Page - 143 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Peter Burke | Cultural displacements and intellectual moorings 143 II A couple of years ago, when discussing losses and gains of historiographic paradigms10, you were addressing the different and mutually exclusive perspectives and scales of history. How do history and memory as expressions of levels of historical knowledge relate to the horizons of tradition? It is normal for memories to be more vivid at the level of village or family rather than the nation. Take the case of my late mother-in-law, born in Brazil of Italian parents. Her mother came from South Italy, a very catholic and conservative family, and her father from Tuscany, very antic- lerical. And so, what she remembered were the stories of the family, it is understandable, she did not read histories of migration. I believe that this is the case not only for migration history, it’s the way that people remember the past versus what they read in history books. We need the view from both sides, to understand something we need both the macro approach and the micro approach. And that was why a group of Italian historians had to invent micro history as a compensating opposition to the dominance of a macro sociological social history of peoples, most famous in German Strukturgeschichte, Wehler11 and all that. I think that both are nee- ded, unfortunately the historians who belong to the two groups often fight. How do you address the incommensurable scales of history and memory? To reconstruct the experiences of migration we need the micro approach. In collecting the stati- stics it is very interesting to know just how many people went from a particular place to another place. But then, to know what the move felt like is also important, and you have to use a totally different method to discover this. I think that migration is perceived very differently in big countries and small countries. If you live in a place like the Netherlands which is small and relatively crowded, you feel invaded. But in Brazil people are much more relaxed about migration, partly because there is actually a lot of space. And they put up monuments to migrants, which you do not get very often in Europe. Probably they are paid for by the descendants of the migrants, but they are put up in public places, a monument to the Ukrainians in Brazil, for example. There is a discussion now whether there should be a monument in London for the ship the Empire Windrush12 which brought the first West Indians to England after the Second World war. But still it has not hap- pened. And if it happens, it is likely not to be in the centre of London, they will probably put it in Vauxhall13. 10 Peter Burke. ‘Paradigms Lost: From Göttingen to Berlin’, Common Knowledge 14(2) 2008, pp. 244-257. 11 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, 1931-2014, author of Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. 5 Bände, C.H. Beck, München, 1987–2008. 12 HMT Empire Windrush has brought one of the first large groups of post-war West Indian immigrants in 1948 from Jamaica to London. British Caribbean people who came to the United Kingdom in the period after World War II are occasionally referred to as the “Windrush generation”. 13 Vauxhall is a district along Thames River in London’s ethnically mixed Lambeth borough. – In 1998 the Win- drush Consortium has placed at the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the event a memorial plaque at the Pitzhanger Manor Museum, Walpole Park, Ealing. See Danya Bazaraa. ‘Walpole Park Windrush Memorial re-dedication ceremony’, in getwestlondon, June 20, 2014, URL <http://www.getwestlondon.co.uk/news/local- news/walpole-park-windrush-memorial-re-dedication-7299135> [accessed 2016-01-16]