Tuesday Colloquium - Work in Progress03/13/18
Imagining Futures: Memory and Belonging in an African Family
Professor of Social Anthropology
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Born in 1954 in Braunschweig, Germany
Studied Sociology, Political Science, and German Literature at the University of Göttingen and at Freie Universität Berlin and Agricultural Sciences of the Tropics and Subtropics at the University of Göttingen
Photo: Thomas Hartmann, JGU Mainz
Why study families and family memory? Even in societies where state institutions have taken over many of the tasks that were formerly performed by families, families continue to bind people; they connect older and younger generations and provide access to material and immaterial resources, but also exert social control and impose obligations to care for ones kin. Families are, so to speak, instruments of transmission of various resources through time. What is transmitted from one generation to the next comprises not only material, tangible property but also intangible heritage, including stories, rituals, symbols and, more generally, knowledge as well as values. Central to this heritage are memories of the family history. Indeed, families are held together or divided, as the case may be, by memories of past events. The capacity of family members to act in the present and to shape their own and their relations future is premised on active, selective remembering and forgetting.
Our book project explores the dialogical and mutually constitutive relationship between remembering family history and notions of family membership. Drawing on Tamara Harevens (1977) idea of complex relations between individual time, family time and historical time, we examine the history of remembering and belonging, and their interrelation, in one extended African family. How has family remembering changed over the past century in response to the radical transformation of the socio-economic bases of family life, the conversion of a majority of family members to Catholicism and the increasing geographic and social mobility of family members? How have such new challenges to family cohesion and changing intra-family relationships shaped new ways of turning to the past? And vice versa: how can particular constructions of the family past stabilize, contest or redefine understandings of who belongs to the family and how family members should comport themselves?
In our book, we will pay close attention to the changing genres (ritual texts, songs, proverbs, personal names, stories, gossip, genealogies, images, documents etc.) and media of remembering (oral performances, written texts, photography, film and video, Facebook and WhatsApp etc.), and we examine how these media shape the contents of what is being remembered, and what silenced or forgotten. We will also discuss questions of power and authority that intervene in all acts of transmission of memories, asking who the gatekeepers of family memory are and who decides what to remember or to forget, which memories are officialized and processed as gossip etc. In short: our project explores how making memory and making the family are intertwined.
In our presentation in the colloquium, we will briefly present the overall project and give insights into the first chapter of the book, which discusses a recently developed format of family memory, namely the first so-called Homecoming festival, which was celebrated in December 2016.
Lentz, Carola (
2017)
Ghanaian "Monument Wars" : the contested history of the Nkrumah statues
Lentz, Carola (
2017)
‚Kakube has come to stay’ : the making of a cultural festival in Northern Ghana, 1989-2015
Lentz, Carola (
2016)
African middle classes : lessons from transnational studies and a research agenda
Lentz, Carola (
2016)
Culture : the making, unmaking and remaking of an anthropological concept
Lentz, Carola (
2016)
A lasting memory : the contested history of the Nkrumah statue
Lentz, Carola (
Mainz,
2015)
Elites or middle classes? : lessons from transnational research for the study of social stratification in Africa
Arbeitspapiere ; Band 161
Lentz, Carola (
2015)
Miszellen der Ethnologiegeschichte : die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde ; Geschichte und aktuelle Herausforderungen
Lentz, Carola (
2014)
"I take an oath to the state, not the government" : career trajectories and professional ethics of Ghanaian public servants
Lentz, Carola (
2013)
The 2010 independence jubilees : the politics and aesthetics of national commemoration in Africa
Lentz, Carola (
2013)
Celebrating independence jubilees and the millennium: national days in Africa
Tuesday Colloquium - Work in Progress03/13/18
Imagining Futures: Memory and Belonging in an African Family
Lecture04/17/18
(Re)Constructing belonging: upward mobility, family ties, and funerals in Ghana
Lecture05/30/18
Imagining Futures: Memory and Belonging in an African Family