Memories of Conflict and Present-Day Struggles in Europe: New Tensions between Corporatism,Class, and Social Movements

This lecture addresses the connection between the production in the present of particular memories of the past and the ability to frame present-day conflicts in ways that render certain possibilities legitimate while excluding others. Through the ethnographic material I have gathered during my career I will show how different projects of the future (personal and collective) appeal to memories of conflict that link responsibilities and generations at different scales. Taking as my object of observation the transformations in economic relations in a heavy industrial region of northwestern Spain I will trace the connections between the languages and practices of contention, the reconfigured structures of production and governance, and the production of diverse memories (and silences) of conflict. Diverse memories produce struggles framed in class terms, or struggles framed in terms of corporatist interests, or in terms of contingently defined social claims. Through this often ambivalent delimitation of conflicts between past and present, the field of possible futures gets configured and with it the spectrum of possible political action.