Preliminary Programme

Over 500.000 Europeans are born deaf and one million people use sign language. People who are
deaf since childhood rarely master the oral language, written and spoken. Their favourite language,
often the only one, is a signed language. These are languages in their own right, able to convey any
meaning and bring along history, memory and culture. Both deaf people and their languages have
been heavily discriminated. Only in the late twentieth century was the linguisticity of signed
languages rediscovered, leading to a more mature claim of deaf people’s rights.
Deaf signing communities in Europe have only recently started to be perceived as linguistic and
cultural minorities, and their languages are being claimed now as part of the linguistic and cultural
heritage of mainstream European societies.
In the recent Italian history it has been thought that citizens should bow to a supposed natural
national identity and the country should identify with one language. Such misled sense of
belonging, have imposed a subtractive bilingualism on deaf people, while paving the way for the
relegation of their language and culture to a position of inferiority and disrepute. There was a logic
according to which deviances had to be eliminated or hidden, in order to be recognized as part of
the community.
The willingness emerged in the last decades, to accept the different other, is an expression of an
internal cultural identity. However no serious attempt has been made to recover the memory of this
linguistic minority, which cannot rely on writing but only on face-to-face communication or video
technologies to entrust its own memory. It is a fragile memory. At the same time it is a minority,
socially weak and strongly discriminated against memory. However, recovering a common memory
has been one of the determinants for advancing deaf people’s rights.
This paper aims to analyze the theoretical and methodological issues related to Sign[ed] History and
its potential to claim rights and participation. In order to manage different language and social
dynamics we propose thath some typical instruments of oral history research, such as unstructured interviews and Grounded Theory, it might be helpful to go beyond the hegemonic reproductive approach and the 'paradox of oral history' (and the 'paradox of Deaf studies). However, within this set of practices it has been possible to identify the need of not only providing counseling spaces for the “unheard voices”, but also of making the “untold narratives” come to light through engaging initiatives open to the community. (Show less)

This paper brings the study of gender in Africa’s deeper pasts in dialogue with a cultural analysis of the contemporary historical moment. Focusing specifically on the oral historical narratives of precolonial women of authority in northern Mozambique, it explores how these narratives are communicated and made sense of in present time. These women—generally called ‘queens’ and sometimes ‘princesses’ in Portuguese sources—often only appear in footnotes in written documentation and early history writing. Moreover, the practice of history writing on gender in Africa still often continues to be framed by Eurocentric teleological narratives of modernity in which the past is distanced from the present along a linear path. This paper proposes thinking of temporality differently. It explores how multiple gender times work in the historical present. As my analysis shows, even in this new time of ‘women’s emancipation/empowerment’, other voices can be heard that connect the present with different pasts. Deeper histories continue to echo in the present; they constitute the contemporary historical experience in interaction with, for instance, more recent socialist ideas of women’s emancipation and the current (international) development discourse on gender equality. Combining the study of the contemporary historical moment with the study of the deeper past, this paper suggests, allows us to better capture the ‘fullness’ of gender times (Show less)

The presentation focuses on what will be termed ‘memory ideologies’, namely, the underlying conceptions concerning the nature, functions, and consequences of memory reflected in testimonies and life stories of Ingrian Finns of the Gulag and Soviet terror. Ingrian Finns are a historical minority of Russia who used to live in the area surrounding the city of Saint Petersburg/Leningrad. Ingrian Finns descend from Lutheran Finns who immigrated to the area in the 17th century during the era of the Swedish Empire. By contextualising Ingrian Finnish testimonies with respect to the specific times of their narration, it will be argued that Ingrian Finnish testimonies represent various types of memory ideologies. Although individuals’ and communities’ memories and experiences of the past have been studied extensively in oral history, cultural memory studies, as well as in anthropology and folklore studies, the issue of what kinds of assumptions and communicative functions are assigned and attributed – both implicitly and explicitly – with the notion of memory has been to some extent bypassed. For this reason, the presentation approaches such reflexive regimentation and deployment of memory through the concept of ‘memory ideology’, a term coined on the basis of the concept of linguistic/semiotic ideology, developed in linguistic anthropology. Moreover, the presentation suggests that the significance of the notion of memory ideology is that it affords systematic analysis of the ways in which memory (as a relationship between the past, present, and future) is conceptualised on various levels of culture in general and mobilised in oral histories, testimonies, and life stories in particular. It is a useful concept for analysing beliefs, conceptions, and principles that people and societies reflexively associate with memory, its functions, and its corollaries. The importance of understanding memory ideologies lies in the fact that they reflexively regiment the ways in which people and societies use and interpret memory, and in these processes make evaluations with social, political, and ethical ramifications. The presentation situates at the disciplinary crossroad of oral history, cultural memory studies, folklore studies, and linguistic anthropology. (Show less)