A continuing preoccupation with the Occupation
In addition to a number of commemorative and traditional events and a steady stream of new publications, references and allusions to the period of the Occupation appear to have increased over the last few years. One basic reason, sometimes supported by evidence, is that after seventy years there is a danger that those years and their traumatic events will gradually be forgotten or remembered incorrectly. It may also be, however, that they are being recalled to help assuage a collective sense of guilt, or in some cases used more consciously for political and socio-political purposes with the result that they feed deep-rooted and sometimes unrealised prejudices with direct consequences for contemporary society. After rapidly rehearsing the ways in which the Occupation has hitherto been assessed, the article focuses precisely on some of this apparent modern development.1
The ‘Affairs’ of Political Memory: Hermeneutical Dissidence from National Myth-Making
Self-serving hegemonic visions of history are institutionalised by dominant memory entrepreneurs, simultaneously imposing an authoritative version of ‘what happened’ and their right to articulate it. These visions and the hierarchies of honour they consecrate are cultivated trans-generationally, aiming to ensure the community’s political cohesion, as well as the emotional attachments that can ensure its reproduction over time. This paper has three objectives. First, it brings insights from social epistemology to bear on a conceptualisation of political memory-making and proposes the concepts of ‘hermeneutical dissidence’ and ‘hermeneutical seduction’ to capture the critical interrogation of such mythologies. It highlight the obstacles facing any attempt at subverting them, particularly given the resilience of cognitive and emotional investments in particular schemas of perception and understanding in relation to the boundaries of the community and its history. Second, I transplant the descriptive concept of ‘affair’ formulated by pragmatic sociologists into debates about political memory, infusing it with a dose of normativity in order to shed critical light on various types of hermeneutical dissidence from dominant, emotionally-anchored, exclusionary imaginaries. Third, to render the theoretical proposal concrete, I introduce two ‘memory affairs’, both triggered by debates over the meaning and gender of political resistance.
Eimeria odocoilei n. sp. from the mule deer Odocoileus h. hemionus in Washington.
SYNOPSIS. Eimeria odocoilei n. sp. is described from feces of a mule deer Odocoileus h. hemionus in Washington. Its oocysts are 26 to 28 by 22 to 26 μ. It is the second species of Eimeria described from this host.