Ethnographying public memory: the commemorative genre for the victims of terrorism in Italy

This article addresses one concern that is central to much of the sociology of memory currently ongoing: how can we remember terror and how can we forget it? And moreover, is there any cultural shape of remembering terror, which is more suitable than others? By addressing the issue of the social representation of a very controversial past - the massacre at the Bologna railway station in 1980 - the focus is here on the relation between the collective knowledge of public events, such as a terror attack, and the process of their fixing and shaping into social practices (commemorative ceremonies) and cultural objects (public symbols of the slaughter). It will be shown how, in the Bologna case, this process reflects tensions and articulates contradictions in the public inscription of the legitimate version of this past, between state and civil society. It will be argued that, due to a specific group of agents of memory - composed primarily by the association of the victims’ relatives and the committees of solidarity founded in the city during the last two decades - the structure of the commemorative ceremony has lead to the public fixing of a specific genre of memorisation in Italy for the victims of terrorism. This genre, that defines the number of its degrees of freedom (the range of possible variation within itself), becomes a crucial key to understanding the public making of cultural memories. The methodological considerations that arise from this research are related to the possible ways to analyse controversial versions of the past. It will be shown how ethnographying public enactment of personal experience and interviewing the victims and their relatives represent a very specific type of research experience, where many usual assumptions used by qualitative interviews are violated.