ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in subsequent chapters of this book. The book highlights the cultural significance of commemoration and its power to shape the memory of the past and collective identities. The multidimensional understanding of the relationship between war, memory and commemoration advanced in the book holds that cultural disenchantment and cultural re-enchantment are both possible outcomes of new commemorative forms. For commemoration to successfully provide a symbolically powerful context for legitimising particular cultural understandings of the world, the ritual form through which commemoration is undertaken must be consistent with the social environment itself. The book explains fieldwork and historical document analysis to move beyond general theories of globalisation that stress that national history is becoming dislocated from its origins, hybridised and losing its affect as the state loses its monopoly on remembering history.