Ethnographying Public Memory:The Commemorative Genre for the victims of Terrorism in Italy

Abstract

This article addresses one concern that is central to much of the sociology of memory currently ongoing: how can we remember terror and how can we forget it? And moreover, is there any cultural shape of remembering terror, which is more suitable than others? By addressing the issue of the social representation of a very controversial past - the massacre at the Bologna railway station in 1980 - the focus is here on the relation between the collective knowledge of public events, such as a terror attack, and the process of their fixing and shaping into social practices (commemorative ceremonies) and cultural objects (public symbols of the slaughter). It will be shown how, in the Bologna case, this process reflects tensions and articulates contradictions in the public inscription of the legitimate version of this past, between state and civil society. It will be argued that, due to a specific group of agents of memory - composed primarily by the association of the victims’ relatives and the committees of solidarity founded in the city during the last two decades - the structure of the commemorative ceremony has led to the public fixing of a specific genre of memorization in Italy for the victims of terrorism. This genre, that defines the number of its degrees of freedom (the range of possible variation within itself), becomes a crucial key to understanding the public making of cultural memories. The methodological considerations that arise from this research are related to the possible ways to analyse controversial versions of the past. It will be shown how ethnographying public enactment of personal experience and interviewing the victims and their relatives represent a very specific type of research experience, where many usual assumptions used by qualitative interviews are violated.

Ethnography and Organizational Processes

“…Ethnography or, to emphasize the processual nature of doing ethnography itself, ethnographying (Tota, 2004;de Jong, Kamsteeg and Ybema, 2012) typically means three things: (i) doing research (fieldwork), (ii) understanding the world with an orientation toward sensemaking (sensework), and (iii) articulating and presenting those understandings (textwork). The first of these refers to research done through prolonged and intensive engagement with the research setting and its actors, combining different fieldwork methods (observing, with whatever degree of participating; talking to people, including interviewing; and/or the close reading of research-relevant documents).…”

More than a method? Organisational ethnography as a way of imagining the social

“…In fact, the recognition of a distinct informal organisation was not only the result of Warner's interviews but of his capacity to imagine the social world of Hawthorne and the Bank Wiring Room. It was the capacity to observe, the social sensibility of imagining when ethnographing (Tota 2004), with what Beth Bechky describes as "anthropological sensibility" (Bechky 2013, 97), or, in Barbara Czarniawska-Joerges' (1992 words, an "anthropological frame of mind" that made it possible for Warner to understand that the informal organisation at Hawthorne "also included their immediate supervisors" (Morey andLuthans 2013 [1987], 84). Warner was reported to be obsessed with "keep[ing] a continuous record of all activity that was observable" (ibid.…”

Making the Familiar Strange: A Case for Disengaged Organizational Ethnography

“…In these, strangeness was the given, and immersion in the field countered it. When 'ethnographying' within one's own culture (Chock, 1986;Tota, 2004) -and that is where organizational ethnography is often done -we are much more like fish trying to discover the water that surrounds us. For organizational ethnographers, the very 'un-strangeness' of the surroundings in their research prevents them from seeing it.…”