Theories continued

1
Theories (continued)
origin
prehistory
history
2
Presentation Dates for First Short Report
3
Presentation Dates for Second Short Report
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Readings

• Zelizer, Barbie. Finding aids to the past
  bearing personal witness to traumatic public
  events Media Culture and Society 2002 24 697
• Schudson, Michael. Lives, Laws and Language
  Commemorative versus Non-Commemorative Forms of
  Effective Public Memory, The Communication
  Review, Vol 21(1) pp. 3-17.

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Todays Class

• student presentations
• Collected Personal Memories vs. Collective Memory

6
Time Frames in Collective Memory Studies

• Assumptions about mnemonic traces
• Cognitive vs. unconscious processes
• History vs. representations of the past
• mental structures

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931
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Processes Forms for Framing Memory in time

• Sociomental topography of how communities
  remember the past
• Unconventional approach to links between
  conventional ideas of history
  public/collecctive memory
• mnemonic traditions
• recalling the past together synchronizing
  attention on particular moments
• social norms of remembering
• Mnemonic transitivity (allows memory to pass from
  one person to another even when there is no
  directe contact)

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Recall 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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Next Topic Varieties of Personal Memory
Collected vs. Collective Memory

• What do we become aware of when we remember and
  how do we do it? (David Gross Lost Time, 2000)
• Semantic memory (words)
• Propositional memories (kinds of Info.)
• Implicit memories (ex. How to play an instrument)
• Episodic memory (beginning end, aura)
• Other kinds
• Projects (Odysseus and faithfulness to project of
  returning home)
• Revisionist (confessions)
• Happy/sad episodes, feelings emotions (ex.
  Proust)
• Amnesia (deliberate, unconscious etc..)

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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
• Bearing Witness (Zelizer)

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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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Next Class (October 10) will be shorter than
usual

• Guest Lectures
• Tracey Zhang
• Tibetan Refugees and the Representation of the
  Past in Marketing Tibetan Carpets--political
  economy of collective memory
• Daniel Ahadi
• Western Media Representations of Muslims