Memory, Narratives and Events

Disasters

Narratives geo

Definition

Day-to-day vs spectacular

Events

Social difference/power

Fragmented/multiple/contradictory

Memory

Events

Memories materialised?

Temporalities

Gender

Be exclusive

Geography

The geographical
literature includes, at the very least, work on monuments and memorials (Atkinson
and Cosgrove, 1998; Foote, 1997; Forest and Johnson, 2002; Heffernan, 1995; Johnson,
1999; 2003; Marshall, 2004; Till, 1999; Whelan, 2002; Withers, 1996), the holocaust
and commemoration (Azaryahu, 2003; Charlesworth, 1994), cultural landscapes
(Duncan, 1990; Matless, 1998), nostalgia (Blunt, 2003), everyday landscapes and
re-memory (Tolia-Kelly, 2004), the nomenclature of public spaces (Alderman, 2002;
Azaryahu, 1996), the history of geographical knowledge (Withers, 2004), and
`haunted' landscapes (DeLyser, 1999; Hetherington and Degen, 2001; Till, 2005).

Tegg (2007) - environments are analysed in other bodies of work as well as contexts and difference

Tegg (2007) - Yet memory also changes in line with alterations in physical and social
space, whether this be urban transformations, social revolutions, ecological restructur-
ing, or, as Matsuda (1996) has argued, the ways in which new mappings of space and
power restructure the `chronopolitics' of a period and place.

Tagg (2007) - MEMORIES CHANGE OVER TIME; First, memories of an event change
through time. Each recollection is as much a recollection of the last time an event was
remembered as a direct relationship with the event in question. This allows the context
of recall to infiltrate the memory leading to distortion, or enrichment, depending on
perspective. Second, the ways in which memories are formed and valued change as one
moves through time. Different methods and traditions of memory emerge, whereas
evaluations of the utility and accuracy of memory evolve. These evaluations have varied
in relation to memories of individuals and what are conceptualised as collective
memories.

Boym's (2001) postcommunist cities of nostalgia, the materiality of the
environment seeps into, and provokes, memories.

Collective

The relationship between personal and collective memory is an essential component
of the memory literature (Connerton, 1989; Fentress and Wickham, 1992).

The Subaltern Studies Collective has sought to unearth the memories and recollec-
tions of nonelite struggles against colonial and nationalist authority (Chaturvedi, 2000;
Guha, 1982). The status of this nonelite shifted during the 1980s from the peasantry to
women, the urban poor, `untouchables', and other underprivileged subject positions
that had been denied a voice in the archive. The memories of these groups were sought
through attentive detail to oral histories, textual silences, and oppressed versions of
events.

These contexts have included the Revolt of
1857 (the memory of which is still contested through titles such as the Sepoy Mutiny
Reviewing geographies of memory/forgetting 461
or the First War of Independence), violent and nonviolent anticolonial nationalist
movements, independence and partition in 1947, authoritarian actions of the state,
and continued communal violence. The suppression of painful memories within a
respectful adoration of the nation, as mediated by official historians and politicians,
has urged the selective forgetting of loss amidst degrees of national pride and shame
(Das, 1995; Kaul, 2001).

Amin (1995) has illustrated how place based these processes
can be in his examination of the Chauri Chaura incident of 1922, during which a
group of policemen were burnt to death by nationalist campaigners, leading to
Gandhi's suspension of the noncooperation movement. Amin set about grasping
this event not through historical documents, but through recall, although these
recollections could not escape the hegemonic power of juridical and nationalist
discourses.

Pandey (2001) has attempted to extract memories of
partition from narratives that seek to describe it as a blip in a nonviolent narrative by
stressing the force, uncertainty, loss, and confusion that negate any normalisation of
local events. In so doing he described the aftermath of partition in Delhi, from which
330 000 Muslims left and to which 500 000 non-Muslims arrived after 1947. Here, the
overwhelmed city itself became an aide-me¨moire in recollections of the past, being
referred to as a `refugee-istan', a city of horror, whereas the process of migration
was likened to fleeing sudden death only to be buried in a living grave. But the city
itself also became an imaginary space in which memory became creative and nostalgic,
but also forgetful of certain actions.

Tarlo (2003) has shown how such processes were not confined to the immediately
postcolonial period. In her complex and moving description of the afterlife of
the Emergency in Delhi (1975 ^ 77), Tarlo recounts how enforced vasectomies, in the
name of family planning, and slum clearance, in the name of urban planning, were
used to doubly victimise the poor. Memories of this period are unintelligible when read
outside of their places of formation: the now nonexistent slums that punctuated the
landscape; the basement sterilisation `clinics'; the relocation colonies that formed a ring
of poverty around the capital; the local offices which house the files of the relocated;
and the libraries which recount the narratives and counternarratives of this collapse in
Indian democracy (also see Henderson, 1977). As Tarlo suggests, a huge effort has gone
into forgetting the Emergency, but the often illiterate and poverty-stricken survivors of
the period form a countergeography against forgetting that circumscribes the capital
with colonies of remembering (Tarlo, 2000).

What

Smith - 2013 - Memory is a crucial element of how individuals and collectivities
negotiate their histories, presents, and futures.

The process of
social memory cannot be extracted from the practice of knowledge
and power (Rose-Redwood, Alderman, & Azaryahu, 2008).

Smith (2013) - Social
and individual memory is stored and externalized in places
(Halbwach,1992; Irwin-Zarecka, 1994; Johnson & Pratt, 2009; Nora,
1989; Rose-Redwood et al., 2008).

Smith (2013) - Much memory scholarship has
focused on the practice of nationalism in the building of museums
and monuments, the conflict such structures engender, and the role
of elites in forging dominant memory through such landscape
practices (Anderson, 1991; Johnson & Pratt, 2009; Till, 2003).

Legg (2007) observes that work on memory has often neglected
theoretical contributions from beyond the European and North
American contexts, most notably the role of subaltern studies in
working to recover memories that counter those of nationalist
historians, elites, and colonizers (Chaturvedi, 2000; Guha, 1982).

In this section, I will pay attention to collective memories of the environment and environmental change. The literature on this type of memories is limited, given that memory studies have focused on three other key themes: 1) memories of the Holocaust and its consequences (see, for example, (Levy and Sznaider, 2006) (Wolf, 2004) (Assmann, 2010) (Baer and Sznaider, 2017) (Rothberg, 2009)); 2) memories about European nation-state formation, traditions, and identities (for example, (Leggewie, 2009) )(Nicolaïdis and Sèbe, 2014) (Mälksoo, 2014) (2017) ; and 3) the links between memories and transitional justice in contexts of armed conflict ( (Bakiner, 2016) (Buckley-Zistel et al., 2013) (Subotic, 2009) (Lind, 2008) ).

When memories of environmental change are expressed through narratives, they become a representation of ‘both a moral order and a way of making sense of their [human actors’] current experiences’ (Perreault, 2018).

Narratives anthropology

positionality + role of anthropologist

Sacks (1992) notes, storytelling rights are partially constrained by the nature of the teller's involvement in the narrated events (see also Shuman 1986).

Differentiated by and Reinforcing social order

Sidnell (2000) her anthropological research about young men's involvement in rum shops in a rural Indo-guyanese village highlights how adult men tell stories in these shops. Participation in storytelling is a way for men to demonstrate membership in the community. However, the stories told allow for differentiated participation based on age, experience and expertise. In the context of rumshop conversations, men use this differential access to stories to display important aspects of the social order to one another in their talk.

Flooding

Role storytelling

Membership in a community

Sidnell (2000) - part of a community of adult men

Schegloff notes that people generally tell stories to do something—"to complain, to boast, to inform, to alert, to tease, to explain or excuse or justify, or to provide for an interactional environment in whose course or context or interstices such actions and interactional inflections can be accomplished" (1997a:97). Recipients of stories are oriented to the story as a recognizable unit of talk distinguished by a variety of formal
features, and also to what is being accomplished through its telling. Schegloff goes on to remark that given this, it is not at all surprising to find that the project being implemented
in the telling of a story informs its constructional features, the details of the telling, as well as the manner in which it is received by its recipients (Goodwin 1984; Sacks 1978).

Ponder on and understand the social context people live in

Sidnell (2000) - I have suggested that stories are told in Indo-Guyanese rumshops as a way of displaying knowledge and situating the participants within a local social order. I have presented evidence to suggest that the participants themselves oriented to this interactional purpose behind storytelling and, further, that this purpose influenced the design of particular turns and the shape of a larger telling. My goal has been to argue that social relations and talk exist in a mutually constitutive relationship. Social organization is reflected in talk and realized in and through the details of its production and uptake.

Event

Mattingly et al. (2002) - 9/11 USA - This article considers the relationship
among these events, the stories told about them,
and the ongoing construction of personal and collective
identities.
If stories are useful for exploring the meaning of September
11, the reverse is also true. September 11 offers a
place in which to examine the cultural work of stories.

For example, Mattingly et al. (2002) described how the Afro American women from working class and low-income backgrounds constructed narratives of the 9/11 event in the United States of America. They argue that these stories provide vehicles for women to ponder on which social contexts they live in, within what sort of subject position they are placed and how these processes are changing in lights of the attacks in America's War on Terrorism.

Mattingly et al. (2002) - Thus, another primary
question asked in this article is this: What do we learn
about personal stories themselves, as simultaneously individual
and collective, by examining intimate, emotionfilled
narratives told about the most publicly shared national
event of the last half century? How, then, does
September 11 provide a powerful occasion—cultural material—
for exploring the way personal stories are used to
construct meaning?

Features

Mattingly et al. (2002) - three features of personal stories: Three key features of personal stories
are considered here: first, the way that stories portray life
in the breach; second, how stories operate within a double
landscape, a landscape of observable "public" acts and an
internal psychic plane of beliefs, feelings, and emotions;
and, third, the way stories construct and reflect on multiple
positionalities that can allow for subtle moral readings
of situations, actions, and individuals. Stories offer accounts
in which there are multiple actors, often occupying
multiple subject positions. In the stories we examine,
these are based (though not exclusively) on race, gender,
class, and the more specific stance of mother.

Moral stances

Mattingly et al. (2002) - The stories
and commentaries recounted here illuminate the
shifting stances women take up in and through talk, specifically
moral stances concerning September 11 and
America's "War on Terrorism.' Their discourse speaks to
the salience of specific variables of identities (e.g., race,
class, and motherhood), in light of the extraordinary
events of September 11. In general, the discussions and
stories of these women convey a strong resistance to aligning
with a pro-American or patriotic stance. In this, the
women are not alone within either the African American
community or America's female population.

Resistance/structures

Mattingly et al. (2002) - Their discourse speaks to
the salience of specific variables of identities (e.g., race,
class, and motherhood), in light of the extraordinary
events of September 11. In general, the discussions and
stories of these women convey a strong resistance to aligning
with a pro-American or patriotic stance.

Mattingly et al. (2002) - Stories
are particularly able to convey the moral ambiguity of
life, the way one can passionately believe two contradictory
things at once, or how those things one passionately
believes and feels can put one in a position where one is
acting and believing what, under other circumstances, one
eschews. Morality is revealed as nuanced and situated.

Context

Mattingly et al. (2002) - Finally, the power and meaning of these women's stories
do not reside with form and content alone. Nadine's
story and those of the other women are not free-floating
texts but, rather, speech acts carried out within particular
contexts. Their stories illuminate both the personal and
the cultural in a particularly effective way because of the

Maintaining friendships

Byler (2021) - In Northwest China, young Uyghur men foster friendships with one another as they flee colonial dispossession in their villages and migrate to the city. These friendships which ultimately offer forms of protection in these migrants' lives are enacted through storytelling about colonial violence.

Meaning-Making

Byler (2021) - Friendships gave young Uyghur men a daily space for the “subjective in-between” of storytelling (Arendt 1958, 182–
84). As the anthropologist Michael D. Jackson (2002) has argued, storytelling is a way of giving order and consistency to events in the lives of modernist subjects, who often begin to experience their lives through a life-path narrative of “free will” and self-actualization. In personal stories, market oriented subjects—often the narrators—become the main characters rather than bit players on the sidelines of social change. It is not just that stories give meaning to human lives in general, but rather that they change how people “experience the events that have befallen [them] by symbolically restructuring them” (Jackson 2002, 16).

Byler (2021) - By defining
lives, stories supply people with a way of overcoming the
way social structures block them fromrealizing their hopes.
By narrating existence and staging representations of their
lives, modernist subjects make their words and thoughts
stand in the place of the world. As Jackson points out, what
is crucial here is to understand that stories are not identical
with the structure of societies—rather, storytelling is important
because it shows subjects how they live. Their importance
rests, then, not in whether stories are true or whether
they offer a sense of hope, but in what they indicate about
systems that constrain people and what this knowledge enables
subjects, particularly colonized subjects, to do.

Byler (2021) - anti-colonial - Over the period of this study, the
intensification of policing turned storytelling and the being
together it fostered into a sharply anti-colonialmode of care
and empowerment, one that resonates with the decolonial
struggles of Indigenous men elsewhere. Sharing stories of
trauma and emasculation opened up spaces of care and belonging for Uyghurs, a process that resembled those studied
by Robert Alexander Innes and Kim Anderson (2015) among
alienated Indigenous young men in North America.

Byler (2021) - This, also, is
the work of anthropology: listening to and telling the stories
of friends in order to make them matter.

Miller et al. (1990) - Of all interactions of narrative and self, perhaps bone is more common than that which occurs in ordinary talk when people relate to one another their personal experiences. Indeed, telling other people about events that have happened to oneself may well be a cultural universal. We know, at leat, that versions of this type of storytelling occur in diverse cultural traditions the United States and around the world. One encounter in the anthropological and folklore literatures narrators who heard witches in the dead of night; witnessed sudden, fatal fights in bars; outwitted foreign intruders for school principles; coped with errant children or survived hunting accidents. Despite the diversity of events recounted, despite substantial differences in verbal form and style of performance, all these narrators lay claim to some personal experience and, in so doing, reveal something about themselves. Stories of this sort, then, provide one widely available means by which people create, interpret, and publicly project culturally constituted images of self in face-to-face interaction.

Social support/lives

Soblin (1998) - Narratives play an important role in the organization of therapeutic action in rural Mali. This article provides structural and interpretive analyses of a young, French-speaking Dogon woman s accounts of her efforts to manage her menstrual bleeding and threatened infertility. Through her personal narratives she creates social arenas to recruit support, negotiate changes in her family relationships, and enhance her standing as a member of the community. Beginning with the accounts of her fear and helplessness, the narrator integrates past events into her unfolding present and achieves a meaningful resolution of her problem. Her narratives weave together encounters with family members, friends, and healers to
describe a therapeutic itinerary that acquires significance as a transformative experience,

Samuels (2016) - a focus on embodiment,I suggest, is an important addition to current work in the anthropology of narratives that, while acknowledging that they may regularly help to create ‘meaning’, argues that their primary effect is to create a shared world and enable people to simply ‘be-with others (Zigon 2012).

Zigon (2012), cited in Samuels (2016) - Jarrett Zigon (2012) that aims to move away from the dominant focus on the meaning-making capacity of narratives. Zigon argues that what narratives most significantly reveal how individuals intersubjectively live in their world together, even though they often do not create meaning and foster mutual understanding. Narrative interactions, from this perspective, are primarily struggles to regain comfortable relations with others and with the world. They are efforts to'keep-going' (Zigon 2012: 216), or, as Zigon has argued elsewhere, attempts to regain'attunemenť with the world (Zigon 2014).

Samuels (2016) - Different futures and pasts, including the narrated event itself, narratively structured the experience of storytelling - which is, as Richard Bauman (1986) pointed out three decades ago, a temporal and intersubjective event that emerges in the interplay between performance, text, and the contents of the story told.

Samuels (2016) - Instead, following Zigon (2012), I suggest that these narratives' more fundamental accomplishment is a sense of 'sharedness' and being-with-others’, a relationally that they achieve through conveying poignant bodily experiences.

Most importantly, then, what these stories reveal is that by temporally integrating the narrated event and the narrative event through the body, narratives are part of the embodied work of making the everyday liveable and the future possible, of remaking the social world in a post-disaster society.

Samuels (2016) - The narratives I analyse below were told to me in the context of interviews conducted as part of my ethnographic fieldwork on the post-tsunami remaking of everyday life in Aceh. Between 2007 and 2012, I spent thirteen months in and around Aceh's capital,Banda Aceh, living and participating in the everyday life of two neighbourhoods severely damaged by the tsunami and conducting over eighty interviews with residents in these and other neighbourhoods.

Experience

Samuels (2016) - The exploration of tsunami narratives as embodied' has led me to foreground the role of the body in narrative experience and, more generally, to interpret narratives as efforts of remaking relations with the world and others.

Samuels (2016) - Ethnographic studies, moreover, show how narrative and experience are intertwined in the process of mutual creation, a process Mary Steedly has called 'narrative experience' (1993: 15; see also Ochs 8c Capps 1996) and that Rober Desjarlais eloquently captures by arguing that 'the phenomenal and the discursive, life as lived and life as talked about, are like the intertwining strands of a braided rope, each complexly involved in the other, in time' (2003: 6).

Samuels (2016) - The innovative work of Cheryl Mattingly has taken the relation between narrative and experience in a novel direction by showing how action and experience themselves are often narratively structured (Mattingly 1998; 2010).

Samuels (2016) - Not only is there no such thing as 'raw' experience informing after-the-fact narratives, but people's actions and 811interactions in everyday engagements are often narratively structured, as they build on imaginations of future ends and past events in relation to which actions unfold asa narrative. These lived, but often untold, narratives assume a certain plot that can only emerge because of the futures and pasts that lay beyond the particular interaction concerned. In this way, Mattingly carves out a highly original and nuanced perspective on the relation between narrative and experience, arguing that The intimate connection between story and experience results from the structure of action itself (1998: 19).

Disasters

Samuels (2016) - stories of the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia illustrate a sense of sharedness and being with others, a relationality that they achieve through conveying poignant bodily experiences. These stories reveal a glimpse of post-disaster recovery.

Cassim et al. (2015) - Narrative health research (Bury, 1982; Murray,
2000; Radley, 2009) foregrounds how illness
can disrupt a person’s life story, requiring an
active response as part of the recovery process.
We have reapplied these ideas to inform our
understanding of human responses to natural
disasters.

Cassim et al. (2016) - Life narratives that provide a mode for organising and obtaining a sense of meaning for one’s experiences are produced from various socio-cultural resources that are refined through the dialectics of everyday life (Billig, 2008; Hodgetts et al., 2010). Personal narratives are generated from communal level narratives held within communities (Murray, 2000; Rappaport, 2000). According to Sarbin’s (1986) narrative principle, ‘human beings think, perceive, imagine, interact and make moral choices according to narrative structures’ (p. 9), which are shared with others. Such disruptions can necessitate people to reassemble their very sense of self and life. Their efforts at restorying themselves are given form in language, the arts and material practices (Radley, 2009).

Cassim et al. (2015) - Narrative reconstruction via artistic endeavour enables people to render events and experiences tangible. Creative works can act as transitional objects that attach people to the memory of loved ones lost (Witztum and Malkinson, 2009).

Debates

Cassim et al. (2015) - materiality of narratives - Central to this study is the metonymic function
of material objects. Maintaining bonds
with lost loved ones through the preservation of
objects such as clothing, the composition of
poetry and carrying out rituals facilitates healing.
Material objects and associated practices
facilitate the repair of life narratives by acting
as transitional entities, providing media through
which loved ones can communicate and maintain
bonds with the deceased (Glazer and
Marcum, 2003; Green, 2008; Stephens, 2007;
Witztum and Malkinson, 2009).

Samuels (2015) - embodiment of narratives

Slobin (1998) - aspects of narratives

Miller et al. (1990) - different aspects of narratives

Byler (2021) - narratives to nurture and keep different friendships

Cassim et al. (2015) - Research into collective memory also suggests
that ‘memory is not only “stored in brains”
but rather distributed through social artefacts
and cultural tools’ (Beckstead et al., 2011: 195).
In addition to acting as markers for social
events, objects become instrumental for understanding
the past and come to embody stories
relating to past events or narratives (Beckstead
et al., 2011). Objects such as a child’s dress can
acquire a ‘secular sacred character’ as more
than symbols of the past (Morgan and Pritchard,
2005).

Cassim et al. (2015) - Our participants’ actions of remembrance
through the construction and use of material
objects are congruent with Buddhist perceptions
of life, death and rebirth as being part of a
cycle of renewal (cf. Aronson, 2004; Wada and
Park, 2009).

Cassim et al. (2015) - in their discussion about the importance of material objects in the shaping of narratives about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami highlight how these narratives are shaped by cultural and religious Buddhist believes. For example, the believe that life does not end with death in Buddhism shaped the stories about the tsunami.

Simspon & Corbridge (2006) - This article explores the politics of reconstruction and the competing memorial practices that emerged after a
devastating earthquake in western India during 2001. The material is drawn from extensive ethnographic research
and analyses of the politics of rehabilitation in the ‘‘prememorial era,’’ the period before an official memorial
is erected when the gap between the signified (the earthquake) and the signifier (the memorial) is still
wide open and meanings and narratives of the disaster are being created, rehearsed, and contested. Many of the
reconstruction initiatives undertaken after the disaster are inseparable from the politics of contemporary Hindu
nationalism. Consequently, the main sections of the article examine the political nature of memorial practices
and ideas about reconstruction in relation to expressions of nationalism and regionalism.

Simpson and Corbridge (2006) - In their study on memories of earthquake in Western India in 2001 - Our focus here is on the period between the
event and its public memorialization—between what
might be called the signifier and the signified. During
this time memorial practices grew out of numerous private
and small-scale projects, and embraced artifacts
such as photograph albums and the walls of a house, as
well as funerary and calendrical rites and other low-key
public dramas.

Simspon & Corbridge (2006) - describe how Indian political and nationalist organisations provided disaster relief in the 2001 Gujarat earthquake. By doing so, they shaped the narratives and memories that were created and shaped in this process.

It has been observed that postdisaster environments commonly exacerbate social trends that were waxing prior the disaster (Hoffman and Oliver-Smith, 2002)