Keepsake : meanings, practices and tactics of making and preserving memory

Abstract

This study is an attempt to conceptualize what a “keepsake” is within the context of subjective and social usage in relation to death and mourning. The phenomenon of memory keeping is examined not only as a subjective collation but as an objectifying, inalienable practice during which material qualities and mnemonic value of the keepsake are revealed. Ancestral memorials‟ encoding continuity between and across generations, types of display of a keepsake as well as types of mourning/object keeping, are the focai of the study. A test study aiming to provide an understanding and a basis for more profound researching of keepsake as a social phenomenon is conducted, borrowing methods of ethnography and sociology. The discourse of “object-cathexis” and the “perennial nature of objects” as Zygmunt Bauman argues are discussed in order to analyze human-object relations within the framework of mourning.