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Jaime
Kaminski
Sussex Archaeological Society
Barbican House
169 High Street
Lewes
BN8 1YE
In the past ten years much work has been undertaken on comparative approaches to the definition and study of communities of mourning in European states during and after the First World War. In the social organization of remembrance the roles of controlling institutions and self-elected secondary élites in generating a commemorative unity of purpose have been identified in regions and some localities. Micro studies need to be undertaken, however, especially in rural areas, to consider the utility of these concepts and processes in explaining the existence of consensus and conflict in war memorial debates in rural communities. In some parishes in Sussex the Anglican Church engendered social integration and moral order well into the 20th century and presumed that it would determine local responses to commemorating the fallen. In some villages without intimate relations of organized religion and social hierarchy, it encountered resistance. Expressions of division marked a dramatic moment of social dissonance in the long history of parochial governance. Some clergymen failed to acknowledge the growth of sectional interests, who sought social gains. Nonetheless, the heavenward path of the martyred soldier-saint was confirmed and wall tablets in parish churches became sites of mourning, where appropriately pre-modern symbolism conveyed a generalizing sense of the sacred. In many parishes in Sussex memorials, featuring inscribed names, spoke eloquently to the bereaved in the context of the Absent Dead. In conditions of total war local definitions of home mattered and rural parish churches brought a meaning which made bearable the enormity of loss in the immediate aftermath of war.