ABSTRACT
Those whose duties entail stewardship of collective memory face few other images so baffling in constitution as ruins. Even if incomplete, the claims, often ambiguous and irresolvable, made by ruins render them as exemplary but curious forms of lieux de mémoire. Yet, as such, they are replete with paradox. Their physicality as remains of the past gives them a uniquely tactile witness to it, but to make sense of their fractured and incomplete state, recourse has to be made to the imagination to grasp their completeness as it was. If part of a biography, ruins have an obvious claim on the emotions of those who behold their desolation. Yet, even with no such links, ruins have peculiar powers to summon the curious to attend to their tales of plight. They seem to denote a failure of ‘commemorative vigilance’, but one rewarded with a distinctive place in collective memory.
