'The Creation and Maintenance of a Social Memory of Violent Antagonism among Basque Radical Nationalists'

When?

Monday 28 February 2005, 17:00 to 18:30

Where?

19AD04

Open to:

Public, Staff, Students

Speaker:

Tormod Sund, Research Fellow, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Tromsø

Dr Tormod Sund (Tromso)

My paper will address questions of how a social memory of violent antagonism is created and recreated among radical Basque nationalists and how it influences social categorisation and processes of identity formation, within the realm of the Basque conflict. Building on fieldwork material from the Basque region in Spain (July 2000- August 2001) I will explore questions of how ritualised action and local narrative practices interact with personal experience and ‘macro’ level historical accounts, political rhetoric and mass media accounts in the continuous process of creating social memory. I will argue that ‘macro’ level discourses, personal experience and local discourse are anchored in local practices by the way they all influence and are influenced by this practice. Ritualised and narrative practices are ways of ordering chaotic and ambivalent realities and experiences. Through these processes of ordering reality by producing a coherent social memory, certain moral codes emerge. By participating in ritualised practices the subject publicly and thus morally accepts the enacted social memory inherent in these and thereby defines himself or herself as a Basque radical nationalist. Similar to ritual practices, participation in the social construction of narratives according to certain moral codes, form a basis for identity formation. The moral codes I address here evolve from the notion of victimisation, which emerges from a perceived pattern across narratives and ritualised action. Certain contents that support this notion of victimisation are socially expected as content in narratives and ritualised action, and it is from this expectation the moral codes become visible. In this way, social memory through its communal creation and maintenance forms a moral community which expresses what are proper and improper behaviour and narrative representations.