"Anniversaries and Commemoration: Constructing Community and Temporality"

"Anniversaries and Commemoration: Constructing Community and Temporality"

As a way of launching the mini-series of lectures on Commemoration, this lecture is pitched at a fairly general conceptual level.  It will begin by sketching a general framework for the analysis of commemorative practice, and will then focus more specifically on the commemoration of anniversary events - and in particular on 'round number' anniversaries (centenaries, etc.).  The aim is to provoke thought and critical debate on why celebration of round-number anniversaries is such a pronounced feature of contemporary culture, on what the implications of this are for the ways in which society engages with the past, and on how social and temporal dimensions of commemoration may be critically analysed.