Past Lessons for Present Times: Reflections on Contemporary Events in Dark History Museums’ Online Platforms
with Dr. Omri Grinberg
Former Post-doc fellow at the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law under Extreme Conditions
With Chaim Noy and Moran Avital [ISF funding: 2460/21]
Abstract:
This talk is part of a wide-scale research concerned with the curious interface between User Generated Content (UGC) on the Google Maps Platform (GMP), and Dark History Museums (DHMs – museums documenting and commemorating violent atrocities, such as genocides, slavery, war, and gross human rights violations). “Curious”, since GMP is commonly used for geographical navigation, and for basic information and reviews about businesses and establishments, mainly from a consumer and tourist perspective. This type of discourse is starkly different from common forms of expression and discussion regarding DHMs, which have become a transnationally known genre: visitors focus and reflect on moral and historical lessons conveyed through museums’ curatorship, and echo the duty of remembrance. Given the prominence of GMP as a highly popular website and app, when the liberal DHM ethos integrates into GMP’s star-rating system and the genre of consumer-tourism critiques, UGC becomes a telling site for understanding how digital platforms, including (but not only) social media, are in a dynamic of mutual influence with both museums (as key institutional agents of remembrance) and the wider socio-cultural and political production of collective memory.
In this talk, our focus is on UGC that refer to contemporary events or issues. GMP is not a platform for debates and is rarely used to make sweeping political statements. However, within the functional and rhetorical confines, users still use the violent pasts exhibited in DHMs to relate to the present (and future) in various ways. Surveying examples from four pages of DHMs commemorating genocides, we will show how such expressions have dual signification. First, that by relating to the contemporary, users extend the witnessing ethos of DHM to digital platforms. Second, that such acts of witnessing also challenge the neutralization of political discourse from practical, consumer and tourism oriented platforms Thus, the liberal ethos of DHMs, at times accused of overlooking or obscuring contemporary issues, is itself revitalized through such reflections.
Dr. Omri Grinberg is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law Under Extreme Conditions, and at the Truman Institute (Hebrew U) from October 2020 until September 2022. In 2019-2020 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel-Aviv U (Jonathan Shapiro Fund). In 2019 he completed a PhD in Anthropology and Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, following an MA in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew U (2010, summa cum laude). In the past he was a research fellow in the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory and in Media and Cultural Studies, Heinrich Heine University, Dusseldorf.
Omri’s research focuses on definitions and modes of representation of violence in bureaucratic and legal interactions between human rights NGOs and state extensions, as part of a political and cultural theatre that includes everyday life, media, and art. He applies inter-disciplinary tools to examine the ethics of cultural adaptations of testimony and struggles over archival issues in Israel/Palestine.
Omri’s publications, from his MA and PhD, have appeared in a number of edited books, and in such journals as Anthropologica, Journal of Borderland Studies, and Children & Society. He also co-edited A Sort of Solution to Silence: Modern Arab Literature in Hebrew (2018).
