Places and “Non-Places”: The Identity of a Place in the Perspective of Individual Memory and Social Forgetting

Abstract

The article deals with the issue of the identity of the place, taken in reference to the concept of places and non-places by Marc Augé. The main purpose of the theoretical analyses and analysis and interpretation of empirical results of the study was to determine the identity of the place (borderland) by referring to the individual memory of members of the minority group, inscribed in multifaceted, individual negotiations of experiencing the identity of the place. An important aspect discussed in the article are issues of social forgetting in Paul Connerton’s approach and socio-cultural consequences of this process for the identity of the individual, group and place. Narrative interview was the main form of data collection. The analyses are oriented to the variable of the identity of the borderland. The categories of the analysis refer to: the cultural identity of the borderland; personal memories of respondents related to the events, situations related to the past of their family; social memory of the minority group; social memory of the majority group. Memory of the borderland is a memory strongly embedded in a given area and unequivocally localized – assigned to a place “marked” and “embedded” cul- turally. This, of course, implies a series of difficult group-based negotiations regarding the contents of memory, places, events that, from the perspective of internal diversity of the group, may construct contradictory images of the past of the place.