Remapping Memory

The Politics of TimeSpace

1994

Jonathan Boyarin, editor
Afterword by Charles Tilly

Explores memory in the context of place and time.

An intriguing collection of essays offering a new way of understanding how the politics of space, time and memory are negotiated to bring people to terms with their history. Space, time and memory are addressed in relation to an event either of historical significance, like the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or cultural significance, like the Indian preoccupation with reincarnation.

Contributors include Akhil Gupta, Charles R. Hale Carina Perelli, Jennifer Schirmer, Daniel A. Segal, Charles Tilly, and Lisa Yoneyama.

Every essay included is engaging and useful.

American Anthropologist

The essays in this book focus on contested memories in relation to time and space. Within the context of several profound cultural and political conflicts in the contemporary world, the contributors analyze historical self-configurations of human groups, and the construction by these groups of the spaces they shape and that shape them. What emerges is a view of the state as a highly contingent artifact of groups vying for legitimacy-whether through their own sense of "insiderhood," their control of positions within hierarchies, or their control of geographical territories.

Boyarin's lead essay shows how the supposedly "objective" categories of space and time are, in fact, specific products of European modernity. Each case study, in turn, addresses the (re)constitution of space, time, and memory in relation to an event either of historical significance, like the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or of cultural importance, like the Indian preoccupation with reincarnation. These ethnographic studies explore fundamental questions about the nature of memory, the limits of politics, and the complex links between them.

By focusing on personal and collective identity as the site where constructions of memory and dimensionality are tested, shaped, and effected, the authors offer a new way of understanding how the politics of space, time and memory are negotiated to bring people to terms with their history.

Contributors
Akhil Gupta, Stanford University
Charles R. Hale, University of California, Davis
Carina Perelli, PEITHO, Montevideo, Uruguay
Jennifer Schirmer, Center for European Studies, Harvard
Daniel A. Segal, Pitzer College, Claremont, California
Lisa Yoneyama, University of California, San Diego

Jonathan Boyarin is the Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Thought in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Storm from Paradise and the editor of Remapping Memory both published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Charles Tilly teaches and directs the Center for Studies of Social Change at the New School for Social Research, New York.

Every essay included is engaging and useful.

American Anthropologist

An intriguing book.

Environment and Planning