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This paper deals with the relation between different kinds of indigenous speech and music and various iconographic forms such as petroglyphs, house painting, basketry designs and also features of landscape that are understood in graphic terms. It examines how Northwest Amazonian myth-history is structured and memorized, how it can appear in both verbal and non-verbal forms, and how contemporary books, maps and diagrams produced by indigenous organizations as part of programmes of research and education show continuity with these traditional forms. Rather than making firm distinctions between peoples with and without writing, I argue that it is more profitable to focus on how various mnemonic systems—“writing”—work in tandem with different narrative forms—“myth”. When “writing” and “myth” are understood in indigenous terms, contemporary written documents appear in a new light. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 1976, the Sahrawi national liberation movement known as the Polisario Front anticipates state sovereignty in Western Sahara by organizing into the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in Southern Algeria. Drawing on excerpts from the life-histories of six Sahrawi women who contributed to build the SADR's early social and physical infrastructures, this paper presents practices of public remembrance as coextensive to a history-making labour of social regeneration that seeks international recognition for the Sahrawi nation, as well as to pass on nationalist moral values and political desire across time. The life-worlds of the Sahrawi generation these six women belong to have undergone considerable structural changes brought about by Spanish colonialism, the emergence of the Polisario Front in the 1970s, war, forced displacement, and a 1991 UN mediated ceasefire. Highlighting the on-going vitality of anticolonial nationalisms, this paper offers an account of how elderly Sahrawi female militants seek to socially regenerate the project of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism through their production of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how relatives of left-wing Republicans killed and buried in mass graves by Francoist groups during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) recompose the stories of violent death of their ancestors in connection to documentary evidence that emerges during the search for their human remains. Mass grave searches have taken place in the midst of a process of historical investigation that has brought families, historians, activists and archaeologists together in order to document and seek official recognition for these extrajudicial executions. In so doing, they have also prompted the circulation of personal papers and official Francoist files that bear poignant information about the victims. Both sets of documents converge in the family archive, eliciting different re-readings and acts of memory. The article considers how familial interactions with these material sources attempt to grasp and recreate a history of loss marked by rupture and filled with absences. It also explores how such historical and familial uncertainties marks the experience of disappearance in the Spanish context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to document the ongoing shift from communicative to cultural memory of war and post-war events in the Czech Republic by using an example of a local struggle about a memorial for German inhabitants of a Czech town killed in June 1945. Thanks to an anthropological and social geographical approach based on interviews, family memory research, observations, and analysis of archive materials, it is possible to reconstruct the local and international sources of the post-1989 collective memory of the German past in Central Europe. This memory is still in constant conflict with the pre-1989 version of Czech national history which had contemptuously marginalized its German component. The communicative memory of the German past has entered the public space and tries to become a permanent part of the Czech cultural memory, but it is not a straightforward process, mainly due to the continuously strengthening nationalistic framing of memory within Central Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay analyses how three entrances to Ottoman-era Belgrade have been reconstructed since 1878. It demonstrates how the rewriting of these places entailed silencing the Ottoman past and constructing sites of Serbian national memory. By examining city space as a palimpsest, it shows how a new national narrative has been written in relation to earlier Ottoman space, thus making the national narrative a mediator of the memory of the seemingly erased Ottoman past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]