Abstract
Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková’s edited volume Family Memory: Practices, Transmissions and Uses in a Global Perspective has been much needed in the field of memory studies for some time. I had previously sought out a book like this to read and cite and found it curious that one did not exist given how important family memory is across so many disciplines, and especially within memory studies.
Now, one might think that given there was such a stark gap in the literature, an editor could come forward with a very modest book – a first step. However, this is an ambitious collection, which forges paths in many directions. Its authorship and case studies are genuinely international. Where memory studies has primarily anchored itself in Western Europe and the United States, this book takes us to Rome, Brazil, South Africa, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Mexico, Armenia, Rwanda, Russia, New Zealand, India, and to Finland and its diasporas, including in Australia. The collection therefore answers important calls to go beyond UK- and US-centric models and devote attention to the rich diversity of memory practices worldwide. As Švaříčková Slabáková notes in the introduction, the volume ‘illustrates that family memory can be used as an analytical tool in various research traditions all over the globe’ (p. 13).
The methodological scope of the book is similarly inclusive and far-reaching. Chapters draw from interviews, oral histories, memoirs, photographs, social media posts, songs, objects, tattoos and many more sources. The theoretical framing of the book steeps readers in the most classic texts, such as Halbwachs (1992) on communities of memory, it also references touchstones, such as Hirsch (2008) on post-memory, as the volume’s authors draw from the canon of memory studies to develop new ideas.
Following a touching foreword from renowned oral historian Alessando Portelli, the book is organised in four parts. The first focuses on private and public practices of building family memory; the second on the intergenerational transmission of social and political values; the third on family memory of violent events and genocide; and the fourth on family memory, family identity and digital media. Where, to speak frankly, edited volumes can sometimes be disjointed, every chapter in this collection adds something ample and provocative to the cohesive collection.
As new directions within the volume, the editor cites three paths that authors have forged. The first is a rich opportunity for interdisciplinary partnerships, including with psychology, which can orient memory as central to wider studies of family practices and identity. Švaříčková Slabáková’s own chapter offers a rich example of this, demonstrating how the affects and values that Czech families attach to their memories of communism can impact upon their cohesion as a family over time.
The second new direction is the role of family memory in post-conflict societies. This area of memory studies is well established with reference to the legacies of National Socialism and the Holocaust. This book attends to post-conflict memory in different contexts – including Partition, the Russian Revolution, the Armenian and Rwandan Genocides, the Spanish Civil War and Communist regimes – and thus opens up new applications for established concepts to empirically rich international case studies. Öndercan Muti’s chapter on intergenerational family memories explores the applicability of Hirsch’s ‘post-memory’ in the context of how young generations in Armenia, Lebanon and Turkey remember the Armenian Genocide. In a wholly different context, Pilar Domínguez Prats also uses ‘post-memory’ to examine second-generation family memories of the Spanish Civil War and the exile of Republican women to Mexico.
The third new direction centres on mobility and mediation. Several chapters – from Anna Green, Indira Chowdhury and Anne Heimo – look at how the changing location of families, with migration, diaspora and indeed, pandemic, affords new ways to practice and create memory traditions across distances and using memory technologies. These chapters on diaspora memory offer a rich framework for thinking about transnational family memory. Heimo’s chapter, in particular, promises to be a well-cited piece, with its case study of how Finnish diasporas in the United States and Australia use the social media platform Facebook to stay connected to family members across the globe and engage in virtual memory practices. Heimo uses ethnographic methods to explore Finnish diaspora’s ‘spontaneous archive’ of posts, photos, videos and text files, including shared images of family heirlooms as well as Finnish language tattoos.
Many readers will find additional contributions and points of inspiration that go beyond the three identified by the editor. For example, as a sociologist, I was thrilled by the broad definition of family that the book takes as its premise, allowing for the nuances and intersections of intergenerational memory but also intragenerational memory, transmitted amid siblings, cousins and peer groups that become familial through practice.
Several chapters also raise new questions about the ethical and methodological directions of family memory research. For example, Barbara Ronchetti’s opening chapter, ‘Family voices and the practice of memory: Five generations of women in Rome’, explores the silenced history of women in her family, overshadowed as they were by her male relatives, Italian Risorgimento heroes. However, I was most struck by Ronchetti’s account of the process of research, which was done in collaboration with her mother and daughters poring over family documents and objects. There are many fascinating questions here about not only what it means to do research on family but also as family? How does the collective nature of family memories also influence the kinds of knowledge we can create and the methodologies we can use, potentially decentring the idea of the individual researcher?
Philippe Denis’ chapter, ‘Family Memories and the Development of Genocide Ideologies in Rwanda’, also opens interesting methodological paths. Denis gives us a new perspective on how to analyse the role of family memory in post-conflict societies, not only in the aftermath of atrocity but also in creating the ideologies that make genocide possible in the first place. Denis uses existing oral history collections created for other projects and opens up crucial questions about how we can reuse qualitative memory data in a longitudinal way, across time and different contexts, to open up insights that may not have been foreseen when the interviews were first collected. His chapter is therefore a contribution to memory studies of the Rwandan genocide but also growing discussions about secondary analysis of oral histories. In another chapter, Ilia Iliev similarly incorporates the interview transcripts from another research team’s 1990s study of family memories of socialism in Bulgaria. Iliev explains that he returned to the same village and using the same methodology conducted another round of interviews to ‘see if and how the stories and memories changed over time, in a new political and social context’ (p. 97). Both Denis and Iliev’s studies offer illustrative methodologies for intergenerational memory studies through the reuse of data.
Several of the chapters, in ways that are sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, are autobiographical in nature; they recollect the story of the author’s family at the same time as they tell the story of how family memory works, and how we, as scholars, work with it. To give just two examples – Radikobo Ntsimane writes evocatively about his own family to demonstrate the resilience of family traditions and memories amid the racist policies and forced removals of South African Apartheid, and Indira Chowdhury’s beautiful chapter on her family’s ‘unfinished archives’ in the wake of Partition speaks to the way that the challenges of remembering and forgetting run parallel in families and nations. In this way the book’s audience extends beyond an academic one, to include those doing family history, life writing or creative practice inspired by family memory in various ways. Anna Green’s superb chapter on the ‘genealogical imaginary’ among settler descendants in New Zealand, and the challenge of reconciling archival and oral sources with received myths or narratives, will strike a particularly strong chord with such audiences. Chapters from Giselle Martins Venancio and Zbyněk Vydra explore the tensions between public and private representations of families through the analysis of memoirs adding richly to work that pairs family memory and life writing.
Overall, Family Memory is an innovative and much-needed volume for memory studies. It profoundly extends the geographical and socio-historical locations of current memory research and will provide a wellspring of ideas for family memory scholars for decades to come. The chapters offer significant empirical and methodological inspiration for the field, demonstrating the potential for innovative longitudinal memory studies and the nimbleness of existing concepts as they are repurposed for a truly international field.