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COMMEMORATION PRINCIPLES AND MODELS OF WORLD WAR II MEMORIAL SITES IN THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE OF LATVIA – BELARUS BODERLAND
Abstract
Cultural landscape is the environment where the totality of elements created by both a human and nature interact. This landscape demonstrates the development of the society over time. It testifies to the symbiosis of social, economic and cultural processes. Evidence of different historical events and of social life in various epochs, cult and memorial objects co-exist in the landscape. Historically more significant and valuable environmental elements created by a human acquire the status of a cultural monument or a memorial site. Memorial sites and monuments carry not only the aesthetic but also the political load, they may perform the function of the object of political propaganda. Architectonically, memorial sites (monuments including) organize space, often becoming the center of a square or other public place. A type of a memorial is a monument – large-scale structures of artificial origin. Monuments deliver a message about those events and persons whose memory they memorialize, as well as about the socio-cultural and political contexts of their time, and the artistic style of the author. The cultural-historical significance of memorial sites located in the border-zone is to be segmented additionally, because this is the space that in different historic periods has been the place of wars, occupation, human mobility, assimilation and culture transfer. The aim of the research: to characterize the models and commemoration principles of war time burials and memorial sites in Latvia's and Belarus' borderland as the elements for depicting and forming historical memory. In order to create the empiric base of the research the field study method was applied by which the traditions of keeping memorial sites were fixed and described. For the systematization of features of memorial sites (cemetery types, monument variants, and commemoration events) the method of anthropological and semiotic analysis was employed. The analysis of social features of public perception and historical memory was done by applying the approach of sociological stratification.
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