Research

"A description does not in general constitute an analysis.”

(David Bohm)

Summary

My research interests have been personal, familial and national Holocaust and Genocide memory. In the first decade of my career I focused on the interface between private and public Holocaust and Genocide memory work in Israel, Canada and Cambodia, aiming primarily to re-conceptualize trauma descendant lived memory of difficult pasts as silent intersubjective embodied and emotive presence (Towards an Ethnography of Silence Current Anthropology 2009; Breaching the wall of traumatic silence: Holocaust survivor and descendant person–object relations and the material transmission of the genocidal past, Journal of Material Culture, 2012). I have examined ways in which universalizing epistemological frames (psychological illness construct of PTSD, Genocide Studies, Culture Studies (trauma theory) Human Rights and the more recent moral anthropology) discursively elide the private and familial experience of presence while facilitating the public appropriation and translation of private memory into either public niches of domesticated representation of lived memory or ‘dead’ forms of politicized absence (Surviving a Distant Past, Ethos 2003; Embracing the Lived Memory of Genocide, American Ethnologist, 2010; Being There Together: Dark Family Tourism and Emotive Experience of Co-presence in the Holocaust Past, Annals of Tourism Research, 2013; Inheriting Discontinued Bonds: Trauma-Descendant Relations with the Genocide Dead" Death Studies, 2014). I have also ethnographically examined the way certain public niches of family memory resist and transform national commemorative discourse and practice (Survivor Family Memory Work at Sites of Holocaust Remembrance: Institutional Enlistment or Family Agency, History and Memory, 2015) including a micro analysis of semiotic processes at a mini-Holocaust museum (Kidron & Handelman, The Symbolic Type Revisited: Semiotics in Practice and the Reformation of the Israeli Commemorative Context, Symbolic Interaction 2016).

More recently, my comparative work on Jewish-Israeli Holocaust memory and Buddhist Cambodian memory has pointed to the way the presence or absence of the past is shaped by culturally particular religious/cosmological worldviews emergent from within political and historical contexts (Alterity and the Particular Limits of Universalism, Current Anthropology, 2012; Comparative project funded by Israel Science Foundation, 2012-2014).

For the past few years my work on Khmer genocide memory in Canada and Cambodia has taken a turn toward a new emphasis on global and national memory entrepreneurs and their commemorative projects. I am presently writing about the friction between public/global and private memory: On the hand humanitarian neo-liberal and Euro-Western concepts of public genocide commemoration discursively conceptualized as global human right and obligation of moral global citizenship, preventive pedagogy, traumatic working through and lucrative atrocity tourism have promoted the construction of a new genocide commemorative landscape in Cambodia (and even more recently in the Cambodian Diaspora in Canada). The discourse and practice of this globalized public memory work is in friction with culturally and cosmologically validated forms of forgetting of historically difficult pasts as spiritually and emotionally beneficial to the self and the collective and is also at odds with Cambodian conceptions of ancestor veneration as private and domestic merit exchange with ancestors who are perpetually present not as collectivized ghosts of genocidal pasts but as re-presented networks of familial relations. This friction is epitomized throughout the Cambodian countryside in the design of and local relative disinterest in small communal sites of genocide memory (entailing the culturally taboo display of unidentified human remains) imposed from above by NGOs, government and party and village elite, and politicized Buddhist clergy. I am exploring these micro-sites of processual vernacularization and culture change where my interest lies primarily in the opportunity to capture the way particular experience and world view evolves (or fails to evolve) through and within global-local and elite-non-elite contact zones and negotiated and/or failed translation Global Humanitarian Interventions( Ethnographic Field Work in Cambodia funded by Israel Science Foundation 2016-2018).

Grants

Israel Science Foundation Grant 2015-2018

The Human Right to Memorialization: An Ethnographic Study of Global-Local Friction and the Localization of Communal Genocide Commemoration in Cambodia.

Abstract

Public memorialization of genocide is considered essential for post-conflict restorative justice, reconciliation and peacebuilding. The global dissemination of genocide memorialization has emerged as the new pillar of human rights (HR) governance with a supra-international institutional architecture of governance working with NGOs and governments to integrate memorialization into projects of transitional justice. The scholarship calls for the localization of memorial sites in accordance with culturally particular commemorative practices, and collaboration with local actors. However few ethnographic studies have outlined how this recommendation is being implemented. Moreover, local attitudes towards these sites remain undocumented. Integrating insights from the anthropology of human rights with anthropology of memory, this ethnographic study of small scale communal commemoration in Cambodia aims to determine how communal non-monumental sites of genocide memorialization in Cambodia are localized/hybridized in accordance with cultural-particular forms of remembrance. Preliminary data collected during a previous ISF funded study (2010-2013) point to occasional local indifference toward monumental sites of memory due to tension between these sites and traditional Buddhist forward looking perspectives and traditional funerary practices. However new grassroots Cambodia NGOs appear to offer culturally competent forms of communal commemoration. In the proposed project I intend to analyze the design and practice of communal small-scale sites, evaluate the way in which they are in keeping with traditional, global and perhaps hybrid forms of commemoration. In depth interviews with local and global stakeholders will enable evaluation of collaboration. Interviews will also evaluate local visitor motivation and the phenomenological experience of commemorative practice. Data will shed light on the lived experience of genocide loss and remembrance deconstructing depictions of the genocide survivor as submissive or resistant victim of global imperialism. Data pertaining to ‘positive global-local friction’ and grassroots hybridization may contribute to HR policy making and culturally competent global memorialization.

Israel Science Foundation Grant 2009-2012

Surviving Transmitted Legacies of Genocide: Toward a Cross-Cultural Comparative Study of Israeli, Cambodian, and Cambodian-Canadian Trauma Descendant Memory Work

Abstract

Despite the abundant scholarship on trauma and the politics of memory, little is known of the everyday lived experience of trauma descendants. The ISF funded ethnographic research set out to explore the differential impact of genocide on descendants in diverse cultural contexts. Towards that end, I undertook a cross-cultural comparative study of the genocide legacies of Israeli Holocaust descendants, Cambodian-Canadian descendants of genocide and Cambodian descendants. The comparison allows for an examination of the impact of differing cultural meaning worlds and diverse national/ethnic socio-political contexts on descendant identity, on their sense of well-being, and on commemorative practices.

It is widely accepted that the everyday lives of trauma victims and their descendants entail only silent avoidance or repression of the past and the absence of descendant knowledge of that past, while the familial social milieu is thought to foster the wounds of transmitted-PTSD. Mental health professionals, genocide scholars and human rights/community activists have called upon survivors and descendants to resurrect their silenced past and provide testimonial accounts of their traumatic legacy. Contrary to the literature, an ethnographic study of the phenomenological experience of Holocaust descendant memory-identity work and an ethnographic study of Cambodian-Canadian Genocide descendants both found that descendants rejected the PTSD pathologizing contstruct, do not wish to give testimony in commemorative settings and depict the tacit non-pathological presence of the past in the childhood home as entailing the transmission of empowering genocide-related modes of being. Moreover, differing cultural meaning worlds surrounding personal accountability, family relations, memory and history differentially shaped the perceived centrality of genocide in Israeli and Cambodian lives. Differing and evolving socio-political and communal contexts and the intervention of diverse agents of memory were also seen to shape the above meaning worlds and promote or curtail participation in commemorative practices.

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