Du traitement de l'objet "commémoration" et de quelques-uns de ses effets. Ou de la transmission à l'âge démocratique. Post-scriptum au texte de Patrick Garcia (Lyon- France)

The commemoration of the French Revolution called the attention of researchers to the importance of studying commemorative gestures. Thus commemoration became an "object" of research. This raises many theoretical and methodological problems. Commemoration sets up a special temporality: the living evoke the past and make reference to it, more or less outlining the future, too. This carries some disciplinary problems: historians deal with a past time, sociologists and political scientists with a present time while anthropologists deal with an eternal, ritual time which is outside historical time. These various times must be brought together somehow. However, it is difficult to reconcile strategic and symbolic thinking and there is also the "duty" of commemoration versus systematic doubt and the irony linked to it. The paper suggests that we interpret commemoration gestures in the memory-creating practice of the age of democracy. Commemoration becomes part of museology and patrimonialisation.

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