Memory worlds: Reframing time and the past – An introduction

Abstract

This article, a prologue to the special issue ‘Memory Worlds: Reframing Time and the Past’, is a follow-up to the plenary session ‘Connecting Memory Traditions around the World’, organised by the authors in the Third Annual Conference of the Memory Studies Association held in Madrid (2019). Elaborating on the work of critical physicists such as Rovelli and Barad, it calls into question hegemonic conceptions of linear time and the past in two ways. First, by bringing in crucial concepts elaborated in the field of memory studies that anticipate, support or may accommodate this claim. Secondly, by summoning social anthropology to the debate, as a field where subaltern epistemologies of time and the past have become a crucial area of research in the last decades. The article calls for the broadening of the Memory Studies agenda in order to move beyond implicit well-established conceptions of linear time that may obscure or obliterate alternate epistemologies, usually dwelling in the margins.

Using restorative justice to rethink the temporality of transition in Chile

“…A focus on history and memory further challenges transitional justice's temporal assumptions. There is no uncontested history out there, 'behind us', for us to dig up (Ignatieff, 1996). Yet, in practice, transitional justice initiatives that seek to bring to the surface 'the truth' about 'the past' often utilise a rationality suggesting that dealing with 'the past' will enable the achievement of a positive future that is deemed morally acceptable.…”

What journalism tells us about memory, mind and media

“…The need to conceptualise the fuller extent of time's impact on memory has recently drawn the attention of scholars in memory studies. As Hristova et al (2020, 777) observe in their special issue of Memory Studies on the topic, the time concepts underlying both theoretical and empirical work on memory remain largely ‘undiscussed and undefined’, despite the fact that ‘time, and how we conceptualize it, is a, if not the , foundational basis for creating and analyzing memory’. Collective memory, they argue, ‘could be defined as the sociocultural process of producing time in society’ (778).…”

‘Putting heart’ into history and memory: Dialogues with Maya-Tseltal philosopher, Xuno López Intzin

“…Although anthropologist have always been concerned with the documentation of non-Western conceptions of time and memory, as the editors of this special Issue have shown us in their chronological analysis presented in the introduction (Hristova et al., 2020), their analyses very rarely enter into a serious dialogue with the local Indigenous intellectuals. They succeeded in confronting the representation of Indigenous peoples as ‘timeless’ by documenting their memory patterns, but their discursive colonialism considered their theorizations about the world as ‘data’ to be analysed, and not as vernacular theories to be debated.…”