Ghost Island: History, Memory and Place in Ireland
Paul O’Connor
Abstract
Collective memory, as an imaginative terrain which interweaves the past with the present and
underpins the identity and ethos of a social group, is inseparable from place. As globalisation and
electronic communications have weakened our connection to place, collective memory has been
eroded. The result is a historical amnesia which undermines our ability to imagine alternatives to
the present and articulate a shared set of intrinsic, as opposed to purely instrumental, values. Such
historical amnesia increasingly characterises Ireland as the country enters a decade of centenaries
of the events which led to the establishment of the Irish state. In this context, reconnecting with
the collective memory embedded in place has the potential to be a source of cultural and social
renewal.
Key Words: Collective memory, Place, Ethos, Non-place, Globalisation, Decade of centenaries.
Introduction
One of the best-known memoirs of the Irish War of Independence is Dan Breen’s My
Fight for Irish Freedom. At crucial points in the opening stages of the conflict, Breen’s
account presents him and his comrades turning to the historical memory embedded in the
surrounding landscape for inspiration. This is how he leads up to his account of the
ambush at Soloheadbeg, later seen as the beginning of the IRA campaign:
Soloheadbeg is a small townland about two and a half miles from
Tipperary Town…In this plain, dominated by the Galteemore
mountain, Brian Boru1 and his brother Mahon fought their first
great battle with the Danes in 968; their gallant army, composed
of men from Tipperary and Clare, routed the invaders…Their
right wing swept across the hills as the Danes fled to their
stronghold (Breen, 1964: 32).
After the ambush Breen and his companions went on the run and one of them, Sean
Hogan, was soon captured. On receiving information that Hogan was to be transferred by
train from Thurles to Cork they decided to stage a rescue at the village of Knocklong. On
the way they passed through Ballyneety, where one of them recalled an incident from
local history:
We made a detour…past the ruins of the old castle, on the very
same road by which Patrick Sarsfield2 rode on that moonlit night
two hundred and thirty years before, when his sabre brought
terror to Dutch William’s troops. It was a strange coincidence that
we, who now rode on a similar errand of death or glory, were
Tipperary outlaws just like Galloping Hogan who on that night
made Sarsfield’s exploit possible. We, too, were on our way to
rescue another Tipperary outlaw of the same name and clan
(Breen, 1964: 57).
At this time, in early 1919, the Irish Volunteers largely confined themselves to drilling and
training. Breen and his companions faced widespread condemnation for their efforts to
ignite a full-scale conflict with the British. In these circumstances they turned to the past
for legitimisation, seeing themselves as part of an age-old struggle by the native Irish
against successive invaders – and did so by drawing on specific memories inscribed in the
landscape of Tipperary and East Limerick. Identification with their native countryside
allowed Breen and his companions lay claim to the exploits of Brian Boru and Patrick
Sarsfield as part of an ongoing history of resistance to foreign rule, which they saw
themselves carrying forward in their own time. If the hill country of mid-Tipperary
offered physical refuge to the IRA guerrillas, it also gave them a sense of continuity with
the past, an imaginative terrain from whose fastnesses they could bid defiance to the
shifting currents of public opinion or the seeming hopelessness of their cause.
Dan Breen’s memoir shows the intertwining of memory and place; it also indicates
how a felt connection with the past can empower us to re-imagine the present. The
argument of this article is that place provides a centre around which memory, whether
that of an individual or a community, can crystallise. A landscape which has been the site
of continuous and prolonged dwelling thereby becomes a multi-layered palimpsest,
inscribed with the traces of many hands. Such places concentrate value and integrate
experience; not alone are they rich in memories, but by virtue of being embedded in the
same location, these memories gain coherence and become woven into a communal
narrative. Such shared memories anchor the identity of a collective – whether family,
community, ethnic group or religious sect – and underpin their sense of belonging. Places
can also ‘cue’ certain behaviours and so preserve a community’s ethos and traditions.
To be separated from place is to lose this deeply-felt connection to the past. It is to
be condemned to a form of historical amnesia which not only erodes collective identities,
but deprives us of the temporal depth that allows us imagine alternatives to the present.
This is increasingly our fate in the epoch of hyper-globalisation, which replaces local
contexts and face-to-face relations with non-places situated in the interstices of global
chains of communication and exchange. In Ireland, facing into the centenary of the
revolutionary decade in which Dan Breen and his companions played such a prominent
part, this historical amnesia is ever more prevalent.
The first section of this article, ‘History and Memory’, draws a distinction between
history, as the attempt to reconstruct an ‘objective’ account of the past, and collective
memory, which imaginatively interweaves selected elements of past and present to shape a
communal narrative. The second and third sections – ‘The Landscape of Memory’ and
‘The Primordial Depth of Place’ – build on the insights of Maurice Halbwachs, Gaston
Bachelard and Paul Connerton to explore how collective memory is embedded in and
supported by physical places, which provide an imaginative terrain in which it can be
constantly reworked and reinvented. The fourth section, ‘Collective Memory and Social
Ethos’, suggests that it is collective memory which underpins the ethos of a social group,
providing the foundation for its moral codes and cultural imaginary, as opposed to the
more narrowly functional dimensions of its existence. The fifth, ‘Placelessness and
Historical Amnesia’, explores the impact of globalisation and the erosion of place on
memory, drawing upon Marc Augé’s concept of ‘non-places’. The final section, ‘Ghosts’,
draws these themes together to address Ireland’s situation as it enters a ‘decade of
centenaries’ of the founding events of the Irish state. It argues that the challenge we face
in commemorating these events is the growing absence of any felt and meaningful
connection to the past, of collective memory as opposed to historical reconstruction, and
this is related to the intensive globalisation of Ireland over the past half-century and the
progressive erosion of a sense of place. With the attrition of collective memory, we lose
an imaginative terrain in which, through the creative interweaving of the present and the
past, we are enabled to imagine alternative futures, and a shared moral ethos capable of
being mobilised against the cannibalistic individualism of the neo-liberal economic order.
History and Memory
To understand the relationship between memory and place, we must first make a
distinction between the preservation and interrogation of the historical record and socially
effective memory. The work of archivists and professional historians can influence how a
society recollects the past, but it is wholly distinct from the collective memory. The latter
is based on a creative process of re-membering, which involves selecting from the
fragments of the past which lie ready-to-hand those which seem most pertinent to our
concerns, and constructing a usable history which makes sense of where we stand in the
present. Individually or collectively, we thereby construct a genealogy that reinforces our
identity, like an aristocrat filling his house with portraits of his ancestors. Nineteenthcentury radicals with their myth of a free England before the ‘Norman yoke’, Russian
socialists who convinced themselves the rural mir was a relic of primitive communism, or
Christian apologists reinterpreting the Old Testament as a series of prophecies about the
coming of Christ – all were engaged in the same process of connecting past, present, and
a wished-for future in a way that made their proposed reformations seem only the
restoration of a natural and original order, or the fulfilment of a destiny long foretold.
Such formulations are of course never neutral but profoundly-value laden: they embody
the collective ethos or moral imaginary of a religious sect, a political party, an ethnic
community or a social movement. From the perspective of the professional historian this
makes these accounts of the past profoundly suspect, but in social life it is precisely what
gives them their power. Memory becomes socially effective when it is forged into such
narratives – as when Dan Breen and his comrades saw their conflict with England as one
more round in a centuries-old struggle. Collective memory works by ‘knitting together
today and yesterday, integrating the new events and relationships into the narrative of a
life, the biography of a person, a family, a people’ (Young, 1997: 43).
This distinction between historical scholarship and socially effective memory parallels
that made by the historian Pierre Nora (1989) between history and memory. Memory,
which Nora associates with pre-modern societies, involves the persistence of the past into
the present in the form of tradition and custom. History on the other hand is
characterised by its mediated character and a self-conscious distance from the past.
Memory is integrated, unselfconscious, and spontaneous; history is ‘nothing more in fact
than sifted and sorted historical traces’ (Nora, 1989: 8). Memory ‘remains in permanent
evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its
successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to
being long dormant and periodically revived’ (ibid: 8). History, on the other hand ‘is the
reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer’ (ibid: 8).
Memory is always the memory of a particular group; history belongs to everyone and to
no-one. Memory mythologises the world: history seeks to deconstruct the narratives that
memory creates.
Nora claims memory is almost entirely displaced by history in modern societies.
However any social group – any individual – needs some kind of integrative narrative of
their past if they are to maintain their identity. It is through such narratives that memory
becomes socially effective, enters the present and shapes it. This is not to say that we can
create any version of the past that suits us. We are constrained by the resources available
to us in memory and by the weight of traditional interpretation. That a myth need not
coincide at all points with objective reality does not make it indistinguishable from
fantasy: a historical myth is a meaningful arrangement of memory and experience which
resonates with our hopes, fears and desires, and it could not function if it did not reflect
what is generally remembered about the past. But we are likely to pass over much that has
been preserved or recorded of previous epochs if it does not speak to where we currently
stand. Many works of classical antiquity survived in monastic libraries or Byzantine folios
throughout the Middle Ages, but they were only remembered in the Renaissance, when
artists and scholars found in them the inspiration for new ways of thinking that were
already starting to emerge. At this point the texts became a social force.
Finally, while history is textual and archival, memory is inscribed in concrete locations
and social practices (Nora, 1989: 9). The creative remembering of the past most often
takes its inspiration from place.
The Landscape of Memory
‘That memory is dependent on topography is an ancient insight’ (Connerton, 2009: 4).
According to Maurice Halbwachs every collective memory unfolds within a spatial
framework, for ‘space is a reality that endures: since our impressions rush by, one after
another, and leave nothing behind in the mind, we can understand how we recapture the
past only by understanding how it is, in effect, preserved by our physical surroundings’
(1950: 12-13). Because buildings and landscapes, or the street plans and monuments of
towns, can endure for many times the length of a human life, they are peculiarly suited to
become the carriers of collective memory. Hence ‘most groups…engrave their form in
some way upon the soil and retrieve their collective remembrances within the spatial
framework thus defined’ (ibid: 28). Yi-fu Tuan writes of ‘place as time made visible, or
place as memorial to times past’ (1979: 179). For Gaston Bachelard it is through place that
memories are preserved and we are able to retrieve and relive them: otherwise they are
vaporous and without substance. ‘We are unable to live duration that has been destroyed.
We can only think of it, in the line of an abstract time that has been deprived of all
thickness’ (Bachelard,1994: 9). The past only becomes real when it is embodied in space:
‘all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability…In its
countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for’ (ibid: 8). Paul
Connerton suggests that ‘no collective memory can exist without reference to a socially
specific spatial framework…our images of social spaces, because of their relative stability,
give us the illusion of not changing and of rediscovering the past in the present’
(Connerton, 1989: 37).
Traditional peoples exemplify the manner in which a landscape becomes a
mnemonic, whose contours remind its occupants of episodes from history and legend, the
deeds of gods and heroes. Topography is the repository of tradition. For the Navajo,
‘closeness to the land and to their place on the land is their way of being grounded in
tradition, in the traditional ground of their tribal ancestors. Their sense of history and
even their sense of time itself are dependent on this closeness to their land…culture is
almost literally in the land’ (Casey, 1993: 36; italics in original). For the aborigines ‘Space is
full with significance, and the landscape, rather than being comprised of physical and
geological features, is a record of mythical history in which the rocks and trees…are
experienced as ancestors and spirits’ (Relph, 1976: 15).
A similar relationship between landscape and tradition is exemplified in the early Irish
texts known as the Dinnseanchas. This is an ancient corpus of poems and prose tales
which relate how rivers, lakes, mountains, fords, islands, ridges, provinces and royal seats
across Ireland got their names. The stories were written down at various times between
the tenth and twelfth centuries, but much of their content dates from an earlier period –
in some cases as far back as the Iron Age – and originally belonged to an oral culture
(Caviness, 2001).
For the authors of the Dinnseanchas, the mythical history of gods and men was
inscribed in the land itself. The poetry is highly allusive, embodying a range of
mythological and genealogical information. A poem from the metrical Dinnseanchas
which explains the origin of the name of Temair (Tara), from the burial there of the
goddess Tea, opens with a recapitulation of the legendary seven invasions of Ireland
(UCC, 2014). Another poem, which tells how the province of Meath got its name, begins
with a long list of kings said to have possessed the territory (ibid). In total 770 places are
mentioned in the surviving Dinnseanchas (Caviness, 2001); when we consider the density
of their allusions, and how many legends relating to place were either never recorded or
have subsequently been lost, we gain some idea of the symbolic richness of the landscape
in Gaelic Ireland.
The Dinnseanchas tradition in Irish literature is not confined to the corpus of writing
which carries its name. In Gaelic tradition ‘story and place are inextricably linked….
Throughout the literature important events such as the death of gods, goddesses, people
and animals, combats and battles are commemorated in the landscape. It was seen as a
living thing with a name for every feature.’ (Ní Bhrolcháin, 2009: 7). All the main cycles of
Irish storytelling include significant passages detailing how particular places or features of
the landscape got their names. The prose epic Táin Bó Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley)
ends with a battle between two bulls. Placenames are derived from the fragments of the
defeated animal’s body which were scattered over the countryside: Sliab nAdarca, the
Mountain of the Horn; Áth Luain, the Ford of the Loins; Druim Tairb, the Ridge of the
Bull (Kinsella, 1969). Likewise in one of the principal tales of the Fenian Cycle, Acallam na
Senórach (The Colloquy of the Old Men), Oisin and Caílte travel the country with St
Patrick offering information on the landscape and place names; his scribe, Brocan, writes
it all down (Ní Bhrolcháin, 2009). ‘When the Fianna tell tales, they always include
information on the landscape that revives a memory that had been forgotten’ (ibid: 66)
This perception of landscape as the repository of memory and therefore intimately
bound up with the life of the community persisted until the end of the Gaelic order in the
seventeenth century. Lamenting the exile of the Gaelic Lords after the battle of the Boyne
the poet Aeogán O’Rathaille visualised the rivers of Ireland mourning the departed chiefs:
The Sionainn, the Life, the musical Laoi, are muffled
And the Biorra Dubh river, the Bruice, the Bríd, the Bóinn.
Reddened are Loch Dearg’s narrows and the Wave of Tóim
Since the Knave has skinned the crowned King in the game.
- Cabhair ni ghairfead, trans. in Kinsella, 1981
Séathrún Céitinn laments the dispossession of the Gaelic chieftains from their lands using
an idiom which would have been recognised by the writers of the Dinnseanchas:
There’s a new sort growing in the plain of Lugh the lithe
Who are base by right, though they flourish their ‘rolls’ on high Eoghan’s seed exhausted, Tál’s blood troubled and broken,
And the youth of Bántsrath scattered in foreign lands.
- Óm sceol ar ardmhagh Fáil, trans. in Kinsella, 1981
Here Ireland is ‘the plain of Lugh’, named after a god of the Tuath De Danann. The
Gaelic clans of Munster are identified as ‘Eoghan’s seed’ – descendants of the semilegendary Eoghan Mór, who was said to have ruled the southern part of Ireland in the
second or third century AD and who gave his name to the Eóganachta dynasty of
Munster kings. Contemporary events and characters are seen through a mythological and
genealogical prism which connects them to the distant past, and roots them in a particular
place.
As late as the 1970s, when the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes arrived in the
isolated village of Ballybran in West Kerry, she encountered a mentality which retained
remarkable similarities to that of the authors of the Dinnseanchas. The inhabitants, she
wrote, ‘view their terrain as a holy geography, their past as a religious history, and their
language as a sacred tongue’ (2001: 79).
In the highly personalized world of the villager every field and
pasture, every spring and well, every rock, hill, and resting place is
endowed with a name, a personality, a story, and a lesson. On
Mount Brandon alone can be found Macha an Mhil (the Beast’s
Pasture), Faill na nDeamhan (the Demon’s Cliff), Com na Cailighe
(the Hag’s Recess), Loch na Mná (the Woman’s Lake), and Cnoc
an Tairbh (the Bull’s Head) – names suggestive of myths and
legends that recur as well in other parts of Ireland.(ScheperHughes, 2001: 80)
Local traditions viewed the history of the parish as beginning with the landing of Noah’s
granddaughter, accompanied by fifty virgins and three young men, at Dún na mBarc on
the Dingle Peninsula, seeking refuge from the Great Flood.
The collective memory embedded in such landscapes, where every feature has a name
and a story, is richer and fuller than anything we would today count as ‘history’. It
embraces myth, genealogy and folklore, collective traditions and customary observances,
the burial sites of ancestors and the dwelling places of spirits. The relation of this material
to the present is also fundamentally different. History is a body of knowledge about the
past which may reveal some causative connections with the way we live now (as for
example that our political systems are fundamentally shaped by the legacy of the French
revolution), but makes no pretence to offering normative guidelines for how we should
conduct ourselves in the present. Collective memory, on the other hand, is bound up with
the very life of the community. It is the foundation of its values, its ethos, its identity and
its customs. Its absorption is necessary for a full initiation into social life.
The Primordial Depth of Place
Why is it that the collective memory of a group is preserved more effectively in a
landscape or building than in an archive? The legacy of the past is embodied, rather than
merely encoded, in places. Buildings, streets, place-names, monuments and landscape
features can connect us with historic people or events in a way that a written or digital
record cannot. The site of the World Trade Centre in New York, the Colosseum in Rome,
or the battlefields of the Somme and the Marne are all iconic for this reason. In each case
the written or oral transmission of information about the past is required to ‘activate’ the
memories associated with a place. Ground Zero would mean nothing to somebody who
had never heard of September 11th 2001. But inscription in the landscape gives these
memories vividness and immediacy. Embodiment allows us grasp the past.
Place not only makes the past real; it conserves its substance. This goes beyond the
survival of physical remains. Because it fixes and preserves value, place can transmit
something of the cultural perspectives of the past, almost like a dream somehow set in
stone. From where I write this in Tipperary, I can look out the window at the Rock of
Cashel fifteen miles away across the Golden Vale. The rock and the dramatic ruins with
which it is crowned dominate the landscape, making it natural for people in the vicinity to
preserve a recollection of its history. The site also embodies the values of early medieval
Ireland. The importance of defence is reflected in the choice of location, its royal past as
the capital of the Eóganacht kings of Munster in its domineering presence. But above all it
is the religious faith of the age which still finds an echo in the cluster of ecclesiastical
buildings – round tower, cathedral and churches – that give the rock its distinctive
silhouette. Thus embodied, these values live on into the present; they still have power to
seize the imagination.
As well as a building or landscape, the past can be embodied by an object such as a
religious relic or family heirloom, or in a ritual whose words and gestures are carefully
preserved from generation to generation. However these lack the encompassing quality of
place. When we walk through the streets of a city rich with the inherited legacy of the past
we are literarily inside that heritage, surrounded by it on all sides, in a way that we are not
when we gaze on a relic or an antique.
This encompassing quality of place means we can inhabit the scenes of past events
and feel them resonate in our everyday lives. In any old town or city, the streets through
which we move, the houses we live in, have witnessed innumerable previous lives played
out. And so our inhabitation raises echoes in the landscape of memory. The charisma of
an institution such as Oxford or Cambridge derives in part from the opportunity to work
or study in the same place as generations of scholars, many of them illustrious. Irish
republicans marching to the grave of a dead martyr know that they participate in a
commemoration which is annually renewed, and return with their commitment to the
cause reinvigorated. A farmer tilling the fields that have been in their family for
generations feels a particular connection to those who have tended the land before them.
In each case the present act echoes a long succession of similar activities in the same
setting, and produces a felt connection to the past. Hence the associations called to mind
by some street corner where a heroic or tragic event unfolded may be infinitely more
powerful in shaping a community’s consciousness than libraries of learned volumes which
sift the fragments of the past with ‘scientific’ precision.
The importance of continued inhabitation and use can be seen in the distinction Paul
Connerton makes between place as memorial and place as locus (2009: 10). Memorials
commemorate the past explicitly and formally; the memory which they preserve is set and
frozen. As an example Connerton gives war memorials, or the Scandinavian names of
many English villages – a legacy of the Danish conquest of large parts of England in the
ninth century. On the other hand a house long inhabited is for Connerton a locus of
memory which draws the past into the present (ibid: 21). It carries a less explicit and more
informal body of recollection than the memorial. Because of this more fluid, taken for
granted character, ‘the locus is more important than the memorial – whose construction is
so often motivated by the conscious wish to commemorate or the unavowed fear of
forgetting – as a carrier of place memory’ (ibid: 34-5). Because the locus is a place with
which people are intimate in everyday life, constantly reshaping it and adding to its freight
of memory through their activities, the recollections it carries are more deeply interwoven
with local identity and more likely to support a living tradition.
A locus of memory is multi-layered and can connect us to more than one event or
character from the past. Edward Casey writes of the historical dimension of place that
through it time enters space ‘not in the form of a line but as something distinctively
multidimensional’ (1993: 33). The same spot can possess a nearly infinite assortment of
remembrances and associations. Thus Henry James wrote of Rome as ‘an infinite
superposition of history’ (cited in Connerton, 2009: 16). Wherever we dwell, memories
accumulate in layers like archaeological strata. These layers are richer in proportion not
just to the length of time we dwell in a place but to the intensity of our experience. ‘Many
years in one place may leave few memory traces that we can or would wish to recall; and
intense experience of short duration…can alter our lives’ (Tuan, 1979: 185). As a result a
location which has been dwelt in continuously by a social group becomes imbued with a
wealth of association and symbolic value. Place is place ‘insofar as it bears the sedimented
traces of our presence’ (Casey, 1993: 103).
Scattered around the Fertile Crescent are mounds called ‘tells’, each of them the site
of an ancient human settlement. For instance Tell Barri, in north eastern Syria – site of
the ancient city of Kahat, inhabited from the fourth millennium BC until the Arab period
– is a hill 100 foot deep accumulated from the remains of successive settlements. Place is
a kind of ‘psychic tell’ – a layered accumulation of memories, associations, habits,
traditions, rituals and stories, closely associated with physical landscapes, buildings and
objects.
The result is a particular dimension of meaning attached to places which have been
the site of prolonged dwelling and where continuity with the past has not been destroyed.
Merleau-Ponty speaks of ‘primordial depth’ which is not reducible to the three
dimensions of mathematical space or indeed to that of time:
Primal depth, according to Merleau-Ponty, is ‘the dimension in
which things or elements of things envelop each other, whereas
breadth and height are the dimensions in which they are
juxtaposed.’ While juxtaposition acts to set objects merely next to
each other – i.e., as simply located at contiguous points in
planiform space – envelopment arranges objects around each other
in a scene of mutual implication and simultaneous presence. What
primal depth as a thick medium makes possible is thus the
overlapping of near and far, which continually intertwine in depth
(Casey, 1993: 68; italics in original).
For the philosopher Edward Casey such primordial depth is ‘the matter of place’ (ibid:
67). The memories, associations, customs and traditions inscribed in a location
interpenetrate and entwine to endow it with its unique character. Through primordial
depth, our physical surroundings, the stories we tell about them and the rituals we enact
there become deep repositories of meaning and value. A place becomes a sacred
landscape. The Dinnseanchas tradition exemplifies the dimension of primordial depth; as
the history and mythology of its people were inscribed in the landscape, the land of
Ireland became a holy ground infused with the legendary past. A testimony to the
enduring power of this tradition is the continued ability of sacred sites like Croagh Patrick
or Lough Derg to draw tens of thousands of pilgrims each year, or the iconic presence of
such ancient ritual centres as Cashel and Tara.
Primordial depth profoundly influences the nature of collective memory. Embedded
in a historic landscape, the past is not a linear timeline or a collection of disconnected
facts, but a body of interpenetrating traditions which live on in a place so long as it
continues to be the site of human dwelling. Memories, exemplars, stories and customs
mutually envelop and reshape each other. Themes echo from period to period. Aspects of
many different pasts can thereby be assimilated into a coherent narrative, irrespective of
chronology or causal connection. Thus for Dan Breen the memory of Brian Boru’s battle
against the Vikings and the exploits of Patrick Sarsfield – entirely unconnected as they
appear to the academic historian – echo each other and prefigure his own struggle against
British rule, giving it a historical resonance which is all the stronger for being anchored in
a particular landscape. To call this a falsification of history or a selective reading of the
past is to miss the point: memory becomes socially effective when it is incorporated in a
meaningful narrative that connects current circumstances to the past, reinforcing
collective identity and social action.
Primordial depth also allows different traditions to be reconciled and the narratives of
newcomers to be combined with those of autochthons. In Ireland centres such as
Newgrange and Tara enjoyed continuity in sacred status over a period of more than three
thousand years from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, despite successive waves of migration
and invasion (Ó hÓgáin, 1999). Newcomers could preserve the sacred traditions of the
past while adopting these sites to their own use because multiple layers of significance
were juxtaposed and given coherence within the primordial depth of place.
The consequence is that while place helps preserve collective memory and identity, it
does so in a manner which leaves them open to constant reinvention. The primordial
depth of place is an imaginative terrain peopled by gods and heroes, through which spirits
and ancestors move, and where the founding events that define a community and its
ethos are constantly replayed. Moreover it is a terrain through which we too can journey,
shaman-like, to communicate with the spirits and the ancestors, relive their trials and
triumphs, and return transformed and inspired. That globalised late modernity is
characterised by historical amnesia, a two-dimensional landscape lacking temporal depth,
is one of the principal reasons why there seems no alternative, not only to its political and
economic dispensation, but to its basic values. Fredric Jameson (1991) argues that
whereas modernism still believed in some residual zones of nature or the archaic,
postmodernism revels in the process of commodification which seems to have taken over
all spheres of life and closed down every other dimension of reality. In this context the
primordial depth of place can offer us refuge from the stultifying homogenisation of
global consumer capitalism.
Collective Memory and Social Ethos
The primordial depth of place, its capacity to accumulate memory and significance, is
central to the constitution of social reality itself. ‘Social reality is not simply a solid block
of facts, or an interconnected system, but consists of a series of accumulated layers,
forming altogether a meaningful unity’ (Szakolczai, 2014: 157). Social life has depth: it is
the result of a process of historical development, and it is this temporal depth which gives
any social phenomenon its character and renders it meaningful. For Maurice Halbwachs
collective memory is what holds communities together during the intervals between
periods of collective effervescence. It is ‘what binds people together in periods of calm,
when routine behaviour is the order of the day’ (Coser, 1992: 25). In a world of complete
historical amnesia, where human horizons were wholly reduced to the present moment,
social life would be impossible.
In this regard Halbwachs makes an important distinction between functional and social
life. He argues that in modern society the role of preserving social memory is taken on by
those groups, such as the family and the social circles of everyday life, which are not
confined to professional functions (Halbwachs, 1992: 139). This social sphere is
concerned with the qualities of actions and persons, their location within a system of
societal values, rather than their purely functional characteristics:
It is within society that we become accustomed to perceiving and
valuing the personal qualities of actions, words, and
characteristics. Within society we find rules of sufficient
complexity to be able to classify these values and to reason about
them. The role of these social contexts is precisely to retain such
values, and to foster such a mind-set (ibid: 143).
Without such animating values, even the ‘practical’ or technical sides of life cannot
function properly:
Order, discipline, or military instruction are not enough to
conduct a war. Technical qualities cannot replace personal
qualities….These qualities can develop only in an environment of
intense social life in which the ideas of past and present join
together, and in which contemporary groups and those of
yesterday come into contact in some way….The same is true for
the legislator, the councillor, and the judge (ibid: 130).
To be effective a legislator must possess a sense of equity, a feeling for the ideas of justice
that pervade the society of their time – and this cannot be acquired from a written manual
or a course of instruction but only through social intercourse. Likewise, a lawyer in
presenting a case and a judge in deciding it rely on their familiarity with a body of tradition
and moral feeling which goes beyond the letter of the law. In the economic sphere too,
technical expertise or mutual self-interest are not sufficient to enable ongoing exchange:
The difference in needs that makes two people oppose each other
is in itself not sufficient to unify them and to make them
collaborate. No social relationship can arise from a simple
antagonism, or from warfare. It is hence necessary that sellers and
buyers become aware both of what makes them oppose each
other and what unites them; this is to say that each must see,
beyond the antagonist, a social individual and a society of which
he is himself a part (ibid: 164-5).
As Halbwachs sums up, ‘whenever a function requires, in addition to technical
competence, the exercise of a reflective mind, it is not the function itself that can provide
this’ (ibid: 131), but only immersion in the traditions and values of the wider society which
are preserved in its collective memory.
We might speak of this as the ethos of a society or a particular social group. The
ethos of a group encompasses its values, customs, moral laws and traditions of conduct
(Sumner, 1906: 37). It includes not just those rules of behaviour which are explicitly
articulated, but a whole body of taken for granted assumptions without which social
action would be impossible. Any group or organisation – a school, a family, a workplace
or a political party – has such an ethos, permeated, of course, by of the ethos of society as
a whole. The ethos is what makes it a social group as opposed to a mechanical
agglomeration of asocial atoms. Our word ethics is derived from the Greek ‘ethos’: for
the Greeks ethics ‘were things which pertained to the ethos and therefore the things
which were the standard of right’ (ibid:37).
The ethos of a group can be more or less powerful. The ethos of a religious
community tends to be particularly strong and all-pervasive, lending it a unique stability
and cohesion – this is one reason why the overwhelming majority of intentional
communities which have survived more than a few years have been religious in inspiration
(Kanter, 1972). On the other hand the ethos of a workplace or a centre of casual
sociability like a pub can be quite fragile: its power to stamp individual identities and meld
them into an enduring social group is much less. A crucial factor explaining this
divergence is the strength of collective memory and its localisation in place. A workplace
can usually draw on fewer resources of memory, and is less able to localise them in an
enduring centre, than a religious community whose memory goes back hundreds or even
thousands of years and is localised in monuments and houses of worship. As Halbwachs
says, ‘social thought is essentially a memory and…its entire content consists of collective
recollections or remembrances’ (1992: 189). Professional technique, a mechanical skill
which aims only at functional efficiency, does not accumulate significance by repetition. If
a mechanic carries out a sequence of actions designed to fix a leaky radiator in a car, their
only significance is whether or not they achieve that end, and otherwise it is irrelevant
how often the mechanic has carried them out before. But family attachment or patriotic
feeling, a set of ethical precepts or the shared commitment of a party, cannot exist
without consciousness of the temporal dimension of experience preserved in collective
memory. In terms of Weber’s classic distinction, we might say that means-end rationality
is oblivious to history, while value-rationality draws its very substance from collective
memory (Weber, 1968).
Placelessness and Historical Amnesia
Many writers have identified the erosion of place as a feature of modern society. For
Edward Relph placelessness is characteristic of present-day life: ‘it is less and less possible
to have a deeply felt sense of place or to create places authentically’ (1976: 80). According
to Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘Modern man is so mobile that he has not the time to establish roots; his
experience and appreciation of place is superficial’ (1979: 183). Marc Augé claims that
while places are never completely erased, ‘non-places are the real measure of our time’
(1995: 79). To Edward Casey, ‘By late modern times, this world had become increasingly
placeless, a matter of mere sites instead of lived places, of sudden displacements rather
than of perduring implacements’ (1993: xv).
The driving force behind this erosion of place is the separation of space from place
which underpins the economic, political and communicative systems of modernity
(Giddens, 1991: 18). In pre-modern societies space and place largely coincide, since most
activities of social life require the mutual presence of the actors. ‘The advent of modernity
increasingly tears space away from place by fostering relations between ‘absent’ others’
(ibid). This separation of time and space is central to the dynamism of modernity,
facilitating the ‘disembedding’ of social life from local contexts of interaction and the
development of rationalised systems of organisation. Place becomes increasingly
phantasmagoric, penetrated through and through by social influences which are
geographically distant, shaped by a network of relationships which extend far beyond its
borders (ibid).
In practical terms this means that for increasing portions of our lives we inhabit the
physical ‘non-places’ (Augé, 1995) of global transport and commerce or the virtual ‘nonplaces’ of electronic communications and media. For Marc Augé, non-places include
transit centres and temporary abodes such as bus stations, airports, hotel chains, refugee
camps, cars and trains; the sites of abstract, mediated commerce like supermarkets, slot
machines and ATMs; and virtual spaces of communication including cable and wireless
networks, to which we might add the internet. The term “non-place” is used to designate
both ‘spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and
the relations that individuals have with these spaces’ (ibid: 94).
Those relations, in contrast to the dense sociality associated with place, are based on
‘solitary contractuality’ (ibid.). Our only relationship to an airline is the contract we sign
when we buy our ticket; our only relationship to a hotel chain is the agreement to pay a
certain sum of money for a night’s use of a room. The result is ‘a world…surrendered to
solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral’ (ibid: 78). Non-places
are characterised by only the slightest of social contacts – the few necessary words spoken
to the cashier in a shop, a sentence or two exchanged with a fellow-passenger on an
aircraft – out of which only the most tenuous sense of shared identity can emerge. Instead
of interacting with individuals we find ourselves interacting with institutions through the
medium of texts. ‘The link between individuals and their surroundings in the space of
non-place is established through the mediation of words, or even texts’ (ibid: 94). These
texts include road-signs, maps, tourist guides, notices, electronic signboards, screens,
posters, and price lists. The result is that the usual processes of mutual social recognition
to which we owe our identity (Pizzorno, 2008) are suspended: ‘…a person entering the
space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants. He becomes no more than what
he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer or driver’ (Augé, 1995: 103).
In these circumstances there is ‘no room…for history unless it has been transformed
into an element of spectacle’ (ibid: 103). It is worth exploring in more depth why this
should be the case. If we speak of the history of a house, to what do we refer? Not the
mere passage of time, but a succession of events which cohere into a narrative; the
relationships that have unfolded within its walls, the births and comings-of-age, marriages
and deaths, the guests who have been welcomed and the festivities that have taken place,
as well as the physical changes the inhabitants have made to the house, such as building
an extension or refurbishing a room. But in non-places characterised by ‘solitary
contractuality’ there are no enduring relationships, nor do we physically change these sites
in passing through them: therefore there is no story to be told, and no history to tell it.
Despite the fact that many of us spend a considerable portion of our lives in these
environments, the experience is not cumulative. They are spaces where we cannot leave
our mark, which we cannot cultivate or appropriate, since the only relationship we have
with them is governed by contract and mediated by words and signs. Our connection to
them is entirely on the surface. Tim Cresswell’s argument against Augé, that ‘Even
airports have their inhabitants, people who work there, the homeless or frequent fliers
who see the same people, at the same time, every workday’ (2009: 6) is therefore
misconceived. Even if somebody passes through the same airport every month, the
superficiality of their relation to it eliminates the possibility of an accumulation of
association and meaning: every journey is a repetition of the first, as temporal depth gives
way to an eternal present. When our relationship to our surroundings is so distant, they
can afford us no embodiment or fixing of value, no preservation of the past, and no sense
of place, no matter how frequently we pass through.
This is partly a function of the transitory or liminal character of such locations; they
are literally ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner, 1964). This is obvious in the case of transit
centres and temporary accommodation. It is also true of leisure centres such as casinos
and holiday resorts, which operate on the principle of the suspension of ‘ordinary’ time,
and of sites of mediated commerce such as self-help checkouts at the supermarket or
ATM machines which we tend to frequent ‘on the run’ while moving between other
locations. All these environments are in fact the embodiment of ‘permanent liminality’
(Szakolczai, 2000), locations in which the taken-for-granted structures of everyday life and
their accompanying identities are suspended indefinitely. Their liminal character goes even
deeper than their accompanying social practices or the (non)relationships they support; it
is embodied in their physical form. These locations exclude both the everyday spatial
environment and the normal passage of time. Frequently windowless or opening only
upwards to the sky, their interiors possess their own micro-climates regulated by heating
and air conditioning, while artificial lighting nullifies the passage of time. They are also
environments where every sign of decay is suppressed; they aspire to be permanently
glossy, shiny, and up-to-date. Ritzer (2001) and Goss (1993) describe how shopping
centres and casinos play with time and space to create a virtual environment freed from
the constraints of everyday reality, in which shoppers and gamblers may engage in
unchecked consumption, while Jameson (1991) characterises postmodern architecture as
aspiring to create a self-enclosed hyperspace which transcends the capacity of the human
body to orientate itself perceptually in its surroundings. The usual architectural style of
such locations, too, is resolutely international, refusing any connection to the surrounding
locality or its historic traditions. Global crossroads and cathedrals of consumption, these
are both ‘non-places’ and utopian ‘no-places’, cut out of the fabric of everyday space and
time. Within them, the layered accumulation of collective memories we described earlier is
impossible. These are locations which disperse value rather than gather it, public spaces
which are solvents of community and social relationships. As such they embody the
conditions of globalised late modernity.
Another kind of non-place, perhaps even more powerful in its impact than shopping
centres and transit points, is the virtual universe of digital communications and media, in
which we are absorbed for increasingly lengthy portions of our time. Compared to
traditional cultures literate modern society ‘depends less and less on material objects and
the physical environment to embody the value and meaning of a culture’ (Tuan, 1979:
117). Certainly, digital recording, electronic publishing and online archives also mean that
more material relevant to the past can be preserved and people at a geographical distance
from one another can access the same past in the form of an e-book, a television
programme, or a website. But we have already noted that there is a difference between
preserving and disseminating a record of the past and socially effective memory. When
the past is stored in printed records or digital archives, and these are unaccompanied by
the living memory embedded in a place and the community that inhabits it, our
relationship to it changes.
Paul Connerton writes of ‘the gradual replacement of older forms of narration by
information, and of information by sensation’ (2009: 79) with the evolution from the
newspaper to television to the internet. The idea of the simultaneous was built into the
conventions of the newspaper from the very beginning. The typical broadsheet juxtaposes
five or more otherwise unrelated stories on its front page (ibid: 81). The tendency toward
the breakdown of experience into an evanescent collection of images or pieces of
information related only by their temporal juxtaposition is exacerbated by television and
the internet (ibid.). The effect is to ‘isolate what is reported to have happened from the
sphere in which it could deeply enter into the affective experience, and so the affective
time, of readers’ (ibid: 82).
Another way of conceptualising these developments is to speak of the past as
becoming progressively ‘unanchored’ from concrete places and social contexts. Collective
memory is profoundly embedded in physical places and in the stories and traditions,
rituals and practices of the social groups which inhabit them. This anchorage gives it both
an intense presence and a narrative coherence which is related to the primordial depth of
place. With the development of communications media – from print through newspapers
to television and the internet – memory is progressively detached from these contexts and
transmuted first into history and then increasingly into mere information. Disembodied,
and detached from its social context, memory loses both presence and coherence. The
past becomes ever more fragmented and our engagement with it is increasingly either
purely cognitive or a form of entertainment which bears little relation to the contexts of
our everyday lives.
As Ireland has become more integrated in the global economy over the past halfcentury, particularly during the decade and a half of the ‘Celtic Tiger’, a lesser portion of
its citizens’ lives is spent in concrete places and communities, a greater in the non-places
of transport, electronic communications, commerce and leisure. Collective memory has
changed and diminished as a result. When memory is separated from place we lose an
immediate and felt connection to the past. Increasingly all we know of it is a disconnected
jumble of words and images lost amid the noise of the electronic herd. The continuity of
an integrated tradition is replaced by a series of abstract and fleeting impressions. We can
no longer access the primordial depth of meaning inscribed in the landscape, the mythic
narratives that connect contemporary concerns to the dreamtime of the ancestors, the
echoes passed back and forth between different epochs to knit them together. In their
place we have a body of disconnected facts, bracketed as ‘history’ and therefore having
little relevance to the present. The power of collective memory to shape identity and
communal ethos, to let us know who we are and where we belong, is gradually eroded.
Ghosts
Months before the Easter Rising, Patrick Pearse wrote a series of pamphlets which set out
to define a continuous tradition of Irish revolutionary separatism that would legitimate the
rebellion. The first was entitled Ghosts, and its brief prologue stated:
Here be ghosts that I have raised this Christmastide, ghosts of
dead men that have bequeathed a trust to us living men. Ghosts
are a troublesome thing in a house or in a family, as we knew even
before Ibsen taught us. There is only one way to appease a ghost.
You must do the thing it asks you. The ghosts of a nation
sometimes ask very big things; and they must be appeased,
whatever the cost (Pearse, 1924: 221).
Pearse’s ghosts are the spirits of the Fenian dead whom he had summoned shortly before
in his graveside oration for Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, with its famous peroration: ‘The
fools, the fools, the fools! – they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds
these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace!’ (1924: 137). In each case he evokes a
tradition of revolutionary separatism which is passed from one generation to the next in a
kind of apostolic succession; the sacrifice of each generation of martyrs both obligates
and inspires their successors to continue the struggle.3
The deconstruction of this narrative became the objective of several generations of
academic historians from the 1960s onwards, given added impetus by the outbreak of the
northern troubles and a perception that nationalist myths gave succour to those who
justified republican violence (Whelan, 2004). The ghosts of the Fenian dead were now to
be exorcised rather than appeased.
Such a fear of the potentially divisive effects of the past still seems to haunt official
Ireland4 as we approach the centenary of 1916. As the country enters a decade of
commemorations of the events which led up to the foundation of the state, it is possible
to detect a certain ambiguity in prevailing attitudes. There is a recognition these events are
important, that they need to be commemorated, but we seem unsure how to approach
them or how they are relevant to the people we have become. Discussion of the
centenaries is dominated by the prism of contemporary Anglo-Irish relations, the
imperatives of the northern Irish Peace Process, embarrassment over revolutionary
violence, and the ambiguous relationship of the Irish state to the legacy of 1916-23 by
which it is at once legitimated and threatened.
This can be seen in the official decade of centenaries website, which features a ‘Joint
Statement’ from the British and Irish governments that attempts to set the context for the
upcoming sequence of commemorations. It states ‘The relationship between our two
countries has never been stronger or more settled…as it is today’ and goes on to say ‘Our
citizens, uniquely linked by geography and history, are connected today as never before
through business, politics, culture and sport, travel and technology, and of course family
ties’ (Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, 2014). It cites the close economic
integration between the islands and the political co-operation which underpins the Peace
Process. The decade of centenaries, it promises, will be an occasion to reflect on the past
‘in a spirit of historical accuracy, mutual respect, inclusiveness and reconciliation’ and for
looking forward to ‘renewed and strengthened co-operation between our two countries’
(ibid). Indeed the very notion of a ‘decade of centenaries’ commencing with the Home
Rule crisis of 1912 and incorporating various centenaries related to the First World War,
represents a deliberate break from a view of events dominated by a nationalist or
republican perspective.
But whatever about the power of the past (particularly the more recent past) to stoke
the embers of conflict north of the border, the south of Ireland is today characterised not
so much by nationalist mythologising and mulling over historical grievances as by
historical amnesia. Insofar as the nationalist narrative of Irish history has been dismantled,
it has not been replaced by any coherent account of the country’s past able to mould the
collective memory, cement a shared identity and ground a social ethos. This has less to do
with historiographic debate than with the social changes of the past few decades. With
dramatic shifts in population from rural to urban areas and the evolution of a ‘placeless’
landscape of shopping centres, motorways, office parks, industrial estates, international
hotel chains and mushrooming suburbs, huge numbers of Irish people have been
physically severed from the places – whether rural parishes or inner-city communities –
which maintained a living connection with the events of 1912-22: in their place-names, as
the site of raids or ambushes, through physical monuments and memorials, or in their
communal traditions. Even more so, they have been psychologically severed from them,
absorbed into a cultural universe shaped by the internet and the international media and
entertainment industries. From their perspective, what is the relevance of the events of a
century ago to the very different Ireland of today?
Contemporary Ireland is haunted, not by the vengeful ghosts of the Fenian dead, but
by the void left behind after the evaporation of many of the traditional constituents of
Irish identity. A collective memory built around the themes of oppression and resistance
to English rule; the persistence of folkways and traditions inherited from the Gaelic past;
the overwhelming public prominence of Catholic belief and practice; the centrality of
rural life in both the everyday experience and self-image of the country; communal
traditions of voluntarism and mutual aid and an economy only partly integrated into the
global market – all these have vanished from the mainstream of Irish life within a
generation. What has taken their place is a belief in economic growth and instant selfgratification as the only valid measures of social and political success (Keohane &
Kuhling, 2005). But these can provide neither the ground for social cohesion nor a basis
for self-assertion against the dictates of the global market. While place and community
remain important for many people in contemporary Ireland, many more – including much
of the political, economic and cultural elite – have migrated to a liminal space which is
largely unmoored from the physical island with its freight of collective memory. Their
Ireland is a minor intersection of global capital, a ghost island in the cybernetic
thoroughfares of late modernity.
What has been eroded is not just a knowledge of history, but collective memory in
the rich and broad dimensions that I have described. Without this felt connection to the
past and the collective ethos which it underpins, we lose both an imaginative terrain from
which to re-invigorate our current political and economic order and the self-confidence to
assert a moral economy against the imperatives of the market.
In this context the decade of centenaries might provide the occasion for asking how
we can restore a connection to our past, and which elements of the collective imaginary
which is Ireland’s history might inspire us today. I would suggest we look beyond the
events of 1912-22 to the developments which preceded them – in particular, the cultural
revival.
The Irish revival has been described as a conscious revolt against the kind of
provincialism which rejects local traditions in favour of the second-hand imitation of
metropolitan fashions (Kiberd, 1996). This revolt was directed against the intense
globalisation that characterised the second half of the nineteenth century, embodied in the
British Empire in much the same way as twentieth and twenty-first century globalisation
has been embodied in the United States. The Irish revival can be seen as a reaction against
the imperialist domination, homogenisation of culture, enforced provincialism, loss of
collective memory and identity, and subordination of social life to the criteria of the
market which were the hallmarks of nineteenth century globalisation, just as they continue
to characterise its counterpart today. George Russell wrote in 1899: ‘Empires do not
permit the intensive cultivation of human life….they destroy the richness and variety of
existence by the extinction of personal and unique gifts’ (cited in ibid: 157). For W. B.
Yeats, ‘In Ireland, where the Gaelic tongue is still spoken, and to some extent where it is
not, the people live according to a tradition of life that existed before commercialism, and
the vulgarity founded on it’ (cited in ibid: 139). Douglas Hyde worried in 1892 that ‘just at
the moment when the Celtic race is presumably about to largely recover possession of its
own country, it finds itself deprived and stript of its Celtic characteristics, cut off from its
past, yet scarcely in touch with its present’ (cited in ibid: 143). James Connolly charged
Britain with having ‘crushed the development of native genius, and…destroyed the native
industries of a sixth of the human race’ (Connolly, 1988: 84). Daniel Corkery, in Synge and
Anglo-Irish Literature, lambasted Irish writers who aped the metropolitan fashions of
London or New York in order to succeed in the world of commercial literature, rather
than expressing the concrete life of the people around them (Corkery, 1966).
The emphasis placed by the cultural revival on the Irish language and music, on
native folkways and customs, on Celtic mythology and legends, should not be simply seen
as the badges of a narrowly ethnic nationalism – after all, many of its most prominent
exponents were Anglo-Irish. Rather, they were explorations of an imaginative terrain
which seemed to offer refuge from the dominant trends of a globalising, commercial,
materialistic and utilitarian society. Their example is worth pondering today, in an Ireland
which badly needs sources of cultural and social renewal and confidence in our ability to
shape our destiny in a globally interdependent world. We do not need to copy the specific
enthusiasms of the revivalists or reconstruct the nationalist narrative of Irish history to
learn from their sensitivity to the collective memory embedded in place, their ability to
assert the value of local ways of life against the glamour of metropolitan norms, and their
celebration of intrinsic as against instrumental values.
Modernity was for a long time characterised by a clash of totalising ideologies which
claimed universal validity: that clash ended in the victory of globalised capitalism.
Postmodernism celebrated the dissolution of universalistic myths into a diversity of
narratives and cultural forms – on the implicit understanding that none of these could
challenge the fundamental structures of the political and economic order. Today, as
globalised hyper-capitalism threatens the social and ecological foundations of human life,
our challenge is to reconstitute existential communities, not on the basis of some singular
ideology providing a universal blueprint for social reform, but through a recuperation of
everyday human practices which recover relatedness and meaning. This requires a
recovery of the collective memory embedded in place, so we can learn to walk again in the
sacred terrain where we commune with the ancestors and the gods.
Notes
Brian Boru (941-1014) was Dál gCais king of Munster and for much of his career the paramount
king of Ireland. Subsequent historical tradition, beginning with the twelfth century Cogadh Gaedhel
re Gallaibh, depicted him as leading the Irish in a national struggle against the Vikings, who had in
reality been thoroughly integrated into Ireland’s own politics of inter-dynastic feuding by this time.
2 Patrick Sarsfield (1660-1693) was a Jacobite commander in the Williamite War of 1689-1691.
One of his most famous exploits was the destruction of a convoy of Williamite artillery destined
for the siege of Limerick at Ballyneety in 1690, supposedly with assistance from the Tipperary
outlaw Galloping Hogan.
3 This kind of nationalist mythologising can be seen as intermediate between a localised and
topographically rooted collective memory and a postmodern landscape of historical amnesia. It
draws on the materials of collective memory and the traditions of existential communities, but
1
reorders them within a teleological reading of past and future, in the service of a utopian political
project – reinscribing this narrative in the politically-defined territory of the nation. This reminds
us that society’s relationship to the past is not a simple dichotomy of ‘memory’ or ‘forgetfulness’; a
variety of different relations are possible, and are present within modernity.
4 The institutions of the state and those parts of the media and academic opinion which broadly
reflect their viewpoint.
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