Lorenzo Migliorati

The sociological analysis of the commemorative practices represents nowadays a well defined branch of research into the wide and many sided fragmented area of memory studies. Much of the work conducted in this field has followed the path traced by Emile Durkheim theory. Nevertheless, in the course of the last two decades, scholars have tried to move away from the Durkheimian orthodoxy in order to find more appropriate ways to account for the complex variety of the commemorative universes. The most valuable efforts conducted in this direction are represented by the concept of multivocal commemoration elaborated by R. Wagner-Pacifici and B. Schwartz, and by the concept of fragmented commemoration, developed by V. Vinitzky-Seroussi. Drawing on some empirical stimuli provided by an on-going research on the commemoration of the partisan victims of a massacre perpetrated in the village of Cornalba (northern Italy) by a fascist militia, our paper tries to show that multivocal and fragmented types of commemoration don’t fulfill the typology. In our opinion there is still room for another kind of commemorative rite that we would define conflicting commemoration. That is a specific kind of ritual that witness the emergence, during its own execution, of two or more conflicting representations of the same past that it tries to commemorate. In describing this kind of commemoration, we argue that it is more likely to show up in societies marked by pasts of deep social divisions, where a full reconciliation is still not accomplished. Key-words: memory, difficult pasts, commemoration practices, italian resistance, reconciliation.