Memorial

A memorial can be defined as a cultural artifact (such as a gravestone, a sculpture, a statue, a park) aimed at giving shape to a certain past. Usually a memorial is devoted either to a group of people (soldiers, victims) or to an event (an earthquake, a terroristic attack, a war). A memorial is usually intended for commemorative purposes, and it functions as symbolic marker that fixes forever (or at least over a long period of time) the shifting meanings attributed to an event. A memorial inscribes the event in public discourse, and in doing so, it contributes to crystallize and legitimize a certain version of the event that it commemorates. The different definitions of memorials are related to corresponding conceptions of the past and different definitions of memory. The definition of memorial depends on how the past is conceived. By the common sense, the past is often considered as something stable. It is something given once and forever. According to this conception, the past is an object - outside in the world out there- that one can discover, and a memorial is a “representation” depicting that past. However, many theorists have argued that the past is not self-evident, and it has not a unique potential meaning. Maurice Halbwachs, the first sociologist who dealt explicitly with the social context of the process of remembering, argues that the past is a social construction shaped by the concerns of the present. The memorial, in this perspective, represents the act of fixing the past in a specific cultural shape, and is therefore a sort of “frozen” representation of the past.