Archives de catégorie : What

What are these memories

About the Proteus Project

Egyt, 2020 (Credits, Michèle Baussant)

This project stems from a longstanding dialogue between two researchers, Katja Hrobat Virloget and I, between research questions, which began several years ago. Since our discussion, in a Parisian café, during a research visit by Katja Hrobat Virloget, funded by the French Cultural Institute in Slovenia, we have been working together on an ongoing basis on silenced pasts and populations that have been displaced, replanted, replaced, or left behind. This collaboration led us to naturally embark on a program such as Proteus to pursue this work and imagine larger-scale projects with colleagues, permanent researchers, and young researchers.

The project deals with the effects of mass depopulations and repopulations following systemic changes – where the political, socio-economic system changes radically. Many studies are increasingly concerned with the massive displacement of populations due to wars and collapsing intra- and extra-European empires, traces and persistent effects of empires in nations in terms of domination, silences, or competing histories of separated nations and actors. However, few works studies have paid systematic attention to the crossed and parallel social constructions of the presence and absence of the other and, therefore, the self. Often translated into “spatial” terms, these constructions overlap several fields rarely grasped together, such as landscape, lived space, intimate one, history, objects, practices, and language. They challenge the binary identifications and home-making framed by nationalism.   

Based on in-depth qualitative research on various case studies, the project draws on anthropological, historical, and sociological work on the relationship between space and memory. On the one hand, it examines the effects of the national on intertwined, hybrid, and ambivalent histories, spaces, memories, identifications and borders, displacements, circulations, translations, and relationships shaped by and shared through the matrix of the space-time of empires, in their various forms. On the other hand, it questions how these social constructions disclose specific relations and effects between different actors.

Nowadays, Europe is trying to rebrand its image of a dark continent and claim the need to decolonize its history, heritage, and spaces while closing its borders to migrants. However, Europe is also advocating unity in diversity by purging its near past of empire-building, which is still echoing the national entities’ social structures.

These points raise at least two critical concerns for us:

1.How did the fragmentation of multicultural entities into nations produce a reduction of histories and cultures instead of diversity? How does it build the absence of whole segments of peoples, landscapes, languages, cultures, religions, histories, and relationships in a few decades? To what extent the constructed loss of home and homeland of those we are currently “absent” is inextricably linked to the gaining of home and homeland for those who stayed and/or replaced them?

2. Secondly, the research raises questions about nation-building and Europe’s very temporality today, which built itself on an “inverted” temporality of belonging, citizenship, and home for large segments of its populations. This inversion manifests in processes of “undoing” rights and “undoing” identity, relationship to places, and to live together.

Following this line of analysis, the cross-analysis of current spatial and social constructions of absence and presence of the displaced/remained/replaced in different European contexts offers not only an empirical arena but also a powerful analytical tool for exploring and rethinking the local version of processes of inclusion and exclusion, of presence and absence, adhesion and disaffiliation within Europe. It also leads us to explore the question of ‘historical traumas’, particularly when they are mobilized as ‘founders’, and to reflect on possible ways out of the painful alternative of ‘remembering everything’ and/or ‘forgetting everything’.

proteus webinar

Le CEFRES et l’Université Primorska organisent le premier webinaire Proteus dans le cadre du programme bilatéral PHC (Partenariat Hubert Curien) Proteus.

Quand : Mercredi 14 avril 2021, de 14h00 à 18h00
Où : En ligne (voir le lien ci-dessous)
Langue : Anglais
Organisateurs : CEFRES et Université de Primorska
Financement et évaluation : Campus France, Institut français de Slovénie,Agence de recherche slovène, MEAE et MESRI,  Ministère des sciences slovène.

Ce webinaire s’intéresse aux représentations actuelles du “démantèlement” et du “re-membrement” des empires intra- et extra-européens, suite à la Première puis à la Seconde Guerre mondiale, qui ont refondu les populations, les paysages, les frontières, les historiographies, les appartenances et les mémoires. Aujourd’hui, alors que les pays européens s’efforcent de former un monde, un espace et une histoire en commun, ils restent réticents à aborder ces héritages fantomatiques des empires et des guerres qui ont entraîné le déplacement forcé et la disparition de millions de personnes, comme les minorités ethniques expulsées de Prusse orientale et de Silésie, les Allemands des Sudètes et de Bucovine, les Italiens de l’ex-Yougoslavie, les Portugais d’Angola et du Mozambique, entre autres. 

Comment et pourquoi certains souvenirs des déplacements ont-ils été effacés, ignorés, oubliés, et d’autres sont-ils entrés dans les mémoires et commémorés ? De quelle manière ont-ils encore de l’importance aujourd’hui en Europe et au-delà ? Dans quelles circonstances, certaines caractéristiques du passé sont-elles restées si persistantes et résilientes ?

L’objectif du webinaire proposé est de répondre à ces questions en explorant des mémoires collectives parallèles, offrant des images qui chacune se reflète dans l’autre : les mémoires des personnes déplacées, et les mémoires de ceux qui sont restés et/ou ont (re)peuplé les espaces culturels et physiques après eux. A partir d’études de cas spécifiques de mouvements de dépeuplement et de repeuplement liés à l’histoire européenne troublée du XXème siècle et aux vestiges des empires et des guerres, nous avons l’intention d’explorer ce que les mémoires et les silences font aux lieux et ce que les lieux font aux mémoires et aux silences.

Programme

14h00 – 14h20

Courte présentation du Programme Proteus par Valentine Morel, attachée de coopération scientifique et universitaire au Ministère des Affaires étrangères français en Slovénie, et du projet par 

Michèle Baussant et Katja Hrobat-Virloget

Divisés et déracinés

14h20 – 14h35

Aleksej Kalc
, Académie slovène des sciences et des arts, Institut slovène des migrations (Ljubljana), Université de Primorska, Faculté des sciences humaines (Koper)
Transferts de population et transformations ethniques à Koper et Trieste après la Seconde Guerre mondiale : quelques aspects

14h35 – 14h50

Neža Čebron Lipovec
, Université de Primorska, Faculté des sciences humaines
La “continuité visuelle” du paysage dans une ville contestée : le rôle de l’architecture dans le processus d’enracinement d’une communauté

14h50 – 15h05

Petra Kavrečič
, Université de Primorska, Faculté des sciences humaines
Vivre à la frontière. La vie quotidienne dans la région frontalière d’Istrie après la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

Courte discussion de 15h05 à 15h20, Ghislaine Glasson-Deschaumes, cheffe de projet du Labex Passés dans le présent, Université Paris Nanterre

Pause de 15h20 à 15h30

Refaire, rester et s’implanter

15h30 – 15h45

Felipe Kaiser-Fernandes, CEFRES/ IIAC
Quand les paysages déchirés sont refaits : la politique des bazars post-socialistes en République tchèque.

15h45 – 16h00

Katja Hrobat Virloget
, Université de Primorska, Faculté des sciences humaines
A propos de ceux qui sont venus. Frontières symboliques et questions de “chez soi” après “l’exode” en Istrie.

16h00 – 16h15

Irene Dos Santos, CNRS/URMIS, boursière ICM
Les débris impériaux dans l’Angola post-colonial : le silence de ceux qui sont restés après 1975

Courte discussion de 16h15 à 16h30, Ghislaine Glasson-Deschaumes, cheffe de projet du Labex Passés dans le présent, Université Paris Nanterre

Pause de 16h30 à 16h40

Traces et espaces d’entre-deux

16h40 – 16h55

Maria Kokkinou, CEFRES et Université Charles
Tiehonin : Mémoires persistantes d’espaces transformés

16h55 – 17h10

Johana Wyss, Académie tchèque des sciences/CEFRES et Institut Max Planck d’anthropologie sociale
L’identité silésienne : entre récits hégémoniques et contre-récits

17h10 – 17h25

Michèle Baussant, CNRS, CEFRES (USR3138, CNRS, Mae), Boursière ICM
Histoires déplacées sans traces et traces du passé sans histoire : les Juifs égyptiens en et hors d’Egypte

Discussion de 17h25 à 18h, Ghislaine Glasson-Deschaumes, cheffe de projet du Labex Passés dans le présent, Université Paris Nanterre

Pour rejoindre la réunion, cliquez sur le lien suivant : https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87114991116

Southeast European Studies. A state of the art in Germany, Italy and Croatia

31. March 2021 – 15:00-17:00 CET  

with 

Ulf Brunnbauer, University of Regensburg

Francesca Rolandi, Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences

Igor Duda, Juraj Dobrila University of Pula.

The seminar will be moderated by Nadège Ragaru (Sciences Po Paris), Milica Popović (Sciences Po Paris) and Anne Madelain (INALCO Paris)

The working language will be English.

The seminar will be online. Virtual room : https://zoom.us/j/98684093674

When entering type in your name.

Plus d’infos sur : https://sferes.hypotheses.org/

Past in the present: migration and the uses of history in the contemporary era

25 March 2021 13h30 – 15h30

A Tandem Webinar
organized by Catherine Perron (Centre for international relations (CERI) – SciencesPo: Research group migrations and mobilities and Johana Wyss (Czech Academy of Sciences/CEFRES), with the collaboration of Michèle Baussant (CEFRES, CNRS) and Maria Kokkinou (CEFRES/Charles University).

Date: March 25th, 2021, 1.30 to 3.30 pm
Place: Online (see the Zoom link below)
Language: English

Lecturers:

Christophe Bertossi – Centre for Migration and Citizenship, French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), Paris/Department INTEGER, Fellow Institut Convergences Migrations, Paris
Jan Willem Duyvendak –  University of Amsterdam (UvA), /Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW), Amsterdam
Nancy Foner – Hunter College and Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York

Will be presenting the Special Issue they published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Discussants:

Wulf Kansteiner – School of Culture and society – History subject – Aarhus University, Denmark
Evelyne Ribert – CNRS/Institut interdisciplinaire d’anthropologie du contemporain (IIAC)/EHESS – Fellow Institute Convergences Migrations

For more information about the Tandem programme, see the website: https://cefres.cz/en/tandem-program.

To join the Zoom meeting, please click on the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84864576020

      

Le passé au présent : usages de l’histoire et migration à l’époque contemporaine

25 mars 2021 13h30 – 15h30

Webinaire Tandemorganisé par  Catherine Perron  (Centre de recherches internationales de SciencesPo, CERI : Groupe de recherche migrations et mobilitiés et Johana Wyss (Académie tchèque des sciences / CEFRES) avec la collaboration de Michèle Baussant (CEFRES / CNRS) et Maria Kokkinou (CEFRES / Université Charles).

Date : 25 mars 2021, 13h30 à 15h30
Lieu : En ligne (lien Zoom disponible ci-dessous)
Langue : Anglais

Intervenants :

Christophe Bertossi – Centre for Migration and Citizenship, French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), Paris/Department INTEGER, Fellow Institut Convergences Migrations
Jan Willem Duyvendak – Sociology, University of Amsterdam (UvA), /Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW), Amsterdam
Nancy Foner – Hunter College and Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

Ils présenteront le numéro spécial du Journal of ethnic and migration studies : Past in the present : migration and the uses of history in the contemporary era.

Discutants :

Wulf Kantsteiner – School of Culture and society – History subject – Aarhus University – Denmark
Evelyne Ribert – CNRS / Institut interdisciplinaire d’anthropologie du contemporain (IIAC)/ EHESS – Fellow Institut Convergence Migration

Pour plus d’informations sur le programme Tandem, veuillez consulter ce site : https://cefres.cz/fr/programme-tandem.

Pour vous connecter à la réunion, voici le lien Zoom :https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84864576020

, « Matrices coloniales, diasporas inversées et constellations égyptiennes : une ethnographie multisituée des Juifs d’Egypte »

Séminaire Mobilités et Appartenances (EHESS-Marseille), organisé par Francesca Sirna et Melissa Blanchard

Jeudi 11 mars, 11h00-13h00

Pour cette séance nous accueillerons  :  Michèle Baussant, CNRS, CEFRES,  Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique et Fellow ICM

La discussion sera introduite par : Isabelle Grangaud, CNRS, CNE.

En raison des conditions sanitaires actuelles, cette séance sera accessible au public uniquement en visioconférence via zoom (lien de connexion ci-dessous):

https://zoom.us/j/99442886237?pwd=aEdDZzNneEpmcW93S3lSc0piQjNDZz09

Faire territoire Faire société

UMR Environnement Ville Société

Vendredi 26 mars 2021 (10-12h30)

“Mémoires vives, mémoriaux et actualités politiques : quelles traductions spatiales pour quels enjeux sociaux ?”.

Les notions de mémoires vives, d’actualités politiques, de cicatrices, de résilience, de commémoration et remémoration, de réparation seront abordées à partir des trois communications suivantes :
– Sarah Gensburger, Chercheuse en sciences sociales, CNRS-ISP : “Les mémoriaux du 13 novembre : du quartier au musée”
– Rémi Korman, EHESS/CESPRA : “Commémorer le génocide des Tutsi en France : quels lieux et quels enjeux ?”
– William Robin-Detraz, Étudiant en M2 Sciences sociales à l’ENS de Lyon, Agrégé de géographie : “Les sépultures des Africains “morts pour la France” : lieux, commémorations et mobilisations de la mémoire des tirailleurs sénégalais”.

Toutes les informations (résumés et lien de connexion) sont dans le lien ci-dessous :

PHC PROTEUS

Pasts without history and displaced histories of people without traces

Michèle BAUSSANT & Katja HROBAT VIRLOGET

After two deadly World Wars, post-1945’ ‘Europe’s political structure was held up as one of peace and stability. Borders have been remarketed under new national limits, with the waves of “decolonization” affecting Western Europe and the reconfiguration of Central and Eastern European countries due to the Cold War, and later, due to the fall of communist regimes (Rekacewicz, 2003). As a result, it led to new divisions and inward-looking political and cultural attitudes.

Depending on different modalities and temporalities, ethnic minorities expelled from the newly formed “national spaces” such as East Prussia and Silesia, Germans from the Sudetenland and Bukovina, Italians from ex-Yugoslavia, Europeans, and Jews from North Africa, Portuguese from Angola and Mozambique, when at the same time the abruptly depopulated areas (neighborhoods or even regions, in urban or rural areas), which were left behind, became “home” to other populations who did not necessarily share a bond or connection with the previous ‘population’s cultural heritage.

How and why have some of the memories of displacements been erased, ignored, forgotten, and others memorized and commemorated? In what ways do they still matter in Europe and beyond today? Under what circumstances, some of the features of the past have remained so persistent and resilient?

The project endorses the view that spatial reference points frame memory, such as sites, buildings, streets, and artifacts, as stressed by Frances Yates (1966). Furthermore, it is indeed with the material traces left in space that the History begins and which allows us to claim that something happened. Lying on this assumption, on the one hand, we can argue that the material  alteration of places and social landscapes can transform our memories, and even lead to their disappearance. Nevertheless, on the other hand, as Halbwachs highlighted, we also should remember that both memories and silences, in turn, design the spaces in which we live (Halbwachs, 1951 and 1952; Topalov, 1997). By symbolically marking out space, both also change places with which they are associated (Lepetit and Pumain, 1993; Jonker, 1995, Zombori, 2012 ;Truc, 2016).

Our objective is to answer these questions by exploring two parallel collective memories: the memories of the displaced, and the memories of those who (re)populated the cultural and physical spaces after them, as well as the distance and the encounter, the gap, and the crossover between persistent traces of the past without History and displaced histories of people without traces, as reflected in artifacts and material assets, bodies, and narratives. Focusing on this relationship between memories, silences, and production of History and places, following the paradigmatic and pioneering ‘Halbwachs’ study on the collective memory of Christians in the Holy Land, we will be exploring further the question of the links between memory circles (or milieu de mémoire) and sites of memory, an issue that is significantly neglected by the theory of sites of memory (Nora 1984–1992). However, the socio-anthropological importance of the dynamic relationship between memories, silences, production of histories and places can never be exhausted by a study of the so-called sites “of   memory” alone (Baussant, 2015).

This project is deeply rooted in ethnographic fieldwork and will be based on specific empirical case studies. The choice of the case study locations reflects the expertise of the research team’s core members, both from the French and the Slovenian sides.

Membres of the team

Michele Baussant, senior researcher at the CNRS

Katja Hrobat Virloget, associate professor (FH UP)

Aleksej Kalc professor,(ZRC SAZU)

Irène dos Santos, senior research fellow CNRS (URMIS)

Johana Wyss, junior researcher, Czech Akademie of Sciences

Neža Cebron Lipovec, assistant professor  (FH UP)

Petra Kavrecic assistant professor (FH UP),

Maria Kokkinou, postdoctoral fellow CEFRES, Charles University

Felipe Kaiser, doctoral student (IIAC-EHESS, CEFRES)

Tandem Launch

“Defeated Memories. De-imperial Europe: A Resentful Confederation of Vanquished Peoples?”, Prague, Friday 20 November 2020 — Authors of the project: Michèle Baussant (CEFRES, CNRS), Johana Wyss (Czech Academy of Sciences), Maria Kokkinou (CEFRES / Charles University) A project carried out within the framework of the TANDEM program, developed by the Czech Academy of Sciences, Charles University and CEFRES/CNRS united within the Platform for Cooperation and Excellence in Humanities and Social Sciences. http://cefres.cz/en/category/research…

With the participation of:

Sylvie Démurger, Deputy Scientific Director, Europe and International Affairs (CNRS) Jérôme Heurtaux, Director of CEFRES Tat̕ána Petrasová, member of the Academy Council and coordinator of Czech Academy of Sciences for the TANDEM program Catherine Perron, Research Fellow, CERI, Sciences Po Paris Valérie Rosoux, Director of Research-Professor, Université Catholique de Louvain Thomas Van de Putte, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Sociology, University of Trento

Displaced Memories & Memories of Displacement

The international workshop Displaced Memories & Memories of Displacement: Vanquished Others, Silenced Past, and the Burden of Implication in the 21st Century will take place on 9th-11th June 2021 in Prague.

This workshop seeks to provide a comparative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary platform to discuss many cases of how the supressed heritage of the displaced populations in Europe and beyond is being negotiated in the present day. Given the nature of the historical imagination, the dissolution of social spaces can potentially lead to the belief that the history of those who ‘lost’ cannot be afforded memorial sites as they are no longer represented by a symbolic or geographic region. Countries that re-hosted the expellees believed that the expellees’ former sense of belonging would not be an issue in the present. However, the expellees often considered themselves expatriates and transformed their former local and regional places of settlement into homelands, cultivating a ‘retrotopical’ attitude (Bauman, 2017). 

At the same time, the newcomers who repopulated the left behind spaces, that were previously inhabited by the vanquished other, also found themselves in difficult position. While some of them took an active role in the expulsion as perpetrators, many of them could be seen as ‘implicated subject’ (Rothberg, 2019). How do the newcomers understand and negotiate their role and positionality in the context of forced displacement? 

The memories of displacement as well as displaced memories concern people in between several places, across different temporalities, and with multiple belonging. As such, they are notoriously difficult to grasp and therefore severely understudied. To amend this void in our knowledge and to question our taken for granted assumptions in this workshop we advocate multidirectional approach to memories of the displaced populations to answer these questions: 

  • How are social spaces redefined by their new inhabitants?
  • What happens with the heritage of the vanquished Other?
  • How has the heritage of displacement itself been ignored, forgotten, memorialized, transplanted duplicated, and recreated and commemorated, despite the dispersion of people and the lack of material artefacts?
  • Which sites of memory and what memorialization practices for these pasts are no longer associated with their former ‘milieux de memoire’ (Halbwachs 1941; Lavabre 2007)?

Partners:  

hegemonic narratives

Memory politics worldwide is often shaped by the dynamics of relations and tensions between hegemonic narratives, counter-memories and silent communities at the global, national and local levels. Transnational advocacy movements, international agents and organizations influence the application of terminologies and frameworks in which global hegemonic narratives operate. State actors influence and shape hegemonic narratives, silence others or deny their existence in order to legitimize their incumbency and state/nation-building efforts. Local actors – from civil society groups to individuals – often counter top-down efforts of hegemonic narratives by the creation of their own narratives, memories or by silence. In post-conflict and conflict societies the relations between different groups and actors advocating hegemonic narratives becomes all the more acute and tense as the social and political fabric is eroded and in flux by the conflict-generated transformative changes.

How do we understand hegemonic narratives in post-war societies? What do we know about them? How can we conceptualize hegemonic narratives in research inquiry? What constitutes such narratives in societies emerging from conflicts or in the midst of conflict? What is their role in relation to other mnemonic practices such as silencing, forgetting, neglecting, amnesia, or denial? And if they are, in what way do they differ? Find out more via the link below:

https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/hegemonic-narratives

The ‘Shoes on the Danube Bank’ memorial erected in 2005 dedicated to the memory of the Jews shot into the Danube river by Fascist Hungarian militia in 1944-1945. The victims were ordered to take off their shoes, were shot at the edge of the water and their bodies fell into the river. The memorial represent their shoes left behind on the bank.