From the Editors: Can an Empire Have Memory? An Invitation to Discussion

From the Editors, Can an Empire Have Memory? An Invitation to Discussion 20 From the EDITORS CAN AN EMPIRE HAVE MEMORY? AN INVITATION TO DISCUSSION Memory has been promoted to the center of history… Pierre Nora1 In 2004, Ab Imperio explores a concept which has recently been actively utilized by researchers of “nations and nationalism”. At the same time, this concept has found little application in the study of empire. The concept in question is “historical memory”; AI’s editors suggest exploring its potential for the development of “new imperial history”, which implies investigating the dynamics of conflicting images of the past and their coexistence within the symbolic space of the multinational empires and their societies. Memory as a concept for historical study emerged in the context of the modern European nation state and redefined principles upon which the national historical narratives are built. Can memory become a key to our understanding of the mechanisms of a heterogeneous and multinational imperial space? What happens to memory in an empire, where diverse constituent peoples have multiple and alternative visions of the past? Does memory suppress, synthesize, or creates a hierarchy of these visions? Al1 Pierre Nora. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire // Representations. 1989. Vol. 0. No. 26. P. 24. 21 Ab Imperio, 1/2004 ternatively, in an imperial context , do multiple and competing “memories” exist in opposition to the imperial “state-centered” historical narrative? Is the “modern” concept of memory at all necessary for the interpretation of “archaic” empire? Finally, can an empire have“memory” and can “memory” have imperial history? * * * The emergence of modern historical scholarship in the XIX century was accompanied by the emergence of its irreconcilable opponents among scholars in social sciences and humanities.Arange of influential opponents can be named, from Emile Durkheim to Pierre Nora, and certainly not only in France. Sociologists, philologists, anthropologists, psychologists and philosophers criticized different “histories” and did so from diverse perspectives .Yet, however great the differences between quantitative history and the Romantic historiography of the mid-XIX century or between microhistory and traditional political history, many of the fundamental principles of the historiography discipline remain unchanged: history as a scholarly enterprise remains a system of procedures and rules for interpreting past events and circumstances. These procedures and rules, moreover, are implemented selectively and are corrected depending on the studied Chronotopos (time and space). It is this particular quality of the “science of man in time” (Marc Bloch) to erect hierarchies of sources and methods, and to adapt them to given historical circumstances that triggers the main sources of criticisms. Compared to sociological perspectives, history is unscientific in its stress on each event’s uniqueness, leaving no room for unveiling the law of the typical and the universal. At the same time, history is often reproached for taking an anti-humanistic approach and for lacking trust in the vitality and immediateness of human experience. This is accused of creating redundant formal procedures and expertise in the human experience of the past and the perception of the contemporary observer. Paradoxically, Durkheim and Nora could have agreed in refusing to accept the extreme heterogeneity of the internal space of historical perspective. For the former, the problem would have been the diversity of the historical “image”. For the latter, the lack of transparency in the diachronic aspect of historians’ interpretation and the impossibility to perceive today events of the past through the eyes of immediate witnesses without corrections that takes into account “the noise of time” (historically predetermined specifics of perception in the past, disturbances that accompany the transmission of information, amendments to the language of the “modern” man, etc.). Sociology would have made From the Editors, Can an Empire Have Memory? An Invitation to Discussion 22 history a “science” by reducing references to specific location to a variable, whereas studies of memory brings history closer to the humans involved by removing (or “contextualizing”) the unique conditions of time and place or by turning them into a mere function of chronological markers. Eliminating the internal complexity and multidimensionality of the historical space makes “history redundant”. It appears, then, that the study of “memory” is not just a regular inoculation of the...