Download Processes & Social Forms of Remembering & Shaping Memories

Processes & Social Forms
of Remembering & Shaping
Memories
Collective Memory
and Public
Discourse
School of
Communication, SFU,
Spring 2007
Professor:
Jan Marontate
African Drum Workshop, Healing Weekend,
Black Loyalist Heritage Site, Nova Scotia, 2006
Recall: Course Administration
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Handout # 1: Syllabus, Grading, Schedule
Course Website
Handout #2: Partial List of Readings for
Weeks 1-4
Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931
Last Day: Core concepts in
Studies of Collective Memory
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Focus on
– History of scholarly work on “collective memory”
and origins of early interests
– Terminology & related issues
– Early Interest in Collective Memory: Social Construction of
’Knowledge’ & Individual/Society
– Memory as a “social fact” & the social frameworks
of memory
What constitutes a “Site of
Memory”?
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"where [cultural] memory crystallizes and
secretes itself" (Nora 1989: 7)
places
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archives,
museums,
cathedrals,
palaces,
cemeteries, and
memorials;
concepts and practices
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commemorations,
generations,
Mottos
rituals;
objects
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inherited property
– mementos
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monuments
manuals,
emblems,
basic texts
symbols.
Non-places, Silencing:
Memories of Amish
Schoolhouse Killings
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Site where children were killed
Destruction of Amish Schoolhouse
Innovations as Rejection of
Memories of the Past or
revivals?
– Invention of new
ceremonies
– new “fashions”
(today could it be
rejection of the
burka?)
Typology of Memory Claims
(Connerton)
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1-Personal Memory
– Sources: Connections with individual’s life history
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2-Cognitive memory
– Not necessary about the past but enabled by
something we have learned to help us decipher
past, present & future
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3-Habit Memory
– Performative but not necessarily grounded in
specifiv memories
Discussion of Last week’s Film
Screening
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Rabbit-Proof Fence
– Fact-based story
Personal Memories?
 Collective Memories?
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Today: Processes & Forms
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Historical notions
– memory as “positive”
– way of preserving
knowledge & skill
 ways of life
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– sense of identity
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Assumptions about mnemonic traces
– Cognitive vs. unconscious processes
– Time Maps as ways of making connections
(Zerubavel)
“Time Maps” & the Social
Shaping of Memory Discourses
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Questions of relevance
Long and short term (Annales School notion
of longue durée)
Making connections
Delimiting discontinuities
Example: Plotlines & Narrative
Forms
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Progress narratives
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Decline narratives
(examples from Zerubavel Time Maps)
Historical “Phrasing” in
Narratives
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Legato (connected)
Staccato (breaks)
“Triggers”, memory retrieval (types of
Mnemonic devices)
– Words, facts, skills, events
– Ideals, goals, intentions,
promises
– Feelings, states-of-mind, earlier
selves etc…
– Things, odours, ex. Madeleine
(Proust, Remembrance of things
past, triggered by smell and taste
of Madeleines, a style of French
cupcake)
Varieties of Personal Memory
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What do we become aware of when we
remember and how do we do it? (David Gross Lost
Time, 2000)
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Semantic memory (words)
Propositional memories (kinds of Info.)
Implicit memories (ex. How to play an instrument)
Episodic memory (beginning & end, aura)
Other kinds
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Projects (Odysseus and faithfulness to project of returning home)
Revisionist (confessions)
Happy/sad episodes, feelings & emotions (ex. Proust)
– Amnesia (deliberate, unconscious etc..)
Biography (Personal & Collective
Dimensions)
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Biography & Autobiography as
ways of creating relationships
– Discursive process that shapes
memories
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Example: Rabbit-proof fence
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Fact-based film
Historical reconstructions
Personal?
experiences of group(s) of people
(mnemonic communities)?
- other perspectives?
Ways of mapping personal to
collective memories
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Family, ancestry &
descent
Dynasty
– Not always based on
consanguinity
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as historical contact
chains
as continuous
structures
Interconnectedness
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Genealogical Distance (consanguinity)
Ancestral depth (# of generations)
Ancestral Depth
Tracing “Families” over time
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Not just people
Can be practices,
things, events
Monogenist & Polygenist
Models of Human Descent
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Direct ancestors
Socio-mnemonic
dimensions of ancestry
Phylogeny
Divergence Modelling
Mnemonic Cutting
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Conceptualizing Discontinuities (breaks)
Association/assimilation
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Periods, epochs as mnemonic transformation of
historical continuum
History & Prehistory in
Mnemonic Traditions
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Example: Pre-contact and Post contact history of
N. American
Discussion of Fieldwork: ideas
for term work by
–1-Viewing one of each
a
documentary film
 a « fact-based » fictionalized film
Must be about past events (can be very recent past) or the
history of a group, a place etc….something that involves
sharing memories
–2-Doing « fieldwork ». Visiting an
historic site, reconstruction or public
monument or building that is intended to
commemorate or express memories of a group or event.
Vilm Clip Screening: The
Return of Martin Guerre
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Personal story of impersonation?
Framing collective memories of the past?