortured product of colonisation, and had deeply inscribed in them all the violence and terror of the past. Although shying away from Taussig’s provocative formulations on shamanism, history and memory, many other anthropologists have since followed in his footsteps by integrating and refashioning analytical tools derived from academic realms such as cultural history or subaltern and postcolonial studies. Jean and John Comaroff’s book Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (1992), on the South African Twsana is a milestone in this regard. These authors acknowledge that merely replacing dominant regimes of historicity and memory with ‘histories of the repressed’ is less realistic and productive than analysing the tensions and intertwining between them (1992: 17). They argue that to understand the ‘endogenous historicity of local worlds’ it is necessary to do away with ‘the basic tropes of Western historiography – biography and event – by situating being and action, comparatively, with their diverse cultural contexts’ (ibid.: 27). That is, in chronopolitical terms, implicit Western tropes to retrieve, organize and analyse what we understand as ‘the past’ can function as distorting mirrors that blind us to the nuanced understanding of the textures and formats of other culturally bound time constellations. Thus, often times Western analysis of the memory of cultural ‘others’ not only runs the risk of implicitly imposing its own epistemology of time but also its relevant chronotopes to access and make sense of alternate conceptions of the past. To properly access these constellations, the concept of ‘culture’ needs to be reformulated dynamically as a fluid, contradictory and ‘shifting semantic field’ that is neither bound nor free floating but rather ‘empowered in complex ways’ (ibid.: 30).
Following in the footsteps of these authors, analysis of native memories of colonial and postcolonial violences, as well as their interweaving, fractures and dissensions with globalised memorial plots and technologies of memory, have opened a productive route with the potential to promote interesting interfaces with more mainstream studies of memory and trauma (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009; Bond and Craps, 2015). These anthropological studies are on the rise and range from focusing on the local cultural ‘tropes, idioms, narrative, rituals, discipline, power and social context’ of past violences and terror to the conditions and effects of the bureaucratisation or medicalisation of memory in institutionalised settings, where memory is individualised, physiologised and eventually rendered ‘the province of a narrow body of experts’ (Lambeck and Antze, 1996: xiii). Books like Kwon’s sophisticated study of Vietnamese ghosts, representatives of a disjointed time wandering about in the aftermath of civilian massacres during the Vietnam War, provides a nuanced account of phantasmagorical local idioms of dealing with traumatic war memories and the search for social justice (Kwon, 2008). These specifically Vietnamese placeless spectral entities (co bac), locally perceived as alien presences and the opposite pole of ancestors (ong ba), flourished in connection to the proliferation of out of kin graves and buried bodies in many local communities, which disrupt the traditional local commemorative order and dwell in an ambiguous realm in-between, akin to Taussig’s space of death (1987). There, paradoxically, the war that induced them is forgotten as they impose an alternate epistemology of the past to that experienced by the living (Kwon, 2008: 1–9; 21–27). A powerful supernatural idiom to meaningfully negotiate disruptive pasts, comparative hauntology provides another fruitful avenue for widening the cross-cultural range and diversity of the way we understand social memory, its tropes, territories, actors, and institutions (Gordon, 1997; Winter, 1995).
Regarding the second approach, some studies are increasingly focusing on the potential dissonances and frictions between Western Humanitarian, Human Rights or Transitional Justice operatives and local forms and institutions of memory work and social suffering and healing, moving away from the one-size-fits-all model and questioning its unintended effects on local populations. In a European example, Ferrándiz’s work on the contemporary mass grave exhumations of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) discusses how the high impact of forensics as a dominant memory plot in such unburials in Human Rights contexts brings back the acts of paramilitary repression via the logics of the criminal scene, potentially obliterating alternate and nontechnical memory work – a mirror effect he calls phantom militarism (2019). In medical anthropologist Kimberly Theidon’s book on the politics of reconciliation in Peru, based on long-term ethnographic research on the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Quechua victims of the conflict between the State and Shining Path, she critically questions the way in which scientifically established medical syndromes such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), that oftentimes are brought in together with humanitarian interventions and the arrival of peace-making bureaucracies and clusters of international experts, enter in conflict and threaten to colonize indigenous temporalities and memory patterns to the point of their displacement or erasure as exotic beliefs disjointed, or ‘out of time’, from mainstream concepts of truth, justice and reparation (Theidon, 2012).
For Theidon, the Quechua’s specific ‘alchemy of remembering and forgetting’ is highly embodied, and is more likely to frame the traumatic past and notions of restorative justice in terms of ‘aching hearts, lacerating ulcers, masks, faces and foreheads held shamelessly high’ than in culturally alien biomedical symptoms. She stresses how, in the postwar context, Quechua speakers have developed a theory of time and the past integrating afflictions such as susto [soul loss due to fright], llakis [painful memories that fill the body and torment the soul] – to be countered with ritual elements such as agua del olvido [water of forgetfulness] – or mancharisqa ñuñu [frightened breast, teta asustada in Spanish, related to the transfer of intergenerational trauma], all more suited than biomedical symptoms to provide culturally meaningful anchorages to negotiate traumatic memories in local idioms of social suffering and reordering the past. In this context, curanderos or local healers become the most influential memory specialists. Simultaneously, some elements derived from cosmopolitan medical paradigms – such as ‘being traumatized [estar traumado]’ – are also locally deployed in resignified ways, giving way to highly hybridized and complex idioms to access, embody and come to terms with a traumatic past (Theidon, 2012, pp. 12; 25–53). There are many similar examples in contemporary anthropology and cultural and decolonial studies. In her article ‘Mapuche Mnemonics’, for example, Macarena Gómez-Barris (2015) links the longue durée to non-Western epistemologies of time and the past by showing the importance of Mapuche mnemonics for the organisation of social life before and after colonisation. In doing so, she also questions the contemporary Chilean model of transitional justice, which does not allow for considering colonial injustice due to its restricted time frame links.
These examples show how very important insights from anthropology can fecund the field of memory studies when it comes to explore both the vast array of different configurations of being-in-time as well as the myriad entanglements of dominant and subaltern memories at work. This special issue aims to contribute to the ongoing conversation on the role that subaltern and non-hegemonic epistemologies of time and the past can play in the broadening of the field of memory studies, and on the ways their close and nuanced study can further our ongoing debates on temporal diffractions, twilights, multidirectionality and spacetimemattering. In order to do so, as the Comaroffs suggest, there is a need to critically disinvest and decolonise analysis from deeply embedded preconceptions of what ‘the past’ is or means, how it is deployed, what its main communicative devices are in every context, and who its authoritative experts are. The articles in this volume move from specific local examples of distinct epistemologies of time and the past to more hybrid models entangled with global hegemonic patterns.
The first article is based on classic and acclaimed texts such as First Time: The historical Vision of an African American People (1983) and Alabi’s World (1990). With the benefit of hindsight, anthropologist Richard Price (2020) unpacks the specific ways in which the Saamaka people of Suriname have constructed and transmitted the longue durée historical knowledge of their seventeenth and eighteenth-century Maroon ancestors’ liberation – a linear origin story, known as First-Time. Price explores the specific ontology, frames and idioms of this historical knowledge, as well as the (dis)connections to hegemonic colonial memory devices, its evolution in time, the ways of transmission, and the memory specialists (or ‘historians’) who kept and circulated it. This long-term persistence of the past in the present (Assmann, 2013), or deep memory as Price calls it, is as much linear as it is fragmented, in snippets of knowledge and amongst the different clans of the Saamaka, defying authority. And, although Saamakas have an everyday sense of living in a causally linear history, First-Time also acts upon the present, be it through geographical mapping or in the form of avenging spirits which disrupt to a certain extent the causal relations between past-present-future. This piece of classical anthropology shares much of the dilemmas of modern memory scholarship when it comes to activism, globalisation and the management of the past in society and we hope it might add to an exploration of how anthropology and memory studies overlap, share interests and could benefit from each other’s insights.
In the second contribution to this issue, Mexican anthropologist Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo (2020) rethinks her own linear conceptions of time and history through a conversation with Tseltal-Maya scholar Xuno López Intzin. López Intzin explains how he decolonised his mind while rediscovering Maya spirituality. The heart proves to be an important concept in Maya spirituality, which brings its ontological and epistemological claims beyond rational thinking. With that, the heart is also the key concept in Maya epistemologies of the past, since it refers to an emotional and corporal dimension of the past. The Maya peoples understand memory (or history) as a form of becoming, as in the ‘becoming of history’ and the ‘becoming of life’ as a people. The past is embodied, kept as a life experience, in the heart of people who reproduce the past. In the cyclical Maya epistemology of time there is a deep sense that time will return. The dialogue between these two scholars brings about a compelling association between colonialism and the imposition of linear time and hierarchical structures on subaltern groups.
Anthropologist Nancy Chen’s (2020) contribution ‘Making Memories: Chinese Foodscapes, Medicinal Foods, and Generational Eating’ analyses the growing musealisation and the knowledge of traditional and medicinal food that is conveyed from generation to generation. Chen explores the specific contexts in which contemporary Chinese foodways and medicinal recipes connect with past times as well as convey utopian ideals. As such, she looks at how long standing intersections of food and medicine co-constitute social memories produced through foods and eating at commemorations and rituals, as well as at the way notions of safety and reliability surface as renewed ideals of wellbeing and collective identity. The article resonates in an uncanny way with our pandemic present, in which access to food and medicine for wellbeing heavily depend upon their industrialised forms, while activist groups underscore the importance of local production systems and de-acceleration to contain future outbreaks.
In ‘The Vernacular as Method for Memory and Time: A Philological and Cultural Exploration of Filipino Concepts for Memory Studies’, philologist and memory scholar Jocelyn Martin (2020) explores the ways in which Filipino indigenous concepts and contexts, as well as certain loan words, challenge and enter into dialogue with Western ideas in current Memory and Trauma Studies. Martin’s reflection on the Filipino culture surrounding disasters caused by natural events brings about a reconsideration of memory’s relation to the past and the future. Filipino language, which is based on Tagalog, includes a rich array of words referring to memory, many of them include seemingly opposite binaries. Such words unveil a world of deep entanglement between the pervasive agency of natural phenomena, traumatic experiences as a collective and resilience as a strategy in collective memories of traumatic events. In such a world, the need to prepare for an uncertain future influences the conceptualisation of time and memory, which seems much less ‘orderly’ than ideas of linear time might entail. Filipino time is chronological and unpredictable at the same time, linear and non-linear.
Lastly, Australian based scholars Felicity Collins et al. (2020) examine the ways local conceptualisations of memory and time relate to the universalizing ambitions of Memory Studies. Parting from a polyphonic and polytemporal landscape depicted at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s 2020 gala as an example of the complexity of 21st century Australia’s memories, the authors question to what extent insights from memory and trauma studies as developed in Europe and North America – such as intergenerational trauma, postmemory, reconciliation and apology – are fit to the settler-colonial reality of Australia. The piece is polyphonic in itself, as it weaves together the voices of the three authors with the rich examples of Badtjala artist Fiona Foley, the Djap Wurrung Birthing Tree protests in 2019 and the 2017 film The Song Keepers by Naina Sen. Through the analysis of these case studies, the authors wish to avoid the production of a caricature of memory work in Australia, be it the white Australian memory culture, or the First Nations memory imagined as untouched by colonisation or modernity as a redemptive alternative. Instead, the examples in this article show the clashes and contests between (post)colonial Australian memories versus Indigenous, First Nations memories. The text problematises time concepts in all the voices of the polyphony. Far from being non-hierarchical and horizontal (Bhaktin), the Australian polyphonic memory is indeed found to be determined by the legacy of colonial hierarchies.
This last piece quotes the book Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta on indigenous thinking. In this work Yunkaporta posits that indigenous knowledge endures ‘because everybody carries a part of it, no matter how fragmentary. If you want to see the pattern of creation you talk to everybody and listen carefully’ (Yunkaporta, 2019: 14). This description resonates strongly with the Saamaka historians’ work described by Richard Price. Perhaps these two specific examples, entangled with all the pieces in this Special Issue, can inspire us to reconsider Memory Studies as a field which respects and remembers the multifaceted and multitemporal realities and perspectives out there as they ‘bleed through’ and co-constitute our memory worlds. Together, these different conceptions of time might form – following Karen Barad – a diffractive pattern (as interfering waves) which creates profoundly entangled differences ‘within’.
The special issue concludes with a reflective piece from Astrid Erll. Departing from the idea of entangled temporal dynamics, Erll reflects on the current changes in society influenced by the spread of Covid-19. By addressing a ‘new global, combined, yet utterly uneven, régime of “Corona-time”’ (Erll, 2020: 862), the author contemplates how the pandemic has altered the order of time as we knew it.
