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

我们的经验性解释性研究的目的是对比加纳和巴西不同地区、不同世代和不同群体对奴隶制的集体和个人记忆。我们将使用一种结合知识社会学和比喻社会学方法的方法来重建不同记忆实践之间的相互关系。虽然对于欧洲白人来说，跨洲贩卖奴隶的时代如此遥远，以至于他们不会将其与自己的家族历史联系在一起，但巴西和加纳的人就不能这样说了。在这里，在公众和家庭的记忆和纪念活动中，这段往事及其方方面面并不那么遥远，有许多人知道他们的祖先曾被奴役，或他们奴役了他人。然而，在每个国家内部，对奴隶贸易和奴隶制历史的总体态度是非常不同的，有时甚至是有争议的，这在公开演讲或纪念场所、家庭对话、不同群体的成员之间以及在该国不同的地区都可以看到。在对加纳和巴西选定的地区进行对比时，我们将密切关注这些差异，并展示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象而产生的。在加纳，我们将重点关注奴隶船离开的埃尔米纳和开普敦海岸，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沿海地区和南里奥格兰德州的佩洛塔斯周围地区工作，那里的大多数今天的居民是前奴隶的后代，那里的大多数人都是欧洲人的后裔。我们将设法回答以下问题：社区和家庭流传了哪些关于过去的知识？什么样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)由谁、如何以及在什么背景下主题化？我们还将注意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，以及在这些地方或活动中聚集了哪些人。我们打算进行传记和家族史访谈(如果可能，采访同一个家庭的几代人)，小组讨论，并在纪念地与参观者和导游进行有主题的或民族志访谈。

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.