Current Table of Contents

• World In a Jar: War & Trauma1
  
• The Politics of Memory in Annexed Lorraine: The Conflicts between Germanification and French Stalwarts at the beginning of the 20th Century
  The article examines how the uses of memory in turn-of-the-century Lorraine structured political discourse and presented enduring difficulties for the actions of German administrators and local community leaders. In this border region, memory was always contested and challenged, and thereby unstable. This paper approaches "the politics of French memory" through the examination of various pro-French "memory societies" and networks such as the Souvenir Français. The central question is how did conflicts over memory impact Lorraine's political life and its place in the German Empire in the years leading up to the Great War? Regarding this point, the growth of nationalism is analysed as a phenomenon that reached far beyond French nationalist circles.
• The (Cuban) Voice of the (Curaçaoan) People: The Making (And Taking) of a Collective Memory
  At the turn of the 20th century, Afro-Curaçaoans developed an affinity for Cuban culture that influenced the manner to which they came to define their own collective memory. Cuba was raised to mythological status, appropriated and adapted to fit Curaçaoan daily life, enabling a new and inventive sense of belonging. This essay speaks to the intricacies involved in memory-making, with the Cuban-inspired memory of memories on Curaçao introduced as a relative category. It points to the variegated and tenuous nature of memory, showing how the past, when negotiated with the present, can shape group goals and demarcate membership.
• Ways of Forgetting: Israel and the Obliterated Memory of the Palestinian Nakba
  This study analyses national ways of forgetting. Following the eminent British Anthropologists Mary Douglas, I relate here to "forgetting" as "selective remembering, misremembering and disremembering" (Douglas 2007: 13). The case study offered here is that of the Israeli-Jewish forgetting of the uprooting of the Palestinians in the war of 1948. This paper discusses three facets of the collective forgetting: In the first subchapter I analyze the foundations of the Israeli regime of forgetting and discern three mechanisms of removing from memory of selected events: narrative forgetting: the formation and dissemination of an historical narrative; physical forgetting: the destruction of physical remains; and symbolic forgetting: the creation of a new symbolic geography of new places and street names. In the second subchapter, I look at the tenacious ambiguity that lies in the regime of forgetting, as it does not completely erase all the traces of the past. And finally, in the third subchapter, I discuss the growth of subversive memory and counter-memory that at least indicates the option of a future revision of the Israeli regime of forgetting.
• Ritual Dynamics: Mayor Making in Early Modern Norwich
  Through a detailed analysis of a Guild Day ceremony in early modern England we demonstrate that liminal points in this ritual are interrelated to form a "pattern" or "dance" of liminal pulsations. We argue it is the felt necessity, on the part of participants, to complete that pattern that provides a dynamic to any ritual event. It impels participants to continue the ritual to its conclusion and leads them to resist any interference with the "flow" of the ritual. "Flow", we assert, is thus both an interior state of participants and an exterior social characteristic of a ritual. It is created by the structuring of liminal points in a ritual, the liminal pulsations, but it achieves its dynamic by affecting the interior states of participants so that they feel impelled to "close off" the ritual and complete it.
• Structured Bellicosity: Was the Israeli-Arab Conflict Originally Inevitable?
  Subsequent to its inception and the conclusion of the 1948 War, Israel stood at a crossroads. It could choose either to embark on belligerency vis-à-vis the surrounding Arab world or pursue peaceful solutions. Israel opted for bellocisty. Why? It is argued that the political structure that gave precedence to the use of force is traceable to the Israeli type of state building with regard to the strategy the state adopted to absorb the mass Mizrachi immigration from Arab countries. The challenge was absorption without jeopardizing the dominance of the veteran Ashkenazim. The chosen track inevitably created the conditions for bellicosity. Exclusionary arrangements in the labor market by forcibly distancing the cheap Palestinian laborforce, the empowerment of the military as a nation builder, and the enabling of a high level of resource mobilization by a centralized state were all mechanisms that made bellicosity possible and even preferable.
• In Memoriam: C.J. Lammers (1928–2009)*