Sensing Memories of Socialism
Distancing itself from logocentric methodologies that privilege narrative and text in memory research, this paper insists on the importance of the senses in practices of social recall. Through ethnographic analysis of an open-air museum commemorating Soviet history in today’s Lithuania, it examines differential ways in which sight and taste are mobilized as memory media for linking the nation’s socialist past with its “capitalist” present. The paper also argues that this museum constitutes an apt ethnographic locus in which to critique unproblematic unilinear approaches to the ongoing systemic change in the European East after Communist rule.