Memoriography as a Theo-Ethical Methodology for Working with Collective Memories of the Marginalized

This paper offers ‘memoriography’ as a theo-ethical methodology for working with collective memories of marginalized people. Conducting ethnographic and qualitative research that draws on people’s stories and memories involves practical and philosophical challenges, particularly when these stories are shaped by violence and trauma. This paper critically examines these methodological challenges for theology, ethics, and broader religious studies. On a philosophical level, this paper challenges positivist and colonial assumptions that have limited our capacity to hold and wrestle with collective memory, by conceptualizing memoriography within the post-positivist research paradigm and with hauntological insights. On a practical level, memoriography offers three major hermeneutical suggestions for engaging memories of the marginalized: (1) the necessity of holding multiple temporalities, (2) the significance of attending to paradox and aesthetics in resistance to essentialism, and (3) the importance of understanding the networked nature of collective memory and its implications for interpretation. Through this two-fold analysis, memoriography not only guides us to fully embrace sites of ambiguity and tensions of collective memory, but also calls for us to advocate for conditions that allow these memories to be heard across various sites of scholar-activism.