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  • IntroductionTraveling War: Memory Practices in Motion
  • Geoffrey M. White and Eveline Buchheim

While we were writing this introduction an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times recounting a set of encounters and exchanges that had led the granddaughter of a Japanese combatant killed in the battle of Pelilieu in the Western Pacific to return to that island in search of his remains or at least knowledge of the place where he had perished.1 The sheer fact of a descendant returning to a battleground is not in itself a particularly new or newsworthy event. The storyline for this article focused as much on the chain of events that enabled the granddaughter’s return as on the act of traveling itself—specifically on the discovery of a map at the U.S. Naval Construction Battalion Museum in Port Hueneme, California, that identified the location of a cemetery for Japanese remains. In similar ways, the war experiences recalled in this volume also travel across generations and oceans, enabled by the memory work of institutions such as museums, archives and local heritage projects.

In the articles presented here memory is not so much sited as transited, emerging as people move through multi-sited itineraries, more in the spirit of discovery than recovery, actively constructing their understandings of the past through encounters with people, artifacts and landscapes. While the spatial and architectural fixities of war memory have long attracted scholarly attention in research on memorials, monuments, battlegrounds and their commemorative practices, memory studies increasingly turn their attention to the social and performative practices that make past experiences “real” or relevant in the present.2 Historians who focus on the constructions of history emerging in and around memorial sites now reject models that assume singular or fixed significance for those sites, choosing rather [End Page 5] to see them as sites of dialogue or performative enactments of history.3 As Jay Winter has noted with reference to studies of war memory, “the performative turn is built into the shifts in identity attendant upon massive trans-national and trans-Continental migration. It is therefore inevitable that historians and other scholars will pay increasing attention to the ways in which people construct their sense of history by performing the past.”4

To the extent that there has been a performative turn in memory studies, it suggests a certain degree of convergence in the work of historians and anthropologists. To study the history of memory is to study acts of representation and remembrance that are always embedded in social relations and activities, activities of people constructing meaning in the present, using the tools of history to fashion desired futures. It is in this context that the authors collected here trace the paths of people moving through spaces of remembrance, crossing border zones where relevant identities gain heightened significance. In doing so these studies bring an ethnographic sensibility to examine what happens as memory emerges in the activities of people “on the move” in the transcultural and transnational circuits of travel and remembrance.

Turning analytic attention to movement, flux and flow has methodological implications. In introducing a collection of essays on “travelling memory,” Astrid Erll noted that “Mnemonic constellations may look static and bounded when scholars select for their research, as they tend to do, manageable sections of reality (temporal, spatial, or social ones), but they become fuzzy as soon as the perspective is widened.”5 In this respect work in and on the transit areas of memory builds upon decades-long efforts in anthropology to deterritorialize the concept of “culture” while also shifting methodological approaches to more multi-sited research capable of tracing transcultural and transnational connections.6 Consistent with the arguments of a number of influential studies of war memory in transnational perspective, the studies here find that transnational methodologies and perspectives are crucial to the analysis of cultural forces at work in the production of national histories, even when projected as tightly bounded within the commemorative traditions of single nation-states.7 Similarly, cross-cultural, cross-national itineraries traveled in the course of remembering turn out to be a critical element for the vitality and relevance of national imaginaries. [End Page 6]

Memory and...

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