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Museums and Material Memories of the Spanish Civil War: An Archaeological Critique

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Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict ((PSCHC))

Abstract

The Spanish Civil War is remembered in many ways. Vehicles of memory are often material and include ruins, monuments and museums, which are all amenable to archaeological scrutiny. In the present chapter, I am particularly interested in museums. Unlike in other countries, Spain has consistently failed to have proper museums of the conflict managed by the State. The gap is filled by private and local initiatives. Here, I examine, from an archaeological perspective, a variety of small war museums in different parts of Spain. My point is that all such projects entail important problems regarding the story of the Civil War that is being told. Lacking a master narrative to which they can refer, they deploy their own accounts, which either whitewash history or reproduce stereotypes, often inherited from the dictatorship. These narratives, I argue, are more ethnographic than historical and explain the war in antipolitical terms, thus failing to capture its meaning and consequences.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Bjørnar Olsen, Michael Shanks, Timothy Webmoor, and Christopher Witmore, Archaeology: The Discipline of Things (Berkeley: The University of California Press , 2012).

  2. 2.

    Victor Buchli, and Gavin Lucas, Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 2001).

  3. 3.

    Francisco Ferrándiz, “Exhuming the Defeated : Civil War Mass Graves in 21st-Century Spain ,” American Ethnologist 40, no. 1 (2013), 38–54.

  4. 4.

    Alfredo González-Ruibal , “Beyond the Mass Grave: Producing and Remembering Landscapes of Violence in Francoist Spain ,” in Legacies of Violence in Contemporary Spain : Exhuming the Past, Understanding the Present, ed. Ofelia Ferrán and Lisa Hilbink (London: Routledge, 2017), 93–117.

  5. 5.

    Maira Mora, “Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos: Una apuesta estético-política de legibilidad de la experiencia dictatorial,” Cátedra de Artes 11 (2012), 63–76; John D. Giblin, “Post-conflict Heritage : Symbolic Healing and Cultural Renewal,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20, no. 5 (2014), 500–518.

  6. 6.

    Emilse B. Hidalgo, “Argentina’s Former Secret Detention Centres: Between Demolition, Modification and Preservation,” Journal of Material Culture 17, no. 2 (2012), 191–206.

  7. 7.

    Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity , ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press , 2004), 620–639.

  8. 8.

    Jens Andermann, “Showcasing Dictatorship: Memory and the Museum in Argentina and Chile ,” Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 4, no. 2 (2012), 69–93.

  9. 9.

    Alfredo González-Ruibal , Volver a las trincheras: Una arqueología de la Guerra Civil Española (Madrid : Alianza, 2016), 82.

  10. 10.

    Dacia Viejo-Rose, Reconstructing Spain : Cultural Heritage and Memory after Civil War (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press , 2011), 80.

  11. 11.

    Sandie Holguin, “‘National Spain Invites You’: Battlefield Tourism during the Spanish Civil War ,” The American Historical Review 110, no. 5 (2005), 1399–426.

  12. 12.

    Rik Peters, “Actes de présence: Presence in Fascist Political Culture,” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 362–74; Mark Featherstone, “Ruin Value,” Journal for Cultural Research 9, no. 3 (2005), 301–20; Stéphane Michonneau, “Belchite : Between Place of Memory and Place of Recognition (1937–2013),” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’Histoire 3 (2015), 117–31.

  13. 13.

    Luis Castro Berrojo, Héroes y caídos: Políticas de la memoria en la España contemporánea (Madrid : Los libros de la Catarata, 2008), 162–69.

  14. 14.

    José Ángel Brena Alonso, “El Museo de la Guerra de Bilbao (1937–1938): Cinturón de Hierro y turismo bélico al servicio de la propaganda del régimen,” Saibigain 2 (2016), 4–49.

  15. 15.

    Castro Berrojo, Héroes y caídos, 169

  16. 16.

    Francisco Ferrándiz, Guerras sin fin: Guía para descifrar el Valle de los Caídos en la España contemporánea,” Política y sociedad 48, no. 3 (2011), 481–500.

  17. 17.

    Alfredo González-Ruibal , “Topography of Terror or Cultural Heritage ? The Monuments of Franco’s Spain ,” in Europe’s Deadly Century: Perspectives on 20th Century Conflict Heritage , ed. Neil Forbes, Robin Page, and Guillermo Pérez (Swindon: English Heritage , 2009), 65–72.

  18. 18.

    Andreu Besolí, “Los refugios antiaéreos de Barcelona: Pasado y presente de un patrimonio arcano,” Ebre 38: Revista Internacional de la Guerra Civil, 1936–1939 2 (2004), 181–202; Andreu Besolí, and José Peinado, “El estudio y puesta en valor de los refugios antiaéreos de la guerra civil española: El caso del refugio-museo de Cartagena ,” Revista Arqueomurcia 3 (2008), 1–18. For a description of other museums and heritage sites related to the war see Natalia Juan García, “Piezas perdidas, objetos encontrados. El valor de los recuerdos convertidos en colección como vía para recuperar la memoria ,” ASRI: Arte y Sociedad Revista de Investigación 1 (2012), 1–16.

  19. 19.

    For a critique, see Francesc-Xavier Hernández Cardona, and María del Carmen Rojo Ariza, “Museïtzació de conflictes contemporanis: El cas de la Guerra Civil espanyola,” Ebre 38: Revista Internacional de la Guerra Civil, 1936–1939 6 (2011), 131–57.

  20. 20.

    Carolina Martín Piñol, “Los espacios museográficos de la Batall a del Ebro,” Ebre 38: Revista Internacional de la Guerra Civil, 1936–1939 6 (2011), 159–74 (162).

  21. 21.

    Caroline Sturdy Colls, Holocaust Archaeologies: Approaches and Future Directions (Heidelberg, New York, and London: Springer, 2015); Vesa-Pekka Herva, Oula Seitsonen, Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto, and Suzie Thomas, “‘I Have Better Stuff at Home’: Alternative Archaeologies and Private Collecting of World War II Artefacts in Finnish Lapland,” World Archaeology 42, no. 2 (2016), 267–81.

  22. 22.

    For more on this, see the website, “Historia de la Cota 402,” Latrinxera, http://www.latrinxera.es/index.html?msgOrigen=6&CODART=ART00050.

  23. 23.

    See also Juan García, “Piezas perdidas, objetos encontrados,” 7.

  24. 24.

    See González-Ruibal, Volver a las trincheras, Chapter 5.

  25. 25.

    Rachel Ceasar, “How I learned to Love the Bomb: Excavating Pueblo Politics, Love, and Salvaged Technologies after Conflict,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, no. 3 (2016), 570–90.

  26. 26.

    Nick Saunders, Killing Time: Archaeology and the First World War (Stroud: The History Press 2007), 181–95.

  27. 27.

    Hernández Cardona, and Rojo Ariza, “Museïtzació de conflictes contemporanis,” 144.

  28. 28.

    For an account, see Ferrándiz, “Guerras sin fin.”

  29. 29.

    Michael Seidman, “Quiet Fronts in the Spanish Civil War ,” The Historian 61, no. 4 (1999), 821–42.

  30. 30.

    Daniel J. Sherman, “Objects of Memory: History and Narrative in French War Museums,” French Historical Studies 19, no. 1 (1995), 49–74.

  31. 31.

    This is the central argument of Olsen et al., Archeology.

  32. 32.

    González-Ruibal, Volver a las trincheras.

  33. 33.

    John Schofield, Wayne G. Johnson, and Caroline M. Beck, eds., Matériel Culture: The Archaeology of Twentieth-Century Conflict (London: Routledge, 2002).

  34. 34.

    For more on this, see the website, https://www.juntadeandalucia.es/organismos/presidenciaadministracionlocalymemoriademocratica/servicios/mapa/lugares-memoria-historica.html.

  35. 35.

    For more on this, see the website, memoria.gen.cat.cat, Generalitat de Catalunya, http://memorialdemocratic.gencat.cat/ca/espais_de_la_memoria/.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Ciencias del Patrimonio, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

    Alfredo González-Ruibal

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  1. Alfredo González-Ruibal
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Alison Ribeiro de Menezes

  2. Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada

    Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez

  3. York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Adrian Shubert

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González-Ruibal, A. (2018). Museums and Material Memories of the Spanish Civil War: An Archaeological Critique. In: Ribeiro de Menezes, A., Cazorla-Sánchez, A., Shubert, A. (eds) Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97274-9_5

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