The “Invention of Industrial Lorraine”: An Ongoing Process

Abstract

The quarter century of heavy industry dismantling in Lorraine (mines and iron and steel industry) is nearing its end. By comparing the latest event―the spectacular closure of the last coal mine―with the staging of the last casting in an iron and steel factory of Lorraine ten years earlier, the author questions the patrimonial aims of such celebrations. He shows some sequences of the cultural treatment (patrimonial, memorial) of the industrial crisis in Lorraine, from the photographic “symptoms” of a hindered memory to the highly “controlled” museum and to the industrial remains turned into historic buildings, a largely controversial fact. In this context he stresses the conflicting representations of “industrial Lorraine” as a patrimonial boundary object (abstract or concrete, that several actors can appropriate as they like). This paper is meant to contribute to a political anthropology of memory institution.

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