The Performance of Memory--

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The Performance of Memory--

• Commemorative Practices, Bodily Memory, Public
  Events and Public Memorials
• Professor
• Jan Marontate

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Last Day Time Maps the Social Shaping of
Memory Discourses

• Questions of relevance
• Long and short term
• making connections
• identifiying discontinuities
• Marking  starts  and  finishes 

Celebration of Canadian citizenship
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Origins, Collective Memory Priority Claims

• Mnemonic decapitation (Zerubavel)

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Mnemonic Communities time

• Not just people
• Can be practices, things (like media), events
• Example of divergence model

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Shaping, Association,assimilation

• Periods, epochs as mnemonic transformation of
  historical continuum
• Separate groupings over same time (and sometimes
  same places)

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Today

• Film screening part of Spike Lees When the
  levees broke
• Discussion of ideas for projects
• Short lecture ---Guest Speaker (cancelled) was
  Kelly Stewart, curator of a new exhibition at the
  New Westminster Museum and Archives on historic
  Chinese-Canadian communities
• Image of railway workers

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Finding Topics Conducting Research for Short
Reports

• Seek other information on the subject
  represented.
• facts, opinions
• Critically analyze the fit between the
  depiction and documentation about the subject
  represented.
• What does the depiction include and what is left
  out?
• Connections between current/past?
• What factors may have influenced the
  representation?
• Be sure to discuss both the object of remembrance
  and the depiction of it in context.

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Site of Memory Social Frameworks of Memory?

• "where cultural memory crystallizes and
  secretes itself" (Nora 1989 7)
• Places
• Concepts practices
• Objects

Doorway of No Return. Gorée Island. Sénégal.
House of Slaves
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places

• archives,
• museums,
• cathedrals,
• palaces,
• cemeteries, and
• memorials

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concepts and practices

• commemorations,
• generations,
• Mottos
• rituals

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objects

• inherited property
• mementos
• monuments
• manuals,
• emblems,
• basic texts
• symbols.

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Recall Non-places, Silencing

• Memories of Amish Schoolhouse Killings
• Site where children were killed
• Destruction of Amish Schoolhouse
• Handouts critics review new exhibitions
•   Vancouver Flashback  (Street scenes from the
  recent past)

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How does the past shape the present future?

• Schudson Lives, Laws Language. Commemorative
  vs. non-commemorative forms of effective public
  memory
• Personally (lives, lived experience, oral
  history)
• Socially (laws, institutions, codes of ethics
  etc.)
• Culturally (language, symbolic systems)

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The person as a carrier of public memory

• 1. Manifestations personal careers and life
  histories as devices for accessing tracking
  changes
• Processes
• Prompting as context
• Disappearance of older generations
• familiarity of new generations with new
  paradigms rather than conversion
• Commitments to old paradigms vs. revisionism

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Lessons Learned Observing change in
Collective memory

• personal experience as guide (avoidance)
• Example Change in language has potential to
  alter meaning
• Observation of shifts in collective
  representations through changes in language
• Importance of temporal, spatial, group
  affiliations of individual testimonies as
  contexts

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Dynamics of Collective memory (Schudson)

• Pre-emptive Metaphors Devices (avoidance
  technique), ex. Trauma designations like
  holocaust, genocide
• Demonstration effects (interaction of personal
  experience experience of others)
• Ex. Nazis anti-racism
• Accidents as models for risk avoidance (ex.
  tsunami victims)
• Coordinative, conjunctive serial effects (ex.
  the right to vote working class white men in
  different places)
• Cultures of memory (diverse) (ex. Different uses
  of collective identity in different national
  contexts, ex. Post WWII fascist countries,
  attitudes towards elders as carriers of public
  memory, etc.)

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Cultures of collective memory (Olick)

• Different ontological orders, different
  epistemological methodological implications
• Collective memory as
• Aggregated individual recollections?
• Official commemorations (or silencing)?
• Constitutive features of shared identity?

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Collected Memory

• based on individualistic principles (aggregated
  individual memories of members of a croup)
• Assume only individuals remembers
• Different rememberers may be valued differently
• Publicly available symbols
• Methods assign same values to all rememberers
  OR redistributively (ex. To include previously
  disenfranchised)

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Advantages of Individualist approaches
(Collected Memory)

• Potential to reduce political bias embedded in
  existing representations of collective memory by
  recognizing many different kinds of collective
  memory in different places in society

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Posture of Neutrality?

• Should we
• assume a collective memory or identity exists?
• assume a collectivity exists that shares a
  memory?
• Consider ideology, will?
• ex. Survey of Germans about their identity
  effects on politics
• Ex. I am Canadian beer commercial

A screen capture of Joe Canadian from an I am
Canadian commercial, with the maple leaf of the
Canadian flag projected on the background
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Collective Memory (vs. collected)

• Patterns of socialization not reducible to
  individual psycho-social processes?
• groups provide conditions and distinctions
  through which particular events are defined as
  consequential
• Symbols, institutions, technologies etc.
  considered somewhat autonomous
• Memory performed through language, narrative,
  dialogue, genres, shared practices
• Collective memory AS communication

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Social Museum of Harvard Exhibition Review and
Cultural Heritage Institutions as Contexts

• Importance of contextualizing images
• Handout  Categorized, Compared Displayed
  Social Ills as Museum Specimens

Workers in Pittsburgh, photographed by Lewis
Hine, on view in Classified Documents, at
Harvard.