Re-Collecting Family. A Lotmanian Reading on Transgenerational Memory in Post-Conflict Contexts

Although it is often labelled as too sociological a topic to be of inter- est to semioticians, the meaning redistribution of the past at trans- generational and familial level is, in my view, a prolific arena for semiotic research on cultural memory1. It enables a reflection both on the dynamics of cultural preservation – i.e., the ability of a group to adopt or avoid certain narratives in order to maintain its lon- gevity (Lotman, Uspenskij [1971] 1975) – and on its deconstruction, enacted by subsequent generations that interpret and resemantise the past according to their hic et nunc positionality and value sys- tem. Bearing in mind research conducted on groups and individuals who construct their own posterity (Lorusso 2020) and who receive the past as inheritance (Pezzano 2020), on this occasion, I want to investigate the pragmatic attitude of those who came after a given past and who are entitled to convert its passive transmission into a process of active translation.