Arel's Bearing Witness expands how we think about religion in public, presenting museum workers as mediators of a complex public healing process. Pairing her expertise in trauma studies with ethnographic research in the field of memorials, she provides a rare and spiritually sensitive glimpse into the daily labor of bringing people into relationship with the past. In this outstanding work of public theology, Arel leads us into unbearable histories by showing how we, if guided by those who touch the past purposefully, can make meaning in the fragments.
Bearing Witness: The Wounds of Mass Trauma at Memorial Museums
Museum memorialization has long been about politics, design implications, and visitor experience--rarely focused upon the people mired in commemorating the dead. Profound challenges confront those who memorialize mass trauma at memorial museums. Listening to the voices of those called to do this work enables insight into the critical role they play in preserving and disseminating history's most painful narratives, expanding views of recovery from mass trauma, and revealing the value in the profession.
As an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the National September 11 Memorial Museum, Dr. Stephanie Arel recognized costs--psychological, spiritual, and physical--aligned with responding to mass trauma and participating in communal recovery. The impact of bearing witness at memorial museums emerged in the lives of workers. To explore the phenomenon, she visited Auschwitz, interviewing those who remember the Holocaust's horrors while resisting its infiltration in their personal lives. The immensity of honoring the dead for others inspired additional sojourns in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, Israel, South Africa, and the United States. She discovered dimensions of pride and care evident in those who honor memory: the capacity of workers to address reverberating political tensions, while tending to visitor needs; the passion workers have for giving voice to the voiceless who died during traumatic events, while offering care and support to the survivors; and the reality that reassembling the fragments of mass trauma is not for the weary, but instead emerges as a calling and a vocation.
Bearing Witness places value on what workers do, opening space for workers' testimonies to be heard for the first time and creating a global community of and for these workers, who have otherwise never been given a platform to speak about their experiences. The interviews reveal the entanglement of politics with commemoration, the sacredness of remembering, and the multidimensional aspects of care, transforming the reader's understanding of humanity forever.
- Publisher Fortress Press
- Format Hardcover
- ISBN 9781506485454
- eBook ISBN 9781506485461
- Dimensions 5.75 x 8.75
- Pages 243
- Publication Date September 26, 2023
Endorsements
Shelly Rambo, Boston University School of Theology
Bearing Witness is a moving meditation on the lives and work of people who conceive of and work in museums and other commemorative sites designed to memorialize the tragic, traumatic events that many of us would like to forget. These terrible, murderous events took place in the killing fields of Cambodia, the Nazi death camps of Poland, the Twin Towers of New York, the neglected neighborhoods of Soweto. Stephanie Arel's sensitive interviews with the guardians of these sites of traumatic memory reveal the importance of their work as mediators between the victims of evil and those who, for various reasons, make pilgrimages to the sites where thousands, or millions, of them suffered and died. She also beautifully shows how these intermediaries transform the emotional toll of their work into forms of healing and cries for justice.
Edward Berenson, New York University
Combining the keen insight of an ethnographer, the perceptive observations of a psychologist, and the penetrating inquiry of a theologian, Stephanie Arel explores the array of emotional, physical, and spiritual impacts on individuals who have elected to live a life of service by working in memorial museums. She vividly captures the complex challenges for these "guardians of memory," who must engage as professionals in their areas of expertise while continuously confronting the evidence and heartbreaking stories of trauma. With impressive scholarship, Dr. Arel posits that the act of bearing witness by memorial museum workers is more than a calling; it is evidence of a fundamental belief in the possibility of a better future. Yet, the work of those who tend to the pain of others and who daily facilitate the obligations of remembrance comes at considerable personal cost, and through her analysis, Dr. Arel offers a constructive road map for how these "wounded healers" and the institutions for which they work can negotiate challenges unique to this field.
Alice M. Greenwald, president and CEO (retired), National September 11 Memorial and Museum
Stephanie Arel's continuous commitment to improving the mental health of memory practitioners is incredibly important for post-conflict communities, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. Having worked in the Balkans for over two decades, this is the first book I have had the pleasure to engage with that presents both theoretical and empirical knowledge on such important issues, which I as a memory practitioner have been dealing with in both personal and professional capacity.
Velma Šarić, founder and president, Post-Conflict Research Center