Remembering and Forgetting the Greek Civil War

Maria Couroucli (University of Paris/CNRS)

Remembering and forgetting both refer to the relation of present and past. Until the 1990's, the memory of Civil War in Greece had been repressed. Specialists refer to this as a period of omertà (sic), when public -but also private- discourse successfully feigned to ignore recent national history. Some have argued that  "forgetting" the civil war did have a stabilizing -if not a pacifying- effect on Greek society, but that the omertà (sic) also helped traditional mechanisms and structures -local and family networks and clientelism to maintain themselves in the after-war period, a situation that did not allow for much democracy to develop, especially in the country (Van Boeschotten et al, 2008).  

In this paper I propose to look at the memory of the greek civil war through the eyes of a special "witness", Irene, a student in Athens University who had joined a communist-controlled resistance network, "EA" (Ethniki Allileggyi, National Solidarity) during the Nazi occupation. Irene went hiding during the first year of the civil strife in 1945 to avoid arrest and also because she had become a potential target of right-wing extremists. Her everyday life during the 1950s resembles those of thousands of "Reds" in Greece, treated as second-rate citizens by State authorities.

Most memoirs about this period are informed by Greek political life since the war years: remembrance of specific events are part of a more general picture of the past, informed by subsequent experiences and discussions about this troubled period that have been taking place in Greece in the last twenty years. As Irene lives in France since 1960, her memories of war and Civil War have not really been informed by "social frames" (Halbwachs), constituted within the country. Instead, Irene refers to her own "frames": her memories of the past are informed both by her experience of early post-war Greek society and by her life in France and her interest (but not involvement) in local social and political issues since the early 1960s.

Irene's narrative tends to corroborate the hypothesis that the "collective identity" of the Greek communists was essentially constructed inside prisons and exile camps, well after the war and resistance years, during the period of repression (Farakos 1996; Bournazos and Sakellaropoulos 2000; Vervenioti 2000 and 2008; Voglis, 2002; Fleischer 2003; Kouloglou 2005). This collective identity seems to have been built essentially through specific socializing processes within conditions of confinement, among communities of prisoners and exiles, living under extreme conditions during and after the War and Civil War. This hypothesis is being explored in relation to recent work on the Greek Civil War (Close, Voglis 2002, Kalyvas, 2006, among others) and also to the more general debate about individual and collective inscribed memories and lieux de mémoire, with special reference to Halbwachs and Nora.

The Dilemmas and Transformation of Memory in the Context of Migration:
A Malagasy Example

Jennifer Cole (University of Chicago)

Although migration is a historical commonplace, more people leave their homelands—whether for forced or voluntary reasons—now than ever before in history. Drawing on my fieldwork in eastern Madagascar, this talk examines how memory changes in the context of migration. I consider what happens to memory when people migrate from the country to the city in Madagascar, where I have done fieldwork since 1992.  The first part of this talk explores some of the conceptual links and juxtapositions that tie together memory, place, migration, and culture, as these linkages are made in taken-for-granted sets of assumptions embedded in words, everyday practices, and scholarly thinking, and as these are developed both in Euro-American and in Malagasy cultural practice.  I then consider the social practices through which rural Malagasy construct memories of their ancestors, before examining what happens to memory of ancestors when people move to the city. Finally, I speculate on some of the ways in which memories of ancestors, and the ancestral homeland, are transformed as people migrate to metropolitan France. Although my choice of Madagascar is in part fortuitous, it is also true that Malagasy have a particularly elaborate set of ideas that tie memory to place. My aim is to use this very specific example to sketch a more general set of questions that can be used to explore memory in the context of migration. 

Struggling with the memory of things

Rosemary Joyce (Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley)

Archaeological excavations in a number of neighboring sites in the lower Ulua River Valley of Honduras have encountered structured deposits so dramatic that the intentionalities involved cannot be ignored. Understanding of the way the practices that produced these deposits were organized and reproduced, at times over a span of centuries, has suffered from limits on interpretive imagination imposed by dominant modes of analysis. In these, repeated material patterns are explained as the enactment of set scripts given by a cultural order or social evolutionary stage. The integration of approaches grounded in theories of practice produces especially dramatic changes of perspective in regard to these complex structured deposits. Rather than simply being encoded in a ritual system, the repetition of episodes of burning incense and deposition of ceramic incense-burning vessels at one of these sites, Mantecales, is viewed as the product of complex memory work in which humans and non-humans were mutually active. The understandings of this complex deposit are then used to illuminate other deposits, burials, caches, and architectural fills, as equally part of memory work with greater significance as evidence of the historicizing of practice in place.

Photos of the Event