Katharina Schramm is a senior lecturer in social anthropology at the Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg. She has previously worked on the commemoration of the slave trade and cultural politics in Ghana. Her published works include African Homecoming: Panafricanism and the Politics of Heritage (2010) and Identity Politics and the New Genetics: Re/creating Categories of Difference and Belonging (2012).

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1. Introduction: Remembering Violence
Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm

Bodies of Memory

Chapter 2. Rape and Remembrance in Guadeloupe
Janine Klungel

Chapter 3. Uncanny Memories, Violence and Indigenous Medicine in Southern Chile
Dorthe Kristensen

Performance

Chapter 4. Memories of Initiation Violence: Remembered Pain and Religious Transmission among the Bulongic (Guinea, Conakry)
David Berliner

Chapter 5. Nationalizing Personal Trauma, Personalizing National Redemption: Performing Testimony at Auschwitz-Birkenau
Jackie Feldman

Landscapes, Memoryscapes and the Materiality of Objects

Chapter 6. Memories of Slavery: Narrating History in Ritual
Adelheid Pichler

Chapter 7. In a Ruined Country: Place and the Memory of War Destruction in Argonne (France)
Paola Filippucci

Generations: Chasms and Bridges

Chapter 8. Silent Legacies of Trauma: A Comparative Study of Cambodian Canadian and Israeli Holocaust Trauma Descendant Memory Work
Carol Kidron

Chapter 9. The Transmission of Traumatic Loss: A Case Study in Taiwan
Stephan Feuchtwang

Chapter 10. Afterword
Rosalind Shaw

Psychologists have done a great deal of research on the effects of trauma on the individual, revealing the paradox that violent experiences are often secreted away beyond easy accessibility, becoming impossible to verbalize explicitly. However, comparatively little research has been done on the transgenerational effects of trauma and the means by which experiences are transmitted from person to person across time to become intrinsic parts of the social fabric. With eight contributions covering Africa, Central and South America, China, Europe, and the Middle East, this volume sheds new light on the role of memory in constructing popular histories - or historiographies - of violence in the absence of, or in contradistinction to, authoritative written histories. It brings new ethnographic data to light and presents a truly cross-cultural range of case studies that will greatly enhance the discussion of memory and violence across disciplines.