Margarida de Souza Neves
The expression places of
memory was coined by the French historian Pierre Nora. Convinced
that in the times in which we live countries and social groups
are undergoing a profound change in their traditional relations
with the past, Pierre Nora believes that one of the important
questions of contemporary culture rests in the intersection
between respect for the past – whether real or imagined – and
the feeling of belonging to a given group; between the
collective conscience and concern for individuality; between
memory and identity [1].
From 1978 to 1981, Nora gave a seminar at the École des Hautes
Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), which gathered important
names from French intellectual life to reflect on these
questions, having as a reference the memory and identity of
France. The reflection was wellcome, since French intellectuals
were urgently seeking to rethink the centuries-old process of
constructing the French national identity and its other side,
the memory of France as a nation, faced with the new political
and cultural realities brought by the European Union and the new
challenges of globalization and multiculturalism.
The seminar’s purpose was to take as a theme the study of the
French national sentiment, and examine it through some objects –
material or non-material – in which something of the French
national memory had crystallized. Out of the discussions came
seven thought-provoking volumes, published between 1984 and 1986
by Gallimard, containing studies on themes ranging from French
gastronomy to commemorative festivities on the 14th of July;
from the Larousse Dictionary to cathedrals and clochers
(bell-towers) spread throughout the country; from the Eiffel
Tower to the prehistoric cave art at Lascaux; from Joan of Arc
to La Marseillaise.
To Nora’s surprise, the series was not only a success among
French readers. The more general question of the relationship
between memory, identity and future hopes [2], which the
collection addressed by examining cultural practices, collective
representations and French heroes, was in fact crucial in the
contemporary cultural scenario, and the notion of places of
memory forged by Pierre Nora was immediately appropriated by
historians and social scientists all over the world , and from
many ideological slants.
But what is exactly a place of memory for the Frensh author who,
after all, popularized the expression?
For Pierre Nora, places of memory are, above all, places in a
triple sense: they are material places where the social memory
is anchored and can be learned by the senses; they are
functional places because they have or have acquired the
function of laying the foundation for collective memories; and
they are symbolic places where this collective memory – i.e.,
this identity – expresses and reveals itself. Hence, they are
places charged with a desire for memory.
Far from being spontaneous and natural products, places of
memory are a historical construct, and the interest in studying
them comes exactly from their value as documents and monuments
that reveal social processes, conflicts, passions and interests
that, consciously or not, imbue them with an iconic function.
In the introduction to the seven volumes of the collection Les
Lieux de la Mémoire (The Realms of Memory), entitled Entre
Mémoire et Histoire: la problématique des lieux (Between Memory
and History: the problem of places), Nora provides us some
indications of what, in the collection’s perspective, are places
of memory. For him,
“Places of memory are, above all, remainders. [...] They are
rituals of a society without ritual, passing consecrations in a
society that deconsecrates, illusions of eternity.”[3]
Pages before, Nora had warned his readers that “history
dislodges the sacred and turns everything prosaic.”[4]. The
approximation of historians of culture to the places of memory
they intend to study postulates, therefore, a meticulous process
of criticism that permits constructing, with the fragments that
these places of memory represent, one of the possible readings
of the whole historical process that has chosen them and imbued
them with a particular meaning, in this way unraveling the codes
of the rituals that monumentalize them, and in the final
analysis, historicize them, that is, perceive, like a
palimpsest, the marks of time’s passage that, sometimes very
tenuously, appear under the illusion of eternity that is one of
their characteristics.
Without having the heuristic value of a concept, necessarily
operative and referred to a determined theoretical field, the
notion of places of memory is no doubt suggestive, and permits
an interesting approximation of that which Abraham Lincoln
called mystic chords of memory [5] that identify, unite and
confer sense to a given collectivity.
Perhaps overly complacent in the more general plane, since it
would be difficult to find something that could not be
considered under this classification, the notion of places of
memory can interest cultural historians any time we take the
care to observe what they collectively refer to and to answer
some basic questions: They are places of what memory or
memories? They are places of memory to whom and for construction
of what identities and what projects?
In presenting here some places of memory in Brazilian medicine,
our goal is to try out some responses to these questions,
inevitably present for the historians who, out of professional
duty and always with a critical eye, visit these sacred places
of medicine, of medical thinking and medical action in Brazilian
society. From the historian’s perspective, as much as they are
monuments, they are also documents, and as such defy
interpretations.
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[1] - Cf. Interviews with Pierre NORA at www.eurozine.com and at
www.gallimard.fr, consulted December 28, 2005.
[2] - To deepen the organic and necessary relationship among
memory, identity and project , see Gilberto VELHO. “Memória,
Identidade e Projeto”. In Idem. Projeto e Metamorfose.
Antropologia das sociedades compelxas. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar
Editores, 1994.
[3] - Pierre NORA. “Entre mémoire et histoire: la problématique
des lieux”. In Pierre Nora (org). Les lieux de mémoire. Paris:
Gallimard, [1984]. Vol 1 La République. pp. VII to XLII, p.
XXIV.
[4] - Ibid, p. XIX.
[5] - In Michael KAMMEN. Mystic chords of memory. The
transformation of tradition in American culture. New York:
Vintage Books, 1993.
