Int. J. Middle East Stud. 45 (2013), 589–601 doi:10.1017/S002074381300055X REVIEW ARTICLE Susan Slyomovics MEMORY STUDIES: LEBANON AND ISRAEL/PALESTINE EFRAT BEN-ZE’EV, Remembering Palestine in 1948: Beyond National Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). ROCHELLE DAVIS, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010). CRAIG LARKIN, Memory and Conflict in Lebanon: Remembering and Forgetting the Past (New York: Routledge, 2012). ASEEL SAWALHA, Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2011). YFAAT WEISS, A Confiscated Memory: Wadi Salib and Haifa’s Lost Heritage (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Why are humans fated to remember and forget? For Plato, it is because we are wounded by our memory of a previous existence, namely the Platonic “realm of ideas,” to which we forever long to return. In the social sciences, especially history and anthropology, burgeoning cross-disciplinary methodologies and approaches have emerged to study the ways in which humanity remembers and forgets; “cultural memory studies” and the “anthropology of memory” constitute a contemporary realm of ideas concerned with discursive contestations over memory and history. 1 The books under review here, all of which relate to the study of collective memory in Lebanon or Israel/Palestine, have recourse to French theories, despite time lags due to delayed English translation. Foun- dational writers of a field loosely grouped under the rubric “memory studies” include French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, whose Les cadres sociaux de la m´ emoire (1925) and posthumously published La m´ emoire collective (1950) both appeared in English in 1980, under confusingly similar titles. 2 The English-language publication of Halbwachs’ corpus on the individual in relation to “collective memory” coincidentally corresponded with the American Psychiatric Association’s 1980 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition, in which categories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) extended collective memory into collective traumatic memory, through the notion that “Post-traumatic disorder is fundamentally a disorder of memory.” 3 Another seminal thinker in this field is Pierre Nora, especially the multivolume, multiauthored essays produced under his direction entitled Les Lieux de m´ emoire, which appeared in French between 1984 and 1992. 4 Susan Slyomovics is a Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Calif.; email: ssly@anthro.ucla.edu © Cambridge University Press 2013 0020-7438/13 $15.00