Everyday practices of memory: Authenticity, value and the gift

Abstract

This article develops theories of collective memory by attending to the everyday practices and meaning-making involved in creating and sustaining sites of heritage. While research across disciplines linked to memory studies has increased in recent years, with a notable sociological contribution, as yet ethnographic understandings of how collective memory is produced and maintained through locally situated and embedded practices are not fully realized. Our research took place in the village of Six Bells in the South Wales Valleys, where living memory of a coal mining disaster in 1960 and coal mining itself are slowly disappearing. One of ways in which the people of Six Bells are remembering and commemorating this past is by giving their narratives and artefacts to the community’s ‘heritage room’ as gifts. This form of remembering, prompted by an extraordinary event and the rapid social change associated with deindustrialization, produces and sustains legitimate representations and imaginaries of the past. By developing anthropological understandings of gift exchange, we propose that these practices are one visible component of the claims to authenticity and the bestowal of value active in the memory work of everyday life. We attend to three interrelated characteristics of gift exchange to develop our argument; the importance of the personal in producing authenticity through the gift relation; the provenance and social impetus of the act of giving; and the systems of reciprocity generated across and between generations, which work to assign value to the gift itself.

What matters in the queer archive? Technologies of memory and Queering the Map

“…We argue that liveliness and anonymity also, connectedly, generate an acknowledgement and celebration of personal, ordinary memories made public and extraordinary. Memories are contributed, given, gifted to the archive (Blakely & Moles, 2019) for and as queer heritage. As Cvetkovich calls for above (in Arondekar et al, 2015), we see these elements here affording not (only) an archive inclusive of LGBTQIA+ histories but a collective and collectivising refutation of heteronormativity, a response to historic and contemporary vilifications of sexual and gender diversity.…”

Gastropolitical encounters and the political life of sensation

“…Furthermore, the present example also reflects upon a process of tasting an unknown other (Molz, 2004). Built into this process are tastes of heritage, tradition and national identity (Blakely & Moles, 2019; Holtzman, 2006) as encapsulated in the various sense experience and discourses surrounding such food items. Richly laced with affective intensities of pleasure (in eating pork ribs) and a sense of adventure and risk (durian), this example demonstrates how political gustemology, in perceiving and eating the other, transpires.…”

Imagining futures/future imaginings: creative heritage work with young people in Uganda

“…Heritage works cross-generationally: among other things, it is about inheritance and stewardship, memorialisation and commemoration. Heritage is what is passed to the next generation, and it is inherited and reframed actively and through social practices (Blakely & Moles 2019;Pennell 2018Pennell , 2020. This process involves selecting and deciding on what is valued and worthy of passing on, and this of course often produces and reproduces dominant voices, powerful perspectives and stories that are of benefit to particular social groups.…”