Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe.

ioned to become the principal frame of remembrance, trumping all other possible interpretations. Since 1989, the politics of memory has become volatile again as the “postcommunist” generation, but also some old warriors, have begun fashioning new versions of the “past” (including the memories of World War II) and using them as political weapons. The book deals with three groups of countries: the winners (Russia), the losers (Germany), and the countries “in between” that hold multiple roles of “loser, occupied country, collaborator, resistor, victor—some of them simultaneously” (p. 19). France, Italy, Austria, and Yugoslavia belong to this latter category. The volume’s focus on the production of memory at the “national level” is justified and consequently retained throughout the case studies. The omission of other dimensions of interest to students of the politics of memory is, therefore, justifiable. One yearns, however, for at least two more angles: a picture of the “reception” side of memory/history production (e.g., public opinion surveys on “historical memory”) and the elucidation of the tension between mechanisms of “official” remembering at the national level and their various subnational (regional, local, familial) counterparts. The politics involved in the multilevel formation of collective memory are studied by Heonik Kwon in his gripping ethnography of Ha My and My Lai in Vietnam. The Vietnamese, whose society had been ripped apart by devastating wars, have recently engaged in the rebuilding of their country’s social and cultural tissue. In a society whose order rests on a scaffolding of multigenerational kinship regulated by elaborate rituals, this is a particularly demanding task. The ritual reconstruction of lineages that were destroyed by “bad deaths” that occurred “in the streets,” while the proper location for dying is “at home,” is fraught with difficulties. Death outside of the culturally legitimated locations disrupts the viability of family units grounded in the cult of ancestors. And since the family units are the key building blocs of social order, a society that lost hundreds of thousands of its members in ritually uncontrolled conditions, either as soldiers on battlefields or victims of killing fields, is unbalanced. The main task of the reconstruction is, therefore, reburying under the “proper” conditions that can “refit” ancestors into their “rightful” ritual locations and thus restore social order. And this is exactly where state politics and the culture of lineage and community clash. The communist authorities of Vietnam, though reluctantly supportive of the society’s self-healing efforts, are also interested in the victims of the foreign invasions. Reburying can become a political ritual that promotes the interests of the state; the dead are splendid candidates for hero worship. But the cultural logics of hero worship, championed by the state, and cults of the ancestors, needed by the families, are at odds with each other. Actually, engaging in the latter can undermine the regime’s claims to legitimacy and weaken the nation-building potential of official heroism. Kwon’s book offers a fine-grained and analytically sophisticated portrayal of the relationship between politics and culture. Two of its many accomplishments are particularly important. First, the author demonstrates that collective memory is always formulated according to the specific cultural rules in concrete social locations and that the analysis of the political dimension of memory-formation is seriously flawed when cultural mechanisms involved in this process are abstracted away. Second, he shows that collective memory is constructed on several levels, at different scales, often simultaneously. The political and cultural logic that governs this construction at the national level, where it contributes to the state’s self-legitimizing efforts, can be undermined or annulled by the local, regional, or familial processes of collective memory formation. Both volumes are brilliant justifications for the claim that the study of collective memory formation constitutes an indispensable part of the broader efforts to understand the politics of culture and, particularly, the politics of collective identity.