Saturday, March 15, 2014
Executive (Omni Shoreham)
“I remember just bits and pieces like there’s a bomb in Armagh, an IRA bomb, at the courthouse.” This excerpt, drawn from an interview I conducted in July 2012 in Armagh, Northern Ireland, references the interviewee’s memories of what life was like before the current peace process ended much of the violence of the Troubles. Only a child, what the interviewee most easily recalled were moments like the bomb attack, yet he did not reference these violent memories in explaining his adult decision to join the Orange Order, a controversial fraternal Protestant organization. Rather, he spoke of his respect for members he knew growing up, like young men at his church, a teacher at school, and his father, a long-term member of the Order. To analyze how young adults like my interviewee draw on such childhood memories of the Troubles (violent or otherwise) in negotiating and constructing everyday identity in Northern Ireland, I frame my formal and informal interviews, as well as participant-observations, through Wulf Kanstiener’s (2002) theory of collective memory. While Kansteiner (2002) distinguishes between two roles in the process of memory making, those who produce memory and those who consume it, I argue that people act as both consumers and producers of memory in their daily lives, highlighting this dialectical process in one man’s narratives to reveal how memory making relates to concepts of identity and actions in the contemporary context of Northern Ireland's peace process.
