AHR forum. Meatpackers, peronists, and collective memory: A view from the south

American Historical Review

Volumn 102, Issue 5, 1997, Pages 1404-1411

  James, Daniel ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33750175016     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2171070     Document Type: Review

References (19)

1. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York, 1995), 7.
2. The most developed analysis and cataloging of such "mnemonic convulsions" in a particular society is that provided by Raphael Samuel in Theatres of Memory, Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London, 1994- ).
3. As a Latin Americanist, I have access to a growing body of region-specific work informed by a subtle and sensitive engagement with issues of memory. For those who share Confino's methodological concerns, see Jeffrey Gould, Memories of Mestizaje (Durham, N.C., forthcoming);
4. Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley, Calif., 1995);
5. Eclea Bosi, Memoria e sociedade: Lembranca de velhos (São Paulo, 1973).
6. Anthropologists such as Joanne Rappaport have also made us aware of the colonial and neo-colonial dimensions of ethnic memory and the specificity of indigenous ways of remembering, both collectively and individually, and the different histories of memory to which non-European peoples have access: Rappaport, The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes (Cambridge, 1990).
7. The project entitled "Berisso Obrero: Class, Ethnicity and the Construction of Identity in an Argentine Meatpacking Community, 1900-1990," is a collaborative one under the joint direction of Mirta Zaida Lobato and myself, with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
8. Daniel James, "October 17th and 18th, 1945: Mass Protest, Peronism and the Argentine Working Class," Journal of Social History 21 (Spring 1988): 441-61.
9. James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992), 126.
10. Alessandro Portelli, "The Death of Luigi Trastulli: Memory and Event," in Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, N.Y., 1991).
11. This was certainly perceived by the Peronist government of Carlos Menem, which did everything possible to deprive the commemoration of any significance at a national level.
12. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989).
13. The issue of the relationship between collective memory, political context, and the intervention of professional historians has recently been raised in an insightful debate sparked by Gerald M. Sider's article "Cleansing History: Lawrence, Massachusetts, the Strike for Four Loaves of Bread and No Roses, and the Anthropology of Working-Class Consciousness," Radical History Review 65 (1966): 48-83.
14. The classic statement of the relationship is Freud's essay "Memory and Melancholia." See Rebecca Comay, "Mourning Work and Play," Research in Phenomenology 23 (1993).
15. See Huyssen, Twilight Memories.
16. John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), 253-80.
17. See, for example, George Lipsitz, Time Passages, Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis, Minn., 1990);
18. Huyssen, Twilight Memories.
19. Here, the work of anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff seems crucial. See Myerhoff, Remembered Lives: The Work of Ritual, Storytelling, and Growing Older (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992).