מחקרים פעילים

Taking the Soldier Home: An Ethnographic Study of Domestic Commemoration of Fallen Soldiers in Israel

חוקרת ראשית: ד"ר קרול קדרון

עוזרות מחקר: חגית קוריאל, יעל עשור, בשמת איבי, אסנת נזרי-שלו

תקציר

Exploring the interface between private and public memory, this ethnographic study aims to examine domestic memorial rooms frozen in time, sustaining the ‘presence’ of Israeli fallen soldiers in the family home. By preserving childhood rooms intact, parents of the fallen resist the rupture of bereavement. Contrary to collective sites of commemoration such as the military cemetery, national monument or veteran’s day ceremony, parents claim these rooms do not semiotically represent the soldier’s sacrifice to the collective and their death and absence rather, they virtually conjure their ‘continued’ domestic and familial presence and therefore enigmatically (re-)present their lives. Engagement with the dead in the memorial rooms utilizes person-object interaction, visceral and sensorial traces of the dead and kinetic movement in and around the room to sustain the presence of the dead and relations with the dead rather than the commemorated presence of absence and the commemoration of death. Parental self-perceived wellness/adjustment points to the fact that memorial rooms may not be facilely reduced to psychosocial maladjusted attachment to the dead. Instead, this yet to be studied phenomenon calls for an empirically grounded re-conceptualization of private memory-work and bereavement, domestic engagement with the dead and with the material traces of their lives and the potential of emplacement of these relations and interactions in the home to (virtually) sustain the presence of the dead. The study promises insights into the dialectic of private/familial-public/national domains. The rooms uniquely encapsulate private alternative practices of bereavement, engagement with the dead and person-object interaction and macro processes of governmental intervention/enlistment in the private sphere, governmental/grass roots co-engagement and military commemoration. Filling a lacuna in pathologizing psychological bereavement studies and in top-down studies of the politics of memory and militarism, the project captures how the private and 'normalized' presence of deceased loved ones, national fallen and the personal (yet no less collective past) are sustained in everyday domestic lives. Data pertaining to the subjective experience of private-public relations sheds light on conceptions of individualism/privacy and collectivism/public intervention as well as on contemporary concepts of sacrifice and martyrdom in this seemingly paradoxical era of late modern critique of national mythic grand narratives and neo-republicanism.

מימון: הקרן הלאומית למדע (ISRAEL SCIENCE FOUNDATION)

מחקרים קודמים

Surviving Transmitted Legacies of Genocide: Toward a Cross-Cultural Comparative Study of Israeli, Cambodian, and Cambodian-Canadian Trauma Descendant Memory Work. 2009-2012, Funded by the Israeli Science Foundation.

The Human Right to Memorialization: An Ethnographic Study of Global-Local Friction and the Localization of Communal Genocide Commemoration in Cambodia. 2015-2018, Funded by the Israel Science Foundation.

פרסומים אחרונים

Kidron, Carol A. (2020) Emancipatory Voice and the Recursivity of Authentic Silence: Holocaust Descendant Accounts of the Multidirectional Dialectic between Silence and Voice. History and Anthropology

Kidron, Carol A. (2020) The “Perfect Failure” of Communal Genocide Commemoration in Cambodia: Productive Friction or “Bone Business”? Current Anthropology. 61 (3): 304:334.

Kidron, Carol A., Kotliar, Dan, and Kirmayer, Laurence, J. (2019) Trauma as Badge of Honor: Phenomenological Experiencges of Holocaust Descendant Resilient Vulnerability. Social Science and Medicine 239: 112524.

Kidron, Carol A. & Kirmayer, Laurence, J. (2019) Global Mental Health and Idioms of Distress: The Paradox of Culture Sensitive Pathologization of Distress in Cambodia. Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, 43(2), 211-235.

Kidron, Carol A. (2018). Resurrecting Discontinued Bonds: A Comparative Study of Israeli Holocaust and Cambodian Genocide Trauma Descendant Relations with the Genocide Dead. Ethos 46 (2):230-253.

Kidron, Carol A. (2018). Resurrecting Dis-continued Bonds: A Comparative Study of Israeli Holocaust and Cambodian Genocide Trauma Descendant Relations with the Genocide Dead. Ethos, 1-44.

Kidron, Carol A. & Handelman, D. (2016). The Symbolic Type Revisited: Semiotics in Practice and the Reformation of the Israeli Commemorative Context. Symbolic Interaction, 39, 421-445.

Nachtigal, Anat & Kidron, Carol A. (2015). Existential Multiplicity and the Late Modern Smoker: Negotiating Multiple Identities in a Support Group for Smoking Cessation. Sociology of Health and Illness, 37, 452-467.

Kidron, Carol A. (2015). Survivor Family Memory at Sites of Holocaust Remembrance: Institutional Enlistment or Family Agency? History & Memory, 27, 45-73.