Visualizing Mass Grave Recovery: Ritual, Digital Culture and Geographic Information Systems

Kurtz, Wendy Perla

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-97274-9_8

Wendy Perla Kurtz⁷

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

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Abstract

Kurtz reflects on the ritualistic aspects of mourning practices that accompany the current disinterment and reburial of Francoist victims from mass graves on the Iberian Peninsula. Digital productions—blogs, YouTube shorts, social media—act as a stage for families and communities to highlight the process of locating their disappeared family members. Using theories of performance, Kurtz argues the need to actualize funeral rites before a community of witnesses as a way to disseminate memory and enact closure. Through the creation and dissemination of digital texts, performative rituals help to reconcile and recuperate collective memory. The means of dissemination of digital culture become critical and, as such, an analysis of the modalities of visualizations, particularly through digital mapping systems (GIS), concludes the chapter

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Notes

1.
Georges Bataille, “Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press , 1995), 221–35; Kai Erikson, Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1976); Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community,” in Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 183–99.
2.
Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, trans. and ed. James Strachey with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth 1955 [1920]); Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Pierre Janet, L’automatisme psychologique (Paris: Société Pierre Janet, 1973 [1889]); Pierre Janet, “L’amnésie continue,” in L’état mental des hystérique (Paris: Alcan, 1990 [1893]); Pierre Janet, “Les idées fixes de forme hystérique,” Press Medicale 3 (1895), 201–3; Bessel A. Van der Kolk, and Onno Van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” in Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 158–82.
3.
Caruth, “Introductions,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 3–12 and 151–57; Kevin Newmark, “Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of Laughter,” in Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 236–55; Marita Sturken, “The Remembering of Forgetting : Recovered Memory and the Question of Experience ,” Social Text 57 (1998), 103–25; Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press , 2004).
4.
Jo Labanyi, “History and Hauntology; or, What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the Past? Reflection on Spanish Film and Fiction of the Post-Franco Period,” in Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy , ed. Joan Ramon Resina (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 65–82; Cristina Moreiras-Menor, “Spectacle, Trauma and Violence in Contemporary Spain ,” in Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies, ed. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas (London: Arnold, 2000), 134–43; Petar Ramadanovic, Forgetting Futures: On Memory, Trauma, and Identity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001); Teresa M. Vilarós, El mono del desencanto: Una crítica cultural de la Transición española (1973–1993) (Madrid : Editorial Siglo XXI de España, 1998).
5.
Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community,” 186.
6.
Erikson, Everything in Its Path, 154.
7.
The Ministry of Justice publishes a biannual report on the mass grave recovery effort. Datos.gob.es, Gobierno de Espana, http://datos.gob.es/catalogo/e00003901-fosas-o-lugares-de-enterramiento-en-el-territorio-espanol. As of 18 December 2015, the data identified 2,642 mass graves.
8.
Francisco Ferrándiz, and Alejandro Baer, “Digital Memory: The Visual Recording of Mass Grave Exhumations in Contemporary Spain ,” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 9, no. 3 (2008), Art . 35, 1.
9.
Francisco Ferrándiz, “Cries and Whispers: Exhuming and Narrating Defeat in Spain Today,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 9, no. 2 (2008), 177–92; Francisco Ferrándiz, “From Tear to Pixel: Political Correctness and Digital Emotions in the Exhumation of Civil War Mass Graves in Spain Today,” in Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History, ed. Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi (Nashville, NC: Vanderbilt University Press , 2016), 242–61.
10.
Ferrándiz, “From Tear to Pixel,” 243.
11.
Ferrándiz, “From Tear to Pixel,” 243.
12.
Michael Richards, “Grand Narratives, Collective Memory, and Social History: Public Uses of the Past in Postwar Spain ,” in Unearthing Franco’s Legacy : Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain , ed. Carlos Jerez-Farrán and Samuel Amago (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press , 2010), 121–45 (135).
13.
Joan Ramon Resina, “The Weight of Memory and the Lightness of Oblivion : The Dead of the Spanish Civil War ,” in Jerez-Farrán and Amago, Unearthing Franco’s Legacy , 221–42 (224).
14.
Resina, “The Weight of Memory,” 229–30.
15.
Richard Schechner , Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2006), 57.
16.
Diana Taylor , The Archive and the Repertoire : Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press , 2003), 3.
17.
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire , 2.
18.
Paul Connerton , How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press , 1989), 39.
19.
Connerton , How Societies Remember, 40.
20.
Richard Schechner , Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press , 1985), 36.
21.
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire , 16.
22.
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire , 18.
23.
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire , 19 (underlined emphasis added).
24.
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire , 19. A note on the “literary texts” referenced in this quote: I do not encapsulate digital media into this definition of the archive because they were not created during the Civil War or postwar years.
25.
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire , 20.
26.
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire , 21.
27.
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire , 37.
28.
Mark Poster, “Global Media and Culture,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2008), 685–703 (689).
29.
David Gauntlett, “Media Studies 2.0: A Response,” Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 1, no. 1 (2009), 147–57 (149).
30.
Gauntlett, “Media Studies 2.0,” 149.
31.
For instance, Mark Deuze, “Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering the Principal Components of a Digital Culture ,” The Information Society 22 (2006), 63–75; David Silver, “Internet /Cyberculture/Digital Culture /New Media/Fill-In-The-Blank Studies,” New Media and Society 6, no. 1 (2004), 55–64.
32.
Nancy Thumim, Self-Representation and Digital Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 10–11.
33.
John Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of Media (Cambridge: Polity, 1995); Thumim, Self-Representation and Digital Culture ; Leah L. Lievrouw, “New Media, Mediation, and Communication Study,” Information, Communication & Society 12, no. 3 (2009), 303–25.
34.
Thumim, Self-Representation and Digital Culture , 50.
35.
The following are examples of Facebook groups dedicated to historical memory as of March 2017: “Guerra Civil Española – O Revolucion Social” currently with 21,635 members, https://www.facebook.com/groups/234589516628356/; “Plataforma Memoria Histórica—Guerra Civil Española” with 9571 members, https://www.facebook.com/Plataforma-Memoria-Hist%C3%B3rica-Guerra-Civil-Espa%C3%B1ola-219608795906/?ref=br_rs; “Memoria Histórica de España” with 1011 members,
https://www.facebook.com/archivosdememoriahistorica/?ref=br_rs; “La Guerra Civil Española” with 3558 members, https://www.facebook.com/groups/378972102146174/?ref = br_rs.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/240289476125136/.
36.
“Memorias de la Guerra Civil Española—Republica,” 1 October 2017,
http://memoriasdelaguerracivil.blogspot.com/; “Spanish Civil War Memory Project: Audiovisual Archive of the Francoist Repression,” University of California, San Diego,
https://library.ucsd.edu/speccoll/scwmemory/.
37.
“Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica,” http://memoriahistorica.org.es/; “Guerra Civil Española y sus victimas,” http://victimasguerracivilespaniola.blogspot.com/.
38.
“La Memoria ,” Canal Sur ,
http://blogs.canalsur.es/lamemoria/2010/11/24/como-y-por-que-se-escavan-en-espana-las-fosas-comunes-y-como-se-identifican-los-restos-oseos-de-las-victimas-del-franquismo-que-aparecen/.
39.
For a thorough discussion of some fundamental differences between historical memory associations, see Ferrándiz, “From Tear to Pixel,” in Delgado, Fernández and Labanyi, Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History.
40.
“Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/user/ARMHmemoria.
41.
“Foro por la memoria : Campo de Gibraltar,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/user/foroporlamemoriacg.
42.
“Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica,” Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/memoriahistorica/albums.
43.
“Mapa de fosas,” Memoria Histórica. Gobierno de España, Ministerio de Justicia, http://www.memoriahistorica.gob.es/es-es/mapafosas/Paginas/index.aspx.
44.
The map includes the following metadata fields: Numero_Registro, Dominación_Fosa, Tipo_Fosa, Fecha_Fosa, Municipio, Provincia, Comunidad Autónoma, Lat, Long, Tipo_Intervención, Fecha_Intervención, Estado_Actual, Numero_Personas_Fosa, Numero_Personas_Exhumadas, Numero_Personas_Identificadas, Entidad_Promotora, Entidad_Informante.
45.
“Fosas o lugares de enterramiento en el territorio español - Catálago de Datos,” Ministerio de Justicia, http://datos.gob.es/catalogo/e00003901-fosas-o-lugares-de-enterramiento-en-el-territorio-espanol.
46.
Ferrándiz, “From Tear to Pixel,” in Delgado, Fernández and Labanyi, Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History, 244.
47.
“Mapa de fosas comunes de Asturias – Mapa Interactivo,” Gobiernu del Principáu d’Asturies, Universidad de Oviedo, http://tematico.asturias.es/asunsoci/fosas/.
48.
“Fosses i Repressió,” Generalitat de Catalunya, http://fossesirepressio.cat/es/home.
49.
“Visor de fosas de Navarra,” Gobierno de Navarra, http://fosas.navarra.es/.
50.
“Mapa de la memoria .” Asociación de la Resuperación de la Memoria Histórica, http://memoriahistorica.org.es/mapa-de-la-verguenza/.
51.
“Las víctimas en fosas del franquismo,” El Diario .es, http://desmemoria.eldiario.es/mapa-fosas/.
52.
Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press , 2004), 82.
53.
“Mapa de fosas,” Gobierno de España, http://mapadefosas.mjusticia.es/exovi_externo/CargarInformacion.htm.
54.
“Virtual Cartographies ,” http://www.virtualcartographies.com.
55.
Drucker, Graphesis, 105.
56.
“uMap ,” http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/.
57.
Prototypes were built on the following platforms: Google Fusion Tables, Google MyMaps, Omeka with Neatline functionality, ESRI Story Maps in combination with ArcGIS, CartoDB, and Leaflet and Mapbox libraries and templates.
58.
Edward Soja, Thirdspace (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 3.

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University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Wendy Perla Kurtz

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University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes
Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada
Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez
York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Adrian Shubert

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Kurtz, W.P. (2018). Visualizing Mass Grave Recovery: Ritual, Digital Culture and Geographic Information Systems. 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_8

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97274-9_8
Published: 13 December 2018
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