The identity of some urban Beirutis — if one were to infer this form the architectural styles of their residences, their mannerisms, fashions and other cultural manifestations of everyday life — was also a hybrid of seemingly dissonant and inconsistent features. To put it differently, the problem is how to recall the hideous episodes of the war without sanitizing them by making them more tolerable to remember. Within this context, it is understandable how the natural reactions of the Lebanese to all the unbearable atrocities and traumas they were beset with, that they should try to forget, or at least distance themselves from and sanitize, as they appear to be doing, the scars and scares of almost two decades of cruel and senseless violence. Hristova, Zhivka (Author)Ryerson University (Degree granting institution), Collective memory -- Bulgaria -- Sofia -- History -- 20th centuryCity planning -- Bulgaria -- SofiaSpace (Architecture) -- Political aspectsSpace (Architecture) -- Psychological aspectsArchitecture and historyNational monuments -- Political aspects -- Bulgaria. Collective memory and sacred space in post-genocide Rwanda: Reconciliation and rehumanization processes in Mureithi’s ICYIZERE. In a lecture on the 15th November, Associate Professor Tatjana Louis argued that there are multiple… MEMORY AND PLACE ASSI, E. Architectural Heritage Department Dubai Municipality Dubai. So are pictorial glossy anthologies of Beirut's urban history, old postcards, maps, and other such collectibles. To the extent that peoples' memories of a society's past diverge, then its members will be bereft of sharing common experiences, perspectives and visions. The City of Collective Memory describes a series of different visual and mental models by which the urban environment has been recognized, depicted, and planned. With all the bona fides of its architects and the noblesse oblige of the consenting parties, the Mithaq could not have possibly survived the multilayered pressures (local, regional, and international) it was burdened with. AU - Strani, Katerina. Such consciousness and proclivity to engage with cosmopolitan encounters were also present in Beirut before the advent of globalism and postmodernity. It will focus on political transformations of space and erasing, shaping and rebuilding a nation’s memory. The protracted civil disturbances of 1975-92 did not only reinforce the communal character of neighborhoods but generated other problems of a far more critical magnitude. Beirut today is akin to an ongoing living laboratory where one is in a sustained state of being captivated by the perpetual thrills of new discoveries unfolding, as it were, before one's own eyes. … Definition of Collective Memory: Term coined by Maurice Halbwachs referring to memories shared by a group and emerging through communication and institutions. The construction of the wharf in Beirut's port in 1860 to accommodate the increasing maritime traffic, like all the other infrastructural developments and public amenities undertaken throughout the second half of the 19th century (e.g. At this particular juncture the debate represented an effort and commitment to effect a moratorium on the seemingly inevitable and ever accelerated, globalization-induced forgetting (, …we erect monuments so that we shall always remember and build memorials so that we shall never forget. To him memorials "recall only past death or tragic events and provide places to mourn." They are also an outcry against the loss of personal autonomy and authenticity. But once the unrest subsides, internal cleavages and segmental loyalties resurface. J. Prager, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001. It always heightens one's visual and aesthetic sensibilities. By re-examining the checkered history of the Bourj it is our hope to re-construct from its rich and diverse past a history, to paraphrase Forty, "not of memorials but of amnesiacs!!" In postwar Lebanon this crusade has become so pervasive that it is beginning to assume all the trappings and hype of a national pastime and a thriving industry. from them. Recently Jens Hanssen and Daniel Genberg (2002) have coined the term "hypermnesia" to refer to instances in postwar Lebanon of the abundance of overlapping, conflicting and rivaling memories of the war. The sense of place individuals and people as a whole have is both a biological … From these and other such instances, it is clear how essential to stable political life; indeed to the well-being of individual life as well, is a certain measure of amnesia or social forgetfulness. It is studied as a palimpsest, uncovering layers of history from antiquity to the present. If the belligerent and recurrent cycles of random violence had devastated much of the city's center and adjoining urban neighborhoods, the reconstruction schemes, the critics often charge, compounded the ruthless destruction by acting more like a merciless bulldozer. This ongoing project creates a constantly evolving … The cactus-lined alleys were soon converted to macadamized streets. Narrating the Collective: Memory, Power, and Archival Space By: Bernadette Roca b.roca@utoronto.ca. The memory of collective trauma can be adaptive as it … In this respect, Beirut offers another grounded and living instance of the production of social space which depart from other common experiences and patterns observed in other settings (see for example, King,  2003; Nasr and Voilet,  2003). George Naccache's pungent aphorism notwithstanding — "deux négations ne font pas une nation" — this double renunciation seemed both feasible and appropriate at the time. This nostalgic longing, among a growing segment of disenchanted intellectuals, is a form of resistance or refusal to partake in the process of debasement of aesthetic standards or the erosion of bona fide and veritable items of cultural heritage. More explicitly they inform the entangled discourse regarding the connection between objects, memory and forgetting. Thucydides Homericus and the episode of Mykalessus (Th. More info, Conference lectured at the symposium "Beirut: Civil Pleasures, Civil Wars". Collective memory is also different in that it can be far removed from the actual event in time and space (6). For example, the outbreak of violence in former Yugoslavia may well be seen as the outcome of the refusal to forget past events. The two however, as will be seen, are related. Gross density was high — around 300 per hectare — and the town gave an overwhelming impression of congestion. A collective memory can appear concerning a family, a group or universe. In practice, urbanization in Lebanon has not meant the erosion of kinship ties, communal loyalties, and confessional affinities and the emergence of impersonality, anonymity and transitory social relations. On the other, there were the urban communities of Beirut and other coastal cities, mainly Sunni Muslim but with Orthodox and other Christian elements, and with a different idea: that of a trading community open to the world, and serving as a point of transit and exchange, and therefore a community where populations mingled and coexisted peacefully; of a society which needed government and law, but preferred a weak government to which the leaders of its constituent groups had access and which they could control (, Lebanon the mountain of refuge and Lebanon the meeting place, rooted in its own traditions but open to the world, with bilingualism or trilingualism as a necessity of its life; possessing stable institutions which correspond with its deep realities, an assembly in which the spokesmen of the various communities can meet and talk together, tolerant laws, no political domination of one group by another, but kind of spiritual domination of those who think of Lebanon as part of the Mediterranean world (, The ancient commercial craft of the Phoenicians is still very evident …perhaps it will prevail more modern counsels, or be more effectively supplemented by expert foreign advice. 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