Individual and collective memories of slavery and the slave trade: A contrastive comparison of different communities, generations and groupings in Ghana and Brazil

关于奴隶制和奴隶贸易的个人和集体记忆：加纳和巴西不同社区、世代和群体的对比

• 批准号: 462904321
• 负责人: Professorin Dr. Maria Pohn-Lauggas
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Department of Sociology
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 资助国家: 德国
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/462904321?language=en
• 关键词: Individual; collective; memories; slavery; slave

The aim of our empirical interpretative study is to make a contrastive comparison of collective and individual memories of slavery in different regions, generations and groupings in Ghana and Brazil. We will use an approach that combines methods from the sociology of knowledge and figurational sociology to reconstruct the interrelationships between different memory practices. While for white Europeans the age of the transcontinental slave trade is so remote that they do not connect it with their own family history, this cannot be said of people in Brazil and in Ghana. Here, in both public and family memories and commemoration practices, this past, with all its many facets, is less remote, and there are many people who know that their ancestors were enslaved, or that they enslaved others. However, within each country, attitudes to the history of the slave trade and slavery in general are very different, and sometimes controversial, as seen in public discourses or places of remembrance, in family dialogues, among members of different groupings, and in different parts of the country. In carrying out a contrastive comparison of selected regions in Ghana and in Brazil, we will look closely at these differences, and show how they are due to very different historical trajectories and changing social figurations. In Ghana, we will focus on Elmina und Cape Coast, from where the slave ships departed, and on two areas in the north of the country where people were captured and sold in slave markets. In Brazil, we will work in the coastal region of Salvador de Bahia, where most of the present-day inhabitants are descendants of former slaves, and in the region around Pelotas in Rio Grande do Sul, where most people are of European descent. We will seek to answer the following questions: What knowledge of the past has been handed down in the communities and families? What kinds of slavery and slave trade (transatlantic, trans-Saharan, intra-African, intra-Brazilian) are thematized by whom, how and in what contexts? We will also pay attention to what is said and what is not said at places of remembrance and commemorative events in these regions, and which people are brought together at such places or events. We intend to conduct biographical and family-history interviews (if possible with several generations of the same family), group discussions and thematically focused or ethnographic interviews with visitors and guides at places of remembrance.

我们的实证解释性研究的目的是对加纳和巴西不同地区、不同世代和不同群体的集体和个人对奴隶制的记忆进行对比。我们将使用一种结合知识社会学和形象社会学的方法来重建不同记忆实践之间的相互关系。虽然对欧洲白色人来说，跨大陆贩卖奴隶的年代是如此遥远，以至于他们不会将其与自己的家族历史联系起来，但巴西和加纳的人就不能这么说了。在这里，在公众和家庭的记忆和纪念活动中，这段过去及其许多方面都不那么遥远，有许多人知道他们的祖先曾被奴役，或者他们曾奴役过其他人。然而，在每个国家内部，对贩卖奴隶和奴隶制历史的态度大不相同，有时甚至是有争议的，这体现在公共谈话或纪念场所、家庭对话、不同群体成员之间以及国家不同地区。在对加纳和巴西的选定地区进行对比比较时，我们将仔细研究这些差异，并说明它们是如何由于非常不同的历史轨迹和不断变化的社会形态造成的。在加纳，我们将重点关注奴隶船出发的埃尔米纳和开普海岸，以及该国北部的两个地区，那里的人被抓获并在奴隶市场上出售。在巴西，我们将在巴伊亚州的萨尔瓦多沿海地区开展工作，那里的大多数居民现在都是前奴隶的后代，我们还将在南里奥格兰德州的佩尔松周围地区开展工作，那里的大多数人都是欧洲人后裔。我们将寻求回答以下问题：在社区和家庭中流传下来的过去知识是什么？哪些类型的奴隶制和奴隶贸易（跨大西洋、跨撒哈拉、非洲内部、巴西内部）是由谁、如何以及在何种背景下提出的主题？我们还将关注在这些地区的纪念场所和纪念活动中说了什么和没有说什么，以及哪些人聚集在这些场所或活动中。我们打算进行传记和家庭历史采访（如果可能的话，同一个家庭的几代人），小组讨论和主题为重点的或民族志采访的游客和导游在纪念场所。