ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the importance in memory studies of the scholarly turn towards place as an object of study. In this regard the huge French collaborative project led by Pierre Nora on lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) has been extremely influential. Keir Reeves discusses Nora’s work, elucidating the distinction he drew between ‘real’ community memory (‘milieux de mémoire’), which he believed died out in France around the 1970s, and the didactic expression of national memory through lieux de mémoire. He notes that Nora has been widely criticized for his focus on national memory, but focuses on how historians and interpreters of heritage have used his concepts to think imaginatively about the ways in which memory, place and the public intersect at sites of historical commemoration. Surveying a wide range of sites across the world, from Australia and Cambodia to the British Channel Islands and the United States, Reeves shows how complex these dynamics of memory can be, and how important it is for historians to be attentive to the responses of visitors to sensitive sites of memory, and to the ways in which their emotions and actions continually reshape the meanings of these landscapes.
