Content area
Full text
James Opp and John C. Walsh, eds. Placing Memory and Remembering Place in Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010. $85.00 he; $32.95 sc.
While location is a geometrical term and space is an abstraction, place is a "meaning-full" experience. It is created by individuals informally as they absorb the memories of the past, the quotidian activities of their life in the present, and planned future lived-in worlds. And, while grounded physically, the essence of particular places is dynamic and mutable and the process of creating it is captured in the verb, "placing." Certainly, the post-Westphalian/French Revolution/Versailles nation-state took this to heart and embraced the construction of identities. The informality of Tonnies' gemeinschaft was replaced by artifice: the invention of ceremonials and pageants; the production of visual prompts of didactic buildings, statues, and plaques; and the dissemination of preferred meta-narratives and mythic pasts. Later, the commodification of heritage through the tourist-industry required that the forces of commerce branded popular regional differences. And both of these processes have been challenged by shifts in popular preferences, priorities, and practices in the postWoodstock/street-culture/Facebook age. As the technical world of social media organizes the political world of the "occupy" movement and the social world of street parties and riots, performed ceremonials have been replaced by spontaneous protest and celebration. This is what James Opp's and John Walsh's volume presents for us here in several case studies of dynamic identity formation in Canada, but it also addresses the growing problem of the "palpable immediacy" of everywhere and nowhere in a globalised system of information flows.
The several contributions in the first section, "Commemorations: Marking Memories of Place," address the "official" creation of acts of remembrance. It opens with John Walsh's...