Building on different types of evidence, and spanning from Archaic to Roman times, the contributors to this volume address the complex relationship of memory and space in a variety of instances and methodological approaches. As a whole, the volume emphasizes how the Greeks deployed a strong sense of place and locality, especially the epichoric element, in communion with the stuff of memory—stories, myths, and narratives—to shape communal identities. This is far more than a matter of inventing traditions and rather takes us to the heart of how the Greeks experienced their worlds. From Pindar to Actium, for the Greeks the world was experienced as a series of mnemotopes.
Giorgia Proietti is assistant professor at the Department of Humanities, University of Trento
Jeremy McInerney is professor at the Department of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania
From: Introduction (pagg. 1-6)
The significance of memory studies for cultural history has been amply affirmed over the last century. Ever since the publication of Halbwachs’ La Topographie légendaire des Évangiles en Terre sainte in the 1940s, and even earlier with Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925), it has become clear that no culture can be adequately understood without a consideration of how social memory is formed and expressed. Furthermore, we now recognize that the relationship of collective memory to social identity is dynamic and recursive. In the generation since Jan and Aleida Assman first published their studies of kulturelle and soziale Gedächtnis, older notions of closed systems of fixed memories and linear connections from a single past to present have yielded to approaches emphasizing the openness and the constructedness of memory. The deep past aggregates in memories and stories until shared narratives emerge. The more recent past is more actively debated and subject to separate and individual narratives. In between is a space where memoryscapes take shape, as our separate connections to past events and times give way to collective and agreed upon narratives. And from Nora’s studies it is now commonplace to recognize lieux de mémoire and to contrast them with a milieu de mémoire. As a result, it can be taken for granted in the study of ancient Mediterranean societies that place and memory intersect in a thousand different ways. The contributors to this volume address this complex relationship of memory and place in a variety of instances and bring to bear a number of methodological approaches, but the unifying thread is the general apparatus of memory studies constructed over the last century.
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Taken together, then, the contributions in this volume emphasize the degree to which the Greeks deployed a strong sense of place and locality, especially the epichoric element, in communion with the stuff of memory—stories, myths, and narratives—to shape communal identities. This is far more than a matter of inventing traditions and rather takes us to the heart of how the Greeks experienced their worlds. From Pindar to Actium, for the Greeks the world was experienced as a series of mnemotopes.
From Chapter 2. How do Memory and Space Meet? (pagg. 14-28)
This conception of space as a framework for collective memory lies at the roots of Henri Lefebvre’s La production de l’espace (1974), a well-known study in urban sociology that focuses on space as a cultural construction. Space is neither inherited by nature, nor defined by law. Nor is it simply transmitted by the dead hand of the past: space is instead literally produced and reproduced through human intentions and utilizations. Lefebvre proposes a sophisticated analysis of the process of ‘spatialization’—the transformation of physical space into social space—in the modern city. Within his broader interest in modern processes of urbanization and capitalism, common to French sociology of his time, he argues that every society, with its own production mode, constructs its own space: since those in power shape the social construction of space at the time, space ultimately represents a means for power and therefore a milieu of social class conflict. If for Halbwachs there can be no lasting memory without referring to space, likewise for Lefebvre there can be no lasting ideology without referring to space. As we will see, the Greek world seems to offer a blend of the two.
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A constructivist approach is also central to the pioneering spatial theories by Michael Foucault, who has shown that power also plays a fundamental role in shaping landscape: spatial stories are discursive formations, and, as such, they ultimately are conceptualizations of power. Power and politics are also at the core of Said’s notion of ‘imaginary (or imaginative) geographies’, i.e., spaces shaped by imagery and texts at the service of power, as the ‘Orient’ in Western cultural (and colonial and imperialist) imagination. Also connected to this approach is geo-urbanist Edward Soja’s notion of ‘thirdspace’, which is combination of physical and imaginary space (Soja 1996). In this model, it is pretty easy to discern an echo of Lefebvre’s tripartite model of space production, possibly also affected by Foucault’s heterotopies, a subtle concept interlinking real and non real spaces. The spatial turn—an expression introduced by Soja himself with reference to “postmodern critical human geography” was about to happen in the social and human sciences [….].
To summarize such an approach and its relevant terminology, we could envisage a scheme of dichotomies such as this: spatial studies shift their focus from denotation to connotation; conceive space not as something objective, but subjective; understand space not as a product, but as a process; therefore, they prefer to speak of place, instead of space, and of landscape, instead of environment. If memory comes into play, this approach does not only sift through the perception and utilization of a given space in a given moment in time, but gains historical depth, as the layers of meaning which are brought to light in the diachronic analysis of a given place help unravel the specificities of each historical context.
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In recent scholarship, therefore, the phrase “memoryscape” subsumes the three substantial features of what mnemo-spatial studies are ultimately about: the creative role of agent groups and societies, the reification of cultural constructions through the inscription of memory into space, and the dynamic, often conflictual, formation and development of collective memory. Memoryscape is certainly useful as an overarching concept. However, when applied to a specific test case, it might be worth avoiding using it as an umbrella term, as it obliterates the single components of both memory and the landscape it inhabits and (co)creates. Instead, it is advisable to always clearly make explicit the single aspects of memory construction through space considered. If the general principles of the mnemo-spatial process have been clarified so far from several different disciplinary perspectives, it is actually the analysis of their occurrence in a single context, with its singular ways of happening, and cultural specificities, that can make historical research proceed further.
From Chapter 5. The Myth-Historical Geography of the Athenian Leadership of the Delian League (pag. 75)
Mnemo-spatial approaches to Greek history are proving beneficial as a way to shed new light on various case studies, from historiography to archaeological and monumental contexts. In fact, not all the concepts and tools elaborated in the humanities and social sciences have been tested in ancient Greek contexts. Nor can it be taken for granted that theoretical paradigms shaped with reference to a present, observable world are productive if applied to bygone eras, where intentions, perceptions, feelings and reactions can only be tentatively inferred from the surviving fragmentary evidence. However, I argue that theoretical frameworks assuming any sort of semantic relation between two (or more) sites, monuments or texts are critical to understanding how the ancient Greeks, in a given time and space, made sense of either their history (and their role in it) or a specific event (or set of events).In this paper, the paradigms I will deploy to question the textual and monumental evidence are Halbwachs’ social frameworks of memory, Assmann’s mnemotopes, Levebre’s conception of space as a social, cultural and discursive construction, as well as Zerubavel’s notion of mindscapes and mental maps.
Courtesy by Brill