5.13. Sacred Ground and Troubled Pasts: Negotiating Memory in Public Space [ES/EN]

The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented over 4,600 clandestine burial sites linked to the internal armed conflict (1980–2000); by 2023, 5,104 sites had been registered. This paper examines how rural Andean communities reconstruct social relations within territories marked by death—clandestine burials, mass graves, and reburial sites—and how these spaces, beyond memorials, embody cultural identity, belonging, and the ongoing negotiation of loss and justice in post-conflict Peru.

A dialectic between permanence and change, materiality and ephemerality, tradition and innovation, runs throughout memory studies scholarship. For Karl Marx, revolutions rely on borrowed language; for Friedrich Nietzsche, historical humans are crushed under their own antiquarianism; for Henri Bergson, memory is habituated in matter, and so on. Maurice Halbwachs suggests oral memory must be fixed in writing, echoing back to Plato’s Phaedrus. For Paul Connerton, even rites are relived. Public memory is wrapped up in what Pierre Nora calls “illusions of eternity.” My project seeks to take an entirely different epistemological stance from outside the Western tradition of memory studies. What happens when we draw instead on the rich religious memory traditions of ancient India, particularly Buddhism? The stūpa is “the ‘signature monument’ of Buddhism” (Lopez 207), yet it has received insufficient attention in memory studies (Gyatso). More importantly, the Buddhist philosophical teachings that prioritize endless change and transformation over static permanence offer a productive counterpart to Western notions. Instead of an individual self, no-self (anatman). Instead of independence, interdependence—a concept with implications for democracy. Instead of memory, meditation (Pali “sati,” Sanskrit, “smṛti”) which literally means remembrance. A continual bringing of one’s wandering mind back to the breath is remembering at its earliest appearance as a mental formation in consciousness. Utilizing the methods of rhetorical analysis of public memory, I explore the “Four Holy Places” of Buddhist pilgrimage in India and Nepal. India, once the world’s largest democracy, has been dubbed a “backsliding democracy” due in part to Hindu nationalism and religious contention, particularly with border countries like Nepal. As a transnational memory project then, I analyze Buddhist sites in and on their own rhetorical and philosophical terms to rethink what it means for democracies to remember and begin again.

The Valley of Cuelgamuros, until recently known as the Valley of the Fallen, lies about 35 miles outside of Madrid. Inaugurated by the dictator Francisco Franco in 1959, this landmark comprises a vast underground basilica and houses the mostly anonymous remains of 34,000 Spaniards who died during the civil war (1936-1939) and its repressive aftermath. Since the early 2000s, the Valley has been a political lightning rod in a country that has long struggled with how to address the legacies of its authoritarian past. Ongoing debates among politicians, scholars, and journalists have revolved around the possibility of the Valley’s “resignification”—a process exemplified in 2019 by the exhumation of Franco’s body from a tomb behind the basilica’s main altar. In this paper, I perform critical discourse analysis on public texts that have emerged in these debates to distill the notion of resignification and to highlight its entanglement with conflicting narratives about Franco’s regime. Recruiting semiotic concepts from linguistic anthropology, I shed insight on the complexities of recent efforts to transform the landmark through material and discursive interventions. My analysis reveals how calculated and coincidental changes at a site of contested heritage can unsettle a dominant account about the past, even as their proponents wrestle with the temptation of a totalizing narrative themselves.

The notion of authorized heritage discourse (AHD) refers to heritage-making processes that reinforce the narratives, values, interests, and memories of economic and cultural elites. Research in Western postcolonial countries shows that the prevalence of AHD exacerbates tensions with less represented groups—such as minorities and Indigenous or First Nations peoples—who are often marginalized. Within this context, the present paper analyses how the AHD is expressed in the Metropolitan Area of Concepción (MAC) as an example of a postcolonial Latin American city, and how this dominant narrative has, for decades, obscured Indigenous Mapuche heritage, thereby failing to employ heritage policies as a means for reconciliation and peacebuilding. First, we gathered information on all nationally designated heritage sites located in the MAC and conducted a discourse analysis of the heritage decrees, aiming to identify those reflecting the AHD. This information was then used to develop a series of graphs and GIS maps to analyse potential shifts in dominant discourses in recent decades as well as the spatial distribution of heritage sites. Second, we compared these maps with a map identifying sacred sites for the Mapuche people. The findings confirm the prevalence of AHD in the city of Concepción. However, a nascent shift can be observed in the last decade, as a new ideological framework has begun to permeate institutional practices.

This paper analyzes how the Site of Memory and Historical Monument of the former Fort El Morro, in the commune of Talcahuano, Biobío Region, presents different tensions on how to represent memory, having to dispute the memory of the dictatorship with the institutional denialism of the Municipality of Talcahuano, at least until the year 2024. El Morro is thus a space of memory in dispute, moving from a space of repression to a public one through the process of monumentalization, patrimonialization and memorialization carried out by the Corporación de Socorros Mutuos Bautista van Schouwen Vasey. Through an analysis of primary and secondary sources, an analysis was made of how memory processes are intertwined with the physical and emotional reconstruction of the territory, how the site presents different materialities of memory, through the architectural elements that function as living archives of its transformations and meanings, allowing the preservation of narratives of different temporalities. However, these would be presented as counter-narratives regarding how to understand and give meaning to the site. It is concluded that the former Fort El Morro, despite being a historical monument, still presents some problems, mainly due to the meanings that this site evokes, and the lack of funding and political will. This case shows how heritage is re-signified and tensioned through the uses, which are focused on the attributes of heritage that are identified through the political and historical memory of the site, through the community and the territory as such, being able to understand this as a difficult heritage, due to the fact that this place combines not only the biography of the place but also of the protagonists.