LAUSR

DeNora’s examination of narratives of “Turkishness” in music (production) in Berlin. As it stands, however, the editors do not provide enough guidance (which might have taken the form of a much more comprehensive introduction or explanatory pieces at the beginning of each section) to make these chapters more accessible by highlighting key themes or pointing out what insights they offer about the field. The main way in which the reader is supported in her quest to make sense of memory studies is the volume’s division into six parts. These are broad umbrella concepts and divide up the field logically. I had especially high hopes for Part IV “Technologies of memory,” which encompasses issues that I believe are in dire need of development in memory studies and which I also expected to discuss innovative methodological practices. The technologies under scrutiny here include music, cinema, photography, “brick-and-mortar” memorials, and autobiographical accounts. Strangely missing is a contribution that tackles the challenges posed by digital media, above all the Internet, but also the use of mobile devices in memory production, reception, and archiving. While individual chapters touch on digitalization, a more comprehensive treatment would have been welcome in a handbook. On one hand, Part VI on “Body and ecosystems” could be seen as an unprecedented contribution to memory studies in the sense that proponents of the field often point out its tremendous breadth—stretching from literary studies via the social sciences all the way to psychology, biology, medicine, and neuroscience. This volume is one of the few places where these diverse perspectives are actually put together between two book covers. However, after reviewing this final part, I am more skeptical than before about the practical possibility of actually talking across the boundaries between hard sciences and the rest of us. Neither the editors nor the authors suggest how these studies about memory in evolution, in cells, in water, in bodies—each in their own territory fascinating—can inform how we think about individual, social, and political processes of remembrance. Since the scientific languages employed here are very far from my own, I would have needed significant translation to make them fruitful for my own thinking. Overall then, the Handbook is a valuable resource and an impressive collection of memory scholarship that will be useful to political scientists already engaged in or considering the field. However, it does not quite deliver the “multi-disciplinary conversation” it promises and is at times rather “difficult to manage” (p. 2)—something that the editors were hoping to avoid.