Memory,Ethnography and the Method of Memory

Introduction

Browsing through a non-fiction book of Haruki Murakami titled Underground, I was intrigued by a paragraph in the preface (Murakami, 2003, pp. 3–11), which described the method employed in the writing of the text. The context of this book is the underground gas attack of Tokyo on 20 March 1995. With this as a backdrop the author wanted to ‘probe deeper into how Japanese society could perpetrate such a double violence’ (ibid. 4). The first violence being that of the gas attack, the second ‘secondary victimization’ of victims of the gas attacks. ‘The interviews were conducted over nearly a year between the beginning of January and the end of December 1996’ (ibid., p. 3). Of a list of 700 names that Murakami and two research assistants came up with, 20 per cent were identifiable. Female interviewees were not only more difficult to trace by name alone but also not appreciative of being approached by strangers with queries. That some women did ‘respond “despite family opposition”’ (ibid., p. 5) describes the gendered nature of memory that feed into Murakami’s attempt at understanding Japanese society. It is clear that the interviews conducted within one and half years of the gas attack aided in recall. Two stories in particular ‘Tatsuo Akashi: The night before the gas attack, the family was saying over dinner, “My, how lucky we are”’ and ‘Shizuko Akashi: Ii –nii-an (Disneyland)’ stands out both in its poignancy as well as in its significance to memory as a method. Both narratives are about Ms. Shizuko Akashi who was rendered into a temporary vegetative state—one narrated by her elder brother Tatsuo Akashi and another by Murakami.

Narrating the story of the attack Tatsuo Akashi began from kindergarten, from his sister Akashi’s habit of keeping a diary (‘She kept a diary until junior high school’ [Murakami, 2003, p. 76]). Her nature and the primacy of memory to it are revealed in these few sentences. ‘She kept all these dates in her head. She remembered everyone’s favourite things’ (ibid. 78). ‘For instance if she went on holiday somewhere, she’d be sure to bring home souvenirs or buy tea sweets for her colleagues at work’ (ibid.) (all emphasis mine). After her loss of memory subsequent to the gas attack the brother does the task of memory keeping. ‘In my filofax, I noted that her eyes moved on 24 March’ (ibid., p. 80). Akashi seems to maintain a filofax in which he noted down improvements in his sister’s condition. ‘Most of her memory has disappeared’ (ibid., p. 81). We know Shizuko Akashi through her brother’s memory of their childhood and through the author’s interaction with her. Many kind of memories can be seen from the narratives—diary, filofax, souvenir—related to each other as they become aid to memory. At the time of the interview the air valve implanted in Shizuko Akashi’s throat was covered with a round metal plate. This is also a souvenir though not of her choosing—a souvenir of the time she could not breath on her own. A memory etched upon her body. She embodies this memory of ‘her struggle with death’ (ibid., p. 86). As for the extent of memory regained one cannot be sure.

Exposure to memories of her brother and her family is the path to learning for Shizuko. Memory that the family implants in her is the social nature of remembering. This is not falsification. In her case it can be a new memory that ‘fills up that blank spaces’. While Murakami does not emphasis that memory is central to this text, yet this book is carved out entirely from memory of the event and individuals remembrance of their lives as intersecting with the tragedy. The event (lived as out of the ordinary) and the timing of the interview (within a year and a half of the event) impact the nature of remembering.

The ‘field’ as discussed in Murakami’s work is evoked in and through memory. Memory organises our experience of past and is put to use in multivariegated ways of recall. Memory production through use of technology and mnemonic aids is part of fieldwork experience. So are memories of informants and researchers’ own memory that recuperates the field partially for the audience—academic or otherwise. The first section titled ‘Fieldwork, Ethnography and Memory’ begins with a brief introduction to collective memory in the sociological tradition. A problematisation of whom/what comprises collective memory is necessary to reveal presence of hegemonic memory. This section maps outs the semantic field of memory—some of which are taken up in succeeding sections. A work primarily based on memory—The Remembered Village is taken up to briefly introduce memory ethnography. Srinivas inhabits the past of his fieldwork while retrieving the work solely from memory.

The second section ‘Memory and Mnemonic Aids: The Future of Memory’ elaborates memory production through technology. Here, I review the imbrications of memory and technology and ways in which fear of an external memory doing the task of memory for us is projected in a popular futuristic dystopic series. External memory—beginning from act of writing to mnemonic aids that accompany us in the field is ubiquitous to the extent that it has become almost an extension of oneself. Such moves beget the question of time—the separateness of past from present or the lack thereof.

In the third section ‘Memoir: Fiction/Non-Fiction’—the dimension of writing as making sense of oneself in a historical moment or projecting such desire via memoir writing is taken up. I take up the case of Wilkomirski’s memoir (Fragments) which turned out to be a work of fiction. What are the ways in which memory can be put to question? The reason for taking up a problematic work of memory is to question that authority and ‘beyond evidence’ space that memory occupies. The explosion of memory studies has been triggered by attempts to study violence. Holocaust is notable among such events of violence. ‘Likewise, it might be argued that the holocaust spelled not the end, but the inauguration of new and even greater difficulties in the field of memory’ (Radstone, 2000, p. 6). Contemporary preoccupation with memory likewise is centred primarily on violent events as well as protracted violence as many of the reading list across universities or institutes that offer social sciences courses on memory testify.

In the last section—‘Memory and Memorial Lecture’ I present a brief ethnographic account of commemoration in the form of two memorial lectures to illustrate the method of memory I employed in my fieldwork. This brief account addresses the making of memorial lecture as an event of memory that transcends death of individual into a collective mourning. The memorial lectures are biographical as well as imbued with a metaphoric quality akin to memoir.

The disparate sections in terms of materials are stitched together through a matrix of memory practices—old and new. The politics of production of memory is not taken up overtly in the article though especially (but not limited to) memory as memoir hints at it. All the narratives as well as genre mentioned earlier could be argued as acts of recalling within recalling. Some recalling fills up blank spaces of someone else’s memory. Others transform it into writing and yet others intersperse the present with it making the present always telescopes the past. Sometimes in the act of writing up ethnography from field notes we contextualise and recognise a particular memory of one’s own life and understands the field better. What connects the sections therefore is the ever-changing topography of past events; even in instances where we seemingly document the past in its entirety recognition of what that means is something else entirely.

Fieldwork, Ethnography and Memory

Collective memory studies have a long history in the sociological tradition. While the memory of groups is an idea that goes before Halbwachs most of the current work on collective memory has been drawn from his works. ¹ Collective memory is usually pitched against that of individual memory. Halbwachs (as cited by Connerton) sees no point in a separate questioning/inquiry of how individual and societies preserve and rediscover memories. For Halbwachs ‘the idea of an individual memory, absolutely separate from social memory is an abstraction almost devoid of meaning’ (Connerton, 1989, p. 37). Thus the term collective does not mean non-existence of personal/individual memory, rather it means that individual memory exists in a relationship with the social and derives its meaning within that context.

Remembering is meaning-making; it gives a narrative sequence to our lives. Russell’s work on early modern collective memory reveals the exasperatingly simplistic difference given between collective memory and individual memory (personal memory)—the former is attributed to more than one person and the latter to one. ‘According to Halbwachs, groups reconstruct their past experiences collectively, and so even though an individual does have a particular perspective on this group reconstruction of the past, he or she does not have an independent memory of the past’ (Russell, 2006, p. 796).

Suggestion of a common past is a necessity for groups to think of themselves as collective participants of social order. If one juxtaposes the question of collective memory with multiculturalism an important question arises—who is the collective that remembers? This question brings us to the historicity of collective memory and its theories derived from mainly Western societies as inadequate to explain contestation of memories perspectives of those ‘without history’. Indeed hierarchy between memory and history exists as the latter is explained as a discipline with its set rules of study and evidentiary standard built into it that cannot be applied to the former. ‘Relying on the doctrine of “multiple truths,” multiculturalism assets that every minority group is entitled to interpret the past as it pleases, independently of “Eurocentric” male concepts and proofs’ (Schwartz, Fukuoka, & Takita-Ishi, 2005, p. 255). The word memory exists as aforementioned, in a network of power and marginality which is to say, as Maurice Halbwachs observed, ‘there are as many memory as there are groups, that memory is by nature multiple yet specific; collective and plural yet individual’ (Nora, 1996, p. 3).

The semantic field of memory is spread over a spectrum of thoughts/act(ion)s of thinking, acts of writing and concretisation of memory through memorials or days of commemoration. Its relationships with other words—remember, recall, memoir, memorialisation, memorial, commemoration, forgetting ² are parts of the semantic field. Memory also exists as types—Connerton categorised memories into three types—personal, cognitive and habit memory. Loss of memory is a memory incapable of narrative continuity, in the sense that the narrative stops at a point in time. This memory certainly does not assist in further meaning—as more memories are not created the subject grasps for meaning through strains of remembrances that do not merge with each other. Remembering is premeditated by the collusion of state of mind, motor and neurological abilities which makes it possible for a mental reconstruction of events. One fears the pathology of forgetfulness and memory lapses for reason that the subject has to grasp, to begin anew; every piece of information is processed to be forgotten again. For a subject who grapples with absolute beginning it is impossible to participate in a social order which shares a common past and the common knowledge embedded in it.

An example of a work situated between memory and forgetting is—The Remembered Village by M. N. Srinivas (1976) based on fieldwork conducted in the village of Rampura, in Mysore state in 1948. All field notes and documents related to this work were lost when arsonists set fire to the study at Centre for Advanced Study, Behavioural Sciences, Stanford (where he was based). This book is best remembered as part of village studies in social anthropology and may not be considered a work in the sub discipline of sociology of memory even though this work is based on memory. ‘Right at the beginning I had taken decision to include in the book only those facts, incidents and impressions that I was able to remember’ (Srinivas, 1976, p. xiii). An article by M. N. Srinivas titled ‘Ex igni renascimur: The Remembered Village and Some Thoughts on Memory Ethnography’ suggests memory-ethnography as the method employed. ‘My decision to write a book from memory required that I not consult any field notes that came my way, let alone incorporate any material in them’ (Srinivas, 2000, p. 165). The book based on recollection forced by circumstances led to a reasoning of the embodied experience of fieldwork. The task of remembering though arduous is possible as his ‘entire personality’ was involved in making of the field experience.

With the loss of processed data Srinivas turned to memory and occasionally to original notes to counter check what was already written. The ways of doing ‘memory ethnography’, however, is not very clear. The original field data exist elsewhere but rather than distil and process raw data again he decided to immerse in memory ethnography in so far as ethnography is the act of writing up the field. One may look at sociology of memory as part of new trends in social anthropology. There are works that state ‘the explosion in memory studies’. However, I understand memory in social anthropology as belated acknowledgement of the fact that every research is also a work of memory.

Most of us were exposed to learning as memorisation. Indeed many will recall that the student with greater power of memory is the one who does well in examinations, which are nothing more than reproduction of prescribed texts. This is done either orally by chanting endlessly the lessons sentence-by-sentence or by writing down—inscribing the lesson into motor memory or rather rote learning. Imagine the shock to be told at a later stage of education that a sentence-by-sentence reproduction is plagiarism! With knowledge of writing, memory as embodied got replaced by memory as inscribed in writing. This was not without its detractors. Socrates had warned Phaedrus of what knowledge of writing would do to memory:

If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. (Hamilton & Cairns, 1961, p. 520)

One can look at new mnemonic aids that accompany us in our fieldwork similarly. We are dependent on mnemonic devices to do task of memory and thereby discomfited when informants ask not to record interviews and conversations. Relying solely on our own ability of recall has become a source of anxiety as new digital memory replaces our own memory. Every moment in the field is usually committed to digital memory with devices becoming less cumbersome—for instance android phone serves as a camera, video and audio recording device. Recordings (video, audio or still photographs) have begun functioning as mnemonic tool for researchers, making it convenient to go back to conversations and images that would trigger memory. These audiovisuals are important as memory cues. Memory sticks make for ease of transfer of memory from one device to another. The number of devices that act as mnemonic aid abound; however the difference between mnemonic aid and memory as a representation of the self (personal or the collective self) needs to be demarcated. Researchers should also acknowledge the lack of neutrality in the act of remembering—memory can get into the way of memory. Memories collide and undercut each other. What is the ethnographer’s task when memories collide? The first question is always that of the constituency of memory—Who remembers? When? Memory is never in the past; memory is an issue of the present. The collective/self who remembers and the present makes it possible to discern memory.

Memory and Mnemonic Aids: The Future of Memory

How do we separate past from the present? Is there boundary between immediacy of present and the past? How is past and present separable—if they are? One popular science fiction series ‘Black Mirror’ has an episode ‘The Entire History of You’ wherein memory forms the core of the story. This episode, as all episodes of Black Mirror, notches up the technology content in an entirely believable manner anticipating the future. We have altogether begun to rely on technology to do our task of remembering. From embodied memory to act of writing to external memory devices the task of memory is projected onto devices because of perceived unreliability of human memory. Google calendars or digital planners remind us of birthdays, anniversaries and other familial-social events on which our social relationships are predicated. ‘The Entire History of You’ ³ begins with an appraisal interview of the protagonist—Liam Foxwell. After the interview on the way to the airport he replays the interview by activating his embedded full spectrum memory device (which has three decades of backup, the embedded device is referred to as grain) to analyse how the interview went because of ambiguity of one comment. Here one could see that access to memory as it is makes no sense unless one puts it to scrutiny. The embedded memory is also tapped on as surveillance devices, for instance Foxwell had to replay the last 24 hours of his stay for the airport security personnel. From the airport he arrives at a dinner party where he is asked to ‘re-do’ the interview (i.e., project the interview on an interface) for other dinner guests to make an assessment. Memory from the full spectrum device could be accessed and become part of something as banal as dinner conversations where one’s past is viewed together. One of the guests at the dinner, Hallam, did not have the grain as her’s was gouged out—stolen to order after which she did not want one again. She had not encrypted her memory that means someone else is voyeuristically viewing it. Another guest (a grain developer) suggested that hookers do not embed grain—a suggestion that only those who have something to hide do not use the device. Suggesting organic memory as unreliable she says ‘Half the organic memory that you have are junk. Just not trustworthy’. She further suggests that organic memory could be false memory implanted onto people by asking leading questions in therapy. Thus machine memory that records the scene of one’s life is thought to be more reliable than human memory. The crux of this episode is the deteriorating relationship of the two lead characters when every conversation is interspersed with memory as evidence. Foxwell finds out through the grain projected at the dinner party and subsequent such memory projections that his partner Fi (Ffion) is having an affair with Jonas. How much of access to memory is too much? The idea that the past is within the reach of Jonas for him to replay his shared intimacy with Fi becomes a source of obsession for Foxwell leading to a confrontation. He physically assaults Jonas and demands deletion of every memory of Jonas, which has Fi in it. Ease of access to shared intimacy of the past becomes a problem. Lack of distance between the past and the now is expressed poignantly. After the separation of Liam and Fi, Liam goes about the house projecting from his memory device onto the nooks and spaces of the house images of his partner unable to have a sense of the present absence. This hologram like images of the past interferes with the present. Liam in order to make a cut with the past literally cut out the implanted grain from behind his ear.

In this dystopic future blind faith in grain-memory over organic memory, the exaggerated position of memory as evidence and memory as a voyeuristic image disintegrates human relationship. The episode could be read as suggesting social nature of memory. An event will be recorded in as many people’s grain as were present in the making of it or the making of life as it were, ever collected and put to different uses in the present. It’s use for voyeuristic pleasure, sexual arousal (wherein in the sexual act the characters involved display for themselves an earlier time in the relationship when the attraction was much higher than the present lovemaking selves) and nostalgia cannot be more underlined. The idea that memory could be displayed for all to view is not too farfetched an idea. Memory in the form of photographs, diary entry in soft copy or digital footprint in the internet can be easily accessed. Even (or especially) intimate relationships are not free from demands of displaying memories in some forms as evidence of trust and sharing. Dystopia is now. Anxieties vis-a-vis technology (of memory) is depicted in the culmination of this crisis. Memory is artificial yet embodied requiring painful excising from the self. Scars of its removal are etched onto the body of the subject, yet the tenacious hold of memory is visible in the primacy that it has over the everyday. Time is depicted in the ease of access of memory onto the present giving people the feeling that events of past are not representation but past as it is. The immediacy of memory brings forth a crisis. This is no less related to the collapse of temporal gap between past and present. This is thus an issue of time. ‘Memory: presenting another time, the submission of another time to mentation, a submission to now, to the time of remembering’ (Scott, 1999, p. 54). What becomes a problem in this case is the lack of separation; an incident yesterday or 18 months back is seamlessly part of today. The past presented as it were does not mean its transparency, best illustrated when the protagonist could be seen projecting a memory onto a screen asking for ways to read a particular snippet of the past. At the end one is left wondering whether human memory’s key problem—forgetting is, at the end, a boon. Forgetting may be the cementing factor in human relationships whether interpersonal or collective because ‘the time of remembering is not “then”… It is past presence’ (ibid., p. 55). There is no pure objective past ‘out there’ unmediated by the present. It is not that the past is distorted by remembering. It is that there is no past that exists at all without the act of remembering.

Memoir: Fiction/Non-fiction

Memoirs are narratives in first person. The understanding of memoir in literature is that of a non-fictional piece of writing written by the subject.

Memoirs and memory are derived from the Latin word memoria. ‘Memoir, as the name implies, is memory’s uncorrected report’ (Knight, 2007, p. 12). Memoirs as products of memory begets the question whether there is a postmodern turn in memory—is there a way in which memory as an authority can be questioned just as all grounds of authority are being inquired upon.

A non-fiction piece by Elena Lappin ‘The Man with Two Heads’ explores the relationship between memoir and memory through the story of a holocaust memoir by Wilkomirski. Published as Fragments (English translation) the memoir bring up complexity in the relationship between memory and memoir and what it means for a method of incorporating memory in social anthropology. Wilkomirski’s memoir was claimed as fraudulent. The publisher did not think of such an opinion as devastating, rather simply a matter of category—from non-fiction to fiction. Others are harsher—fake/fiction as memoir is thought to have a devastation impact on holocaust literature itself. It brings forth an uneasy part of memory studies, which is to question the veracity of memories itself. Lappin’s work questions the truth of Bruno Grosjean/Bruno Dössekker/Binjamin Wilkomirski’s work Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939–1948 published to acclaim as a classic of holocaust literature. It received the Jewish Quarterly Prize for non-fiction in 1997 and several other awards in the category of autobiography/memoir. A year after Daniel Ganzfried’s article denounced the book as a work of fiction. Wilkomirski responded ‘that his readers had always had the option to understand his book as either fact or fiction’ (Lappin, 1999). Lappin states that to put the memoir as a lie would be too strong:

But ‘lie’ might be too strong a word, meant for courts of law. Writing has milder terms. In writing, there is fiction and non-fiction. These seem clear divisions, but as any writer knows the boundary can be blurred, and nowhere more so than in this literary form ‘the memoir’. Trying to evoke the past the memoirist needs to recreate it, and in doing so he may be tempted to invent—a detail here and there, a scene, a piece of dialogue. In any case, did it matter so much whether Fragments was fact or fiction? Wasn’t it enough that its prose was so moving and powerful that it made hundreds of thousands of readers think about and perhaps ‘feel’—if not understand—the Holocaust? (ibid.)

She nevertheless thought that Wilkomirski’s defence is insufficient considering his claim to be a witness to the holocaust positing his writing as a holocaust memoir firmly rooted in the foundation of the holocaust through the eyes of a young boy who had at a tender age suffered incomprehensibility the horrors of it. In an interview with Lappin, Wilkomirski seem to have a habit memory of the camp. His wife narrated that he constantly moves his feet during sleep, a habit acquired in the camps, to keep rats away at night. For me this issue of memory is compounded by his response to various queries. ‘He has no evidence to support his claims, “except for my memories”’ (ibid.). Daniel Ganzfried had in fact given evidence against his claims, his scrutiny of Wilkomirski’s memory include use of archives, state reports (of Swiss authorities), memory inscribed on the body (e.g., circumcision) and kinship network. The real question is not whether memory stands up to evidence. It is about the product—material artefact of memory in the form of a written text as memoir. On the one hand the question—Can memoir make a claim not founded on any evidence?—is important to be raised. On the other hand in other circumstances much of memory that is not part of state narrative may lack evidence, its very lack of evidence may be used against memory of smaller groups/communities. Evidence may lurk in unacknowledged sources and what is meant by sources needs to be democratised.

Politics of production of memoirs as a literary genre needs to be the context to understand Fragments. Of course one is not looking as binaries of fact/fiction, truth/untruth as oppositional categories vis-a-vis the memoir. That does not however provide us with a way to understand Wilkomirski’s text.

The work of memoir is similar to that of autobiography in that the self is represented. There is no homogenous terrain of autobiography—Dalit autobiographies represent a self that is markedly different and incompatible with the ways the self is defined as unmarked bourgeois, upper caste or patriarch self. Debate within the terrain of Dalit autobiography continues to be rich source of thinking through the relationship between collective self and bourgeois self of the autobiography and between official forgetting and memory. Rege argues that ‘… dalit life narratives are in fact testimonios, which forge a right to speak for and beyond the individual and contest explicitly or implicitly the “official forgetting” of histories of caste oppression, struggle and resistance’ (Rege, 2006, p. 13). Annette Kuhn in ‘A Journey through Memory’ maps an analogy to this.

The aforementioned excerpt ends with a question that should animate our incorporation of memory as a method in social anthropology. The question is that of the collective of political marginality that holds memory. This is a clue to the kind of memory that will be recuperated in a fragmented and dispersed form. It is not the researcher’s task to provide closure to that memory. Autobiographies and memoirs were tools to address exclusion of women in history. Similarly Dalit autobiographies chart a form of political marginality and life world that critique foundational text of social sciences. The ‘truth’ of memory that such works places fragments many. These works are significant because it does not allow one meta-collective memory to displace others.

Memorial Lectures

In this section I attempt to posit two memorial lectures as new forms of memory practices and argue that memorial lectures are one among the multifarious expressive forms of memorialisation that have emerged in recent times. Two annual memorial lectures—the Arambam Samarendra ⁴ Memorial Lecture and Dr Thingnam Kishan ⁵ Memorial Lecture are organised in June in Imphal, Manipur. The tragic death of both these personalities, though separated chronologically, is framed in the same special treatment of death. Commemoration here takes the form of memorial lectures. One memorial lecture is held on the death anniversary or ‘Martyrdom anniversary’ (Arambam Samarendra Memorial Lecture) and the other—birth anniversary (Dr Thingnam Kishan Memorial Lecture). These two deaths spatially and visually occupy distinct space as compared to other forms of commemoration.

In an event marking birth anniversary of Dr Kishan, the Second Dr Kishan Memorial Lecture was held on 28 June 2013. It began at 2:00 p.m. with a slide show presentation of Dr Kishan’s photographs from childhood till adulthood. Personal photographs are biographical in nature. It depicts completeness of the child self and the adult self, both forming a part of whom we mourn for, both irretrievably lost. This is a revised past in that out of an array of photographs appropriate ones are displayed in act of remembering. The photographs project a linear telos. The wall-sized images of the deceased on which lei katpa (floral tributes) was offered was in portrait form. The floral tributes share the same spatial frame as the memorial lecture with lamentations spilling onto the lecture. Lamenting friends, family members and members from the audience gathered in front of the stage. The stage was also marked with visual presence of Dr Kishan, in several blown-up photographs with a quote from him. The images—portrait photographs along with the quote ⁶ produce the meaning of the event and set the stage for the lecture. The quote printed on a flex banner was put up at the entrance of the hall. Two young women dressed in funerary-mourning attire—white shirt with Pungou Phanek—at the reception helped with registration; his books and articles were on sale. After the floral tributes, some family members started weeping in front of and below the stage, marking the lecture with an emotional start. The lecture ⁷ observed the birth anniversary of Dr Thingnam Kishan Singh and espouse his ideas, ‘Nevertheless, during his short but meaningful life, he constantly engaged to inspire and influence the younger generation with his passionate desire for an “exploitation free society” and a “composite” Manipur with equality and justice as its foundation’ (The Dr. Thingnam Kishan Foundation, 2011). What was evident in this memorial lecture was the juxtaposition of the formal/public event with that of familial/domestic—both informs each other—the intellectual exercise of Memorial Lecture could not imagine itself to be an objective exercise nor could the emotional retain itself in the template of ritual lei katpa.

The 11th Arambam Samarendra Memorial Lecture was held on 10 June 2011 Jawaharlal Nehru Dance Academy Hall. M. S. Prabhakara, Special Correspondent of The Hindu, who covered Northeast India for a large part of his career, delivered the lecture. In a span of 2 years (2010 and 2011) as a part of my field work—looking at the memorial lecture as a memory practice I participated in the events as discussant of the lecture and as well as compere at two separate occasions. In 2010 when I attended as a discussant there were moments of discomfort for a few of us who were invited, regarding the slippage between the memorial lecture and mourning ritual. My memories of the events that I study and my identity as a participant are implicated in this work. That a martyr has been memorialised is pointed out in the title of the event: ‘Martyrdom Anniversary’. Does it call for a celebration or a lamentation? This can be analysed from a song (Chaikhre Ngasi Nangi Loubukta) written by Arambam Samarendra an inevitable part of the memorial. My discussion with a member of the Arambam Samarendra Trust revealed that the song supposed to have a melancholic overture was set to a marching tune of martial music. The idea for the melody was that the commemoration and song should inspire rather than lapse into lamentations.

The allusion is blood (of youth) as nurturing the fields and making fertile the lands (of forefathers). In addition to the melody/tune, the lyrics give prominence to the word blood. Blood (Ee) is also a kinship terminology with term for close kin members prefixed with ‘Ee’ when given the possessive pronoun—for instance Eema for my mother, Eepa (my father), Eeche (my sister), Eebung (my brother). There is a significance of overt reference in the lyrics to Ee standing for blood ties. In an interview with an informant I was told that blood spilt at war is given the same treatment as menstrual blood not in terms of purity/impurity but imbued with symbolic idea of fertility, with the exception that the lyrics reference male blood and masculine fertility/virility, in place of female menstrual blood. In the song, the allusion is to spilt blood being productive and almost seminal in its ability to merge with the earth to bring forth new sprouts. Menstrual blood on the other hand even with the undertone of fertility is thought to be impure. Masculine blood does not carry the same ‘impurity’. Thus in Arambam Samarendra’s poem spilt blood ‘of your offspring’ evokes purity and fertility. The next stanza refers to ‘unending pyres of your offspring,’ pyres emanating from sacrificed bodies; the smoke ‘escapes’ upwards—a metaphor for freedom rather than be a cause for lamentation of lost lives. The observation of martyrdom anniversary of Arambam Samarendra has the same function. The song playing to a marching tune inspires, and musically underscores the allusion in the lyrics, a consonance that can hardly be missed. There is significance to the meaning in the gathering of the spectators ⁸ (attending as a continuation of the morning’s programme), who despite being unable to follow the language of the memorial lecture (delivered in English) sat throughout the lecture; they also requested a translation of the lecture. There is a disjuncture in the event which wove together two disparate forms of observance—lamentation and lecture; one ‘familial’ the other ‘public’. There is indeed an inter permeability of the scholarly tenor of the lecture which affects the lamentation urging for its abrupt ending while the lamentation also affects the memorial lecture for a solemn tenor that appeals to the gathering. The two lectures though held on two different dates are in conversation; one acquires meaning in the presence of the other. The two together form a ‘set’ of commemorations and need to be read together within a single frame of reference of martyrdom. The space of the memorial lectures amalgamates the ‘emotional’ and the ‘intellectual’. The possibility of both elements complementing and emotionally enhancing the memorial practice is evident. On the one hand this amalgamation or confusion of whether to present the memorial lecture as a ritual commemoration or follow the template of a ‘regular’ memorial lecture presents a rupture. On the other hand it gives a frame to locate contemporary events and debates. There is a risk of discrepant meanings converging in a single site of the lecture. At the same time, the convergence itself creates new discursive practices of memorialisation. The memorial lectures connote an afterlife of the two individuals. Both the trusts are engaged in activities based on ideas and thoughts propounded by the two men.

‘The Arambam Samarendra Memorial Lecture has thus a single-point agenda: To initiate and foster debate on any critical aspect of contemporary life in Manipur’ (Arambam Samarendra Trust, 2006). One can look at the two memorial lectures as using the same template as a way of producing and reproducing a certain rendering, not of the deceased but a collective articulation of resisting a natural process of forgetting.

Conclusion

Memory is an intrinsic part of all research methods in social anthropology whether overtly mentioned or unacknowledged. Memory is forever open to threat of forgetting; it finds itself incorporated in many memory practices as discussed—mnemonic devices, memoirs, memorial lecture or the presence of memory in an unacknowledged form. To reiterate briefly my arguments in this article—first, duality of remembering and forgetting are negotiated through memory practices. Forgetting is part of memory and therefore memory is always partial, some parts of events are absent in our memory or commemoration events. Act of forgetting can also be a hegemonic exercise of erasure. Remembering is an act of the present in that persistence of memory in forms such as described earlier reveals more of present than past. Second, the present constructs the past even when technology as mnemonic devices captures the whole of memory (if things such as this comes to pass). External memory devices are ubiquitous to counter the risk of forgetting. Third, use of memory and material artefacts of memory such as memoirs needs caution. Reaching out for a moment that has elided takes many forms, our desires are embedded in it. In the case of the memoir described earlier the protagonist’s desire to embed himself in history as an actor and his identification with it is revealed in complicated ways. Fourth, the past is always an elided time, available through memory. While commenting on monuments John Gillis observed that ‘[i]dentities and memories are not things we think about, but things we think with’ (Gillis, 1994, p. 5; original italics). What happens when we think with memories of violence? Certain field sites’ are invested with memory in a more accentuated manner as compared to other for instance sites of violence, which sits rather uncomfortably, and in intimate proximity to death. Such a context gives rise to many and varied memory practices, embracing the visceral along with the objective distance seeking impulse.