Vol. 11 No. 18 (2024): Culture and memory of the ephemeral II

Memory has an evident, social trait of attending to what remains, under the sign of what returns: days of celebrations, commemorations, festivals. But a day is also that which disappears in the course of events, only returns as a passage, only remains as aura and trace: it is measured by glimpses of horizons, revolutions of the firmament. Etymology – which is memories and stories impregnated in a word – teaches us that the ephemeral is what lasts and vanishes on the surface of a day : epi hémera. Morpheus Journal – Interdisciplinary Studies in Social Memory opens the call for papers for volume 10, 2017, numbers 17 and 18. Culture and memory of the ephemeral is the subject of the dossier that will gather contributions (original articles, essays and reviews) on contemporary trends and the construction of memory. There are many ways of portraying ephemeral-memorial relations: documenting what is provisional, or dispersing inscriptions; building monuments of impermanence, or composing odes to the timelessness of snapshots. On the one hand, cultural tradition and technological innovation may intertwine their complex paths of fluid, intangible performances and stable, protected information in archives and databases. Could social networks play a leading role in safeguarding oral narratives and collections of memorial objects from communities and groups? What do information and misinformation mean in the context of the political erasure of collective and ecological memories? On the other hand, given the accumulation of planetary-scale impasses, we must also face omens and announcements of the ephemerality of culture and history. Will different kinds of mnemonic praxes, reinvented traditions, disseminated interculturalities and ethnohistoricities be capable of breaking the destructive inertia of expropriative knowledge and technologies of war? Since the ephemeral, as a form of memory, never ceases to refer to what is sensory and corporeal, can the habitual sense of erasure and determent make way for other senses of detachment and of reattachments? Can ruins of ruins, traces of what is unregistrable be valued as historical experience? When and how can different ways of knowing interweave in alternative pasts and futures? These are just some key questions, among many others, that can be unveiled in the interdisciplinary territories of academic studies.