Investigating the role of cultural practitioners in managing memories of disputed territories (part 1)
In January 2020, the DisTerrMem project published four literature reviews, surveying existing knowledge and research on the respective roles of nation states, regional organisations, civil society groups and cultural practitioners in managing memories of disputed territories. Here, the University of Bath’s Shauna Robertson introduces and summarises Professor David Clarke’s work exploring the role of cultural practitioners.
Part 1 of 2: Memory, territory and cultural practice
“We need to go beyond research focusing on the narratives of memory, and to explore the lived experience of place, embodiment and performance in order to examine the potential of artistic practices in promoting co-existence and cultural exchange.”
The field of memory studies is concerned with how human societies construct their understanding of the past in the present. Its focus tends to be on shared histories, and the extent to which any given history is seen as an agreed homogenous narrative, or as a multitude of differing, even conflicting, perspectives. In the case of disputed territories, a key question is how to manage those multiple and conflicting perspectives in a way that provides a context for living together in harmony, rather than reigniting further conflict.
Professor David Clarke
Key to this is are notions of self-identity, roots and belonging. Here, artistic and cultural practices can have a profound impact on peace-building and reconciliation. A wide range of art-based educational programmes and socially engaged cultural practices have made significant contributions to conflict resolution and collective recovery. With that in mind, the review asks: what is the potential for artistic and cultural practitioners to help promote positive co-existence and cultural exchange between people living in and around disputed territories?
The review comprises two parts. In part 1, summarized here, David Clarke explores the relationship between memory, territoriality and cultural practice.
Where history, geography and culture meet
David’s review highlights the importance of considering how history, geography and culture intersect when managing memories of disputed territories.
The link between territory and political violence is well established. Where ownership and control of territory are in dispute between different groups, the very notion of ‘territory’ and the meaning that people ascribe to place and space is key. At the same time, territorial disputes are closely allied to historical narratives: perceptions of what happened and what did not happen within a locality are of the utmost importance to groups vying for power and place.
Cultural memory
In order to understand the potential contribution of artistic and cultural practitioners to managing such memories, the review digs deeper into the relationship between memory and territory, paying particular attention to ‘cultural memory’: the body of texts, images and rituals specific to each society in each era, whose cultivation serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image.
A human tower, named Castell, during the Festival de la Mercè in Barcelona.
As the world has become organized and divided into ethno-national states, the tendency has been to seek to align territorial boundaries with ethnically, linguistically and culturally homogenous populations. This supposed national homogeneity and territorial integrity then has to be discursively and symbolically produced, by laying down a relationship between a nation state and its geographical features, the myths of the origins of its people, and concepts of a homeland and a shared history - the ‘national biographical narratives’ of modern states. Continuity of place therefore seems key to the rhetoric of historical identity.
‘Selective’ memory in claiming both territory and a sense of identity
In situations of disputed territory, the polyvalence of any space is often perceived as a risk to the supposed homogeneity of the territory claimed by one group or another. In situations of conflict, competing groups therefore seek to emphasize the expression of their own history and identity in spatial terms, while feeling threatened by, and seeking to minimize, reject or overwrite, the history of others’ presence in that same landscape.
However, since all territories are, in reality, subject to ongoing contestation and evolution, their places and spaces remain fundamentally plural and continue to bear the material and cultural traces of successive peoples. Hence, even within a single nation or culture, there is a process of negotiation between institutions and citizens in order to select the particular material traces of the past in the landscape that will be deemed significant, and preserved and incorporated into the discourse of cultural memory. The result is an uneven landscape of remembrance and forgetting.
But why do particular locations or territories need to be understood as being exclusive, and their histories unilateral at all, in order to foster a sense of identity? Isn’t the struggle to define place and past as a more or less static ‘envelope of space-time’ (Doreen Massey) essentially futile, given the constant mobility of peoples across places, and the ongoing evolution and mutual influence of communities and cultures? Of course, the struggle to define the past of a place is also the struggle to define its present and future, which is central to conflict and power relations. So, might we find alternative conceptions of the relationship between place and the past that recognise that what has come together in any given place, and at any given time, is a conjunction of many histories and peoples?
Such a conception of the relationship between memory and territory would clearly challenge the predominant ethno-nationalist approach.
Art and the affective: lived/felt experience versus narrative and the stories we tell ourselves
Photo by Anderson Guerra from Pexels
Historically, cultural and artistic practices that are typical of ethno-nationalism have focused on the integrity of territory; they have had an inherently exclusionary focus on ethnic, cultural and linguistic homogeneity, and served to construct a sense of historical continuity. Cultural practices can (and do) contribute to strongly held feelings such as fear of the other, pride, mourning of loss, desire for revenge, etc. - feelings that can perpetuate conflict and an exclusionary understanding of territory.
The review therefore seeks to investigate what theoretical positions are available that allow us to think about the role of artistic and cultural practice in challenging such understandings, particularly in relation to disputed territories. Moreover, what particular kinds of artistic or cultural interventions might help to foster positive co-existence between people living in and around disputed territories?
A key area of interest here is that of the affective. The affective explores the role of embodied experience, or felt experience (i.e. felt in the emotions and the body) as distinct from the purely narrative - the stories we tell ourselves which originate in thought-based, mental processes. In the context of disputed territories, what are people’s lived and felt experiences of particular places and spaces?
To date, the field of memory studies has tended to focus more on the narrative aspect, investigating the relationship between the construction of personal life-stories and socially constructed narratives, such as those of the nation state. Memory conflicts are thus often presented as primarily driven by competing narratives. Yet every narrative also has a significant affective element. Put simply, all stories contain and transmit emotion and felt experience.
So, what is the relationship between the narrative/discursive and the affective? The review points to a need for further exploration of the experiential qualities of engagement in cultural practice, whether as participant/producer or as recipient/audience member. Without rejecting the importance of narrative and sense making, paying attention to ‘affective-discursive practice’ (Margaret Wetherell) would allow us to consider the relationship between the two in meaning-making and the implications of that for designing artistic and cultural practices.
How might artistic and cultural practices create the conditions for new kinds of understandings of disputed territory to emerge, by combining narrative/discursive and embodied/affective processes? How might we move towards understanding – in a truly embodied way, in our lived experience – our places and spaces as ‘multiple’ and ‘becoming’, rather than insisting on delimiting and fixing exclusionary accounts of both geography and history?
View and download all four literature review reports in full at www.disterrmem.eu/publications.
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Shauna Robertson is DisTerrMem’s project administrator, based at the University of Bath, UK. Discover more at www.disterrmem.eu/university-of-bath