«Complex Heritage» in Family Narratives: Policies and Practices of Reconfiguring the Past

Abstract. Research on “difficult pasts” and “uncomfortable pasts” tends to characterize a collective situation, while interest in family histories and autobiographical narratives addresses individual experiences in context and in interaction with grand narratives and national politics of memory. In the article, I propose to focus on the author’s concept of “complex heritage”/ “complex inheritance”, by which I mean memory/information about
ancestors “heroes” and “antiheroes” (in different country and historical contexts these may be different categories), expressed narratively and fraught with conflict. Based on the analysis of cases from different countries, as well as the concept of “affinities” by J. Mason and the author’s concept of “intangible family heritage”, I attempt to answer a number of questions related to the origin, dynamics and features of the functioning of “complexity” in family narratives. At the end of the article, I make the following conclusion: “complex” is a characteristic, subjectively felt by descendants who are interested in and engaged in their family history, of the totality of events and characters of family narratives, dynamically
problematized in the context and depending on current metanarratives and national policies of memory; it includes two interconnected aspects — compound (“complex” as multi-components) and complexity (“complex” as a problem associated with the idea of inconvenience and exclusion from the current national narrative). The compound itself (probably characteristic of most family narratives around the world) may not pose a
problem as long as it is not embedded or adjusted to the official discourse of memory that attempts to mobilize a group or community within a national collective. This happens due to transborder and transnationality, characteristic of many family stories, which turn out to be wider than state, social, ethnic, religious and other borders.

Keywords: memory studies, family narratives, politics of memory, discourses of memory, “complex heritage”, kinship, ancestors, descendants.