Cultural Memory

A partir dos usos necropolíticos da memória escrava no Brasil pós-abolição, este ensaio analisa a figura do escravo como um ponto de singularização e acúmulo de uma série de tecnologias de poder (soberanas, pré, proto e ultradisciplinares, bio e necropolíticas) que poderiam oferecer uma grade de inteligibilidade para compreender a governamentalidade colonial e suas relações paradoxais com a abolição e a liberdade. Convocando as relações entre memória, história e intempestivo, e por meio da articulação entre textos do pensamento político ocidental antigo, moderno e contemporâneo, propomos descrever de forma interdisciplinar as relações entre o escravo e o fundamento da autoridade política como lógica de necropoder subterrânea que atravessa as figuras aparentemente díspares do escravo, do imigrante europeu, do trabalhador livre e do empresário de si neoliberal. Conclui-se que o desaparecimento da forma-escravo antiga e colonial não determina o fim da lógica escravista, mas sua difusão generalizada na figura de um escravo informe a que os trabalhadores livres, empresários de si mesmos e imigrantes dão consistência hoje.

The article aims to develop a cultural history of the ancient punishment of the cappello d’asino (literaly «ass cap») in Italian schools (but historically used in European schools from the 16th to the 20th Century), which will be analysed from an iconogenetic viewpoint in an attempt to highlight its symbolic roots. This, because an exploration of the practice reveals a fairly complex iconogenesis. On the one hand, the dunce’s cap stems from the late medieval custom of stigmatising the madness of fools and jesters with a hat characterised by animal attributes such as donkeys’ or other animals’ ears. On the other hand, the practice reveals strong links with the ancient practice of marking heretics and infidels with a pointed hat, from the pileus cornutus used to distinguish Jews, to the capirote imposed on people sentenced for religious motives by the Spanish Inquisition. The obligation to publicly wear such headgear was designed to impart public visibility to the wearers’ intellectual or spiritual deviance and to expose them to public contempt in order to oust them from the community of the faithful. In the following centuries, on the contrary, the symbolic significance of the pointed hat became so deeply rooted in people’s culture that it pervaded the school environment too. Thus the obligation for dumb pupils to wear the school version of this headgear (ass cap) began to mark their ousting from the micro-community of the classroom and to stigmatise their refusal (or inability) to learn: a refusal that was considered akin to down-right apostasy, equating the renunciation of reason (by fools) with the abandonment of faith (by heretics). Drawing on Foucault’s and Bourdieu’s research on the hegemonic nature of the modern educational system, it is also interesting to notice how this and other school punishments did not stem from an educational matrix only but, rather, descended from public systems for the control and repression of social and religious deviance (in this regard, a similar parallel will be established with the masks of shame) – although transferred to a symbolic level and adapted to the “condemned”, to their age and their physical and mental ability to endure punishment.

This paper shows that aggregated forms of memory, be they cultural or collective, can be reconceptualised as less stable than they have been hitherto assumed to be.  The ‘frames’ (Irwin-Zarecka, 1994) or ‘schemata’ (Erll, 2011, 2014) that people employ to attribute meaning to the past are multiple, ever-changing and constantly re-actualised in everyday interactions. The paper presents a qualitative micro-study of a 3-minute spoken interaction between a research participant and a researcher, focusing on the past of the contemporary Polish town of Oswiecim, internationally better known as Auschwitz. Borrowing methods and concepts from interactional sociology and linguistic ethnography, the paper demonstrates that people know different narratives about the same past event and are able to move between those narratives when the interactional context requires them to. The combination of micro-discourse analysis with ethnographic detail provides an insight into the flexibility of the remembering self in interpersonal interaction, and the paper’s findings and methodological framework engage in a dialogue with some fundamental critiques in the field of memory studies. These include, among others, the need to connect the micro, meso and macro, and the individual with the social (Kansteiner, 2010; Keightley, Pickering, Bisht 2019; Gensburger, 2016), and the urge to actively develop and think through methods in memory studies research (Kansteiner, 2002; Keightley and Pickering 2013; Roediger and Wertsch, 2008).