Believe Me, Adia

Ethnologia Fennica, 2022

We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left now. To reclaim the realms of Memory, many countries have invested heavily in memory sites, such as monuments, museums, archives, and others though they can never replace the lost memory. But, they are just another way to refresh and nourish our memory of the past. In this context, oral history that touches particularly on topics scarcely touched in the available history books is important, especially oral history preservation that deals with the care and upkeep of oral history materials, whatever format they may be in is essential. Using interviews with living survivors, this method of historical documentation can fill in gaps of records that make up early historical documents. This method of collecting oral history through memory is getting popular the world over thinking that much of local history and wisdom and knowledge and other cultural memories would vanish with the loss of elders who were willing to preserve and pass along. what they knew. With the advent of writing

Without the mythic narrative, depression throws down a cloak of meaningless life existence. Scientists know that the neurobiology of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is twin to major depression but, having the difference of being more so a stress-induced syndrome. What prompts the need for mythic narrative-an intensified learning experience- is the invisibility of trauma impacts and the invisibility of women in South Slavic peoples. The political perspectives carried out into policies and rule of law are exactingly processed without any cultural memory or geographical narratives.

2012

This paper discusses a number of stories about loss, grief and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the attempts by the survivors to construct intimate archives about their shattered lives. In addition to the loss of human lives, the deliberate destruction of documents, photographs, books and official records has been deeply felt by the genocide survivors and other victims of ‘memoricide’ in Bosnia as a very personal loss, an aggravated trauma and a metaphor for annihilation of their personal, family and communal existence. Subsequently, for them, the recreation of personal records and communal archives ultimately becomes an attempt to reclaim their own past and, in the process, to reaffirm their identities and recreate and sustain a sense of continuity in a post-genocide context. Using a series of ethnographic vignettes from Bosnia and the Bosnian refugee diaspora, the paper highlights the importance of the survivors’ emotional (and embodied) attachment to various forms of records and archival material. It also demonstrates the potential for research in memory and archival studies to actively engage in the creation of historical narratives about violations of human rights, thus contributing to truth-finding, social healing and reconciliation processes in post-conflict and post-genocide communities.

Text and Performance Quarterly, 2015

Hungarian Cultural Studies, 2021

Kinga Király conducted interviews with ten North Transylvanian survivors who represent the last witnesses of a generation that is about to disappear and leave us with the question of what to remember and how. On reading the testimonies catalogued in the volume Király produced from those interviews, I realized that I felt compelled to make further connections with my own research on foodways, war trauma and the ecologies of survival witnessing. In a section on the mass genocide of Transylvanian Jewry, I provide a brief historical sketch to help the understanding of the historical complexity and tragedy of the lives of pre- and postwar Transylvanian Jewry. I then contrast the stories of some of Király's subjects with the postwar memoirs of other Transylvanian survivors who emigrated either right after the war or under the Ceausescu dictatorship. I discuss prewar Transylvanian Jewish food culture, and subsequently locate Király's collection as a continuation of the tradition of the memorial or yizkor [‘remembrance’] books. Finally, I discuss Jewish cemeteries and the virtual social death of Jewish tradition in Transylvania, to ask: what is it that remains today from the shattered culture of Transylvanian Jewry?

Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies, 2022

The beginning of political movement for self-determination (tehreek) in Kashmir, particularly the armed movement from late 1980s onward and the concomitant military occupation by the Indian state, transformed downtown Srinagar into a garrisoned colony, choking the capillaries of everyday life through complex structures of state surveillance and military control. After three decades of this armed movement, which continues to have dynamic interfaces with the present, it becomes critical to ask: how do we reimagine the social world of downtown Srinagar of the 1990s and its superimposition onto the present? How is the past remembered and retold in a conflict space that is sedimented with continuing inscriptions of violence? I posit that remembrance of the 1990s in everyday life is achieved through a constellation of mnemonic practices that are sometimes rooted in material and visually accessible monuments of memory such as martyrs’ graveyards, sometimes in linguistic exchanges or verbal testimonies, and sometimes in the sensory and embodied recalls of the past. However, in this chapter I focus on the latter and ask how can we locate emotional, intimate, and often invisibilized practices of remembrance within the larger political movement? I argue that attention to the sensory and extra-linguistic forms of remembrance such as preservation of everyday artifacts, snippets of folk songs, and embodied memory of dreams allow us to excavate the everyday emotions, experiences, and vulnerabilities endured by people living in one of the most militarized conflict zones in the world.

Food and Foodways