Dacia Viejo-Rose

In Spain, the start of the 21st century witnessed an irruption of memory politics, revisiting unresolved questions from the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. It is estimated that over 100,000 individuals died from political violence during the war or the immediate post-war period. Following Franco’s victory, the memory of the winning side was venerated in state-sanctioned commemorations, whilst the memory of the Republican dead was systematically repressed. The transition to democracy failed to confront the legacy of hundreds of clandestine mass graves located throughout Spain. There was no formal truth commission to investigate the mass killing of civilians. From the year 2000 onward, a new endeavor to exhume, identify, and commemorate Republican civilian dead produced a rupture in the prevailing memory politics. Exhumation practices unearthed far more than mortal remains, and the forensic aspects of this work were accompanied by overtly performative actions that sought to fill gaps in the histories of the Republican dead. In this chapter, we will introduce and analyze the ideas, practices, and imaginings of the process of recovering historical memory with particular emphasis on mass graves and exhumations. The emergence of “Historical Memory,” the campaign spearheaded by ARMH, Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory), and the Memory Laws that eventually ensued will be explored.

This chapter explores the different mnemonic and emotional affordances of a range of interconnected sites that constitute warscapes of 20th-century conflict. The types of site that will be examined include mass graves, cemeteries, battlefields, abandoned or “dead” settlements that have been maintained as ruins. The sites vary in the kind of commemorative acts, representations of war, and affective relationships to the dead, which they elicit and enable. This chapter reflects on the experiences of visitors, local communities, and relatives of the dead as they encounter these sites. It will consider key contrasts such as vernacular memorial practices versus official commemoration; military versus civilian death; and heroic or redemptive framings of war versus narratives of mourning and loss. This chapter takes a material culture perspective focusing on the significance of the presence and absence of tangible physical traces of the past including the remains of the dead. Our analysis emphasises the importance of contextualising sites within their wider warscapes. The significance of sites such as battlefields, mass graves, and war cemeteries are understood relationally to each other. The cases considered here are sites of the Spanish Civil War and World War I, drawing on the recent and ongoing recovery and commemoration of war dead in Spain and on the Western Front.

Armed conflict has traditionally seen the targeting and destruction of cultural property and heritage from antiquity to modern conflicts in Syria. Despite the cultural connection between such objects and traditions with people, international law has concentrated on its preservation, prosecution and punishment, rather than reparations for the loss or damage. This article highlights the growing jurisprudence and state practice which suggests a need to rethink this traditional approach and develop a framework for ensuring reparations for damage and destruction caused to cultural property and heritage. This is not only to undo the harm as far as possible, but to ensure the legacy of such culture for future generations. We take a socio-legal approach to these issues drawing from our backgrounds in transitional justice, archaeology and law, to suggest a thicker and contextually relevant approach to reparations, appreciating the reproduction or rehabilitation of culture carries its own meaning and post-conflict societies often convey the violence of the past into the meta-conflict in law and politics of the present. That said, we argue that reparations can play an important role, drawing from human rights law and heritage studies, to remedy the loss to cultural heritage that can more effectively benefit such victims.

If a revolution is taken to be a decisive break with the past, how can there be a heritage of revolution? Conversely, how does any revolution affect tangible and intangible heritage, as well as shifting conceptions of heritage? In this introduction to four papers dedicated to the theme of ‘Heritage and Revolution’, we provide an overview of changing conceptualizations of both ideas and how they have shaped each other since the French Revolution first radically changed both. This special section’s papers developed from the 2017 Annual Seminar of the Cambridge Heritage Research Group. 2017, as the centenary of the February and October Russian Revolutions, provided a global opportunity for reflection on these themes and for analysis of how contemporary heritagization of revolution (or lack thereof) molds and is molded by a society’s conception of itself and its past. At at time of shifting political and heritage paradigms worldwide, this topic remains timely and fascinating.

(2017). Heritage and Peacebuilding. Heritage & Society: Vol. 10, Contesting the Center, pp. 193-197.

Today in heritage studies memory looms larger than ever, there are memory parks, memory politics, and memory wars, there is discussion of ‘dissonant’, ‘dark’, and ‘difficult’ heritage linked to memories of traumatic past events. But what to we mean when we use the word ‘memory’ in the field of heritage? How is the divide between its social and individual realms bridged? This article theorizes the intimate relationship between heritage and memory by focusing on three areas. First, it maps out the vocabulary that has emerged from the heritage-memory dyad including how notions of collective memory and lieux de mémoire have been used, and occasionally misused, as well as the metaphors employed in the process. Second, the emergence of memory studies is considered, providing a brief overview of its foundations as well as assessing how it differs from, overlaps with, and contributes to heritage research. A third section offers a brief review of recent developments in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology relating to memory and how this might inform heritage studies. The concluding discussion provides a synthesis of the theoretical and empirical contribution of memory research to furthering out understanding of cultural heritage and proposes directions for future work on the area of confluence between the two.

War and Cultural Heritage - March 2015