Mourning, Melancholia and Violence

  • Larry Ray
Chapter

Abstract

During the past decade there has been renewed attention in sociology to the relationships between memory, commemoration and (especially national) identity. There is presently a passion for the recovery and discovery of collective and individual ‘pasts’, which are brought into the service of constructing and maintaining identities in a new memory politics. As Jeffrey Prager notes,

Today the past has achieved a kind of iconic, even sacred status. Remembering the past is now widely understood as a valuable activity in and of itself; … We have become a society of ‘memory groups’ where one’s claim to group membership typically goes unchallenged because a common past … constitutes an area of discourse that cannot be contested.1

This chapter examines one aspect of these relationships — the relationship between memory, remembrance of the dead, and national/ethnic conflicts.

Keywords

National Identity Collective Identity Collective Memory Cultural Memory Individual Life History 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

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Copyright information

© Larry Ray 2006

Authors and Affiliations

  • Larry Ray

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