Community Voices and ‘Community Scripts’

Abstract

Community Voices and ‘Community Scripts’1 Carmen Mangion As a primary source, oral history testimonies have a chequered twentiethcentury history. The resurgence of oral history as a methodology in the 1960s was received with consternation by some historians, who saw it, as Eric Hobsbawm did, as a ‘remarkably slippery medium for preserving facts’.2 In the 1960s and 1970s, despite those who discounted the empirical value of oral history, it became a wellspring of ‘facts’, especially for social historians investigating marginalised groups.3 Scholars of cultural studies from the 1980s embraced and valued oral history for its subjectivity. Luisa Passerini argued that oral history narratives were more than facts, they were cultural constructs (‘expression and representation of culture’) that revealed ‘dimensions of memory, ideology and subconscious desires’.4 Another doyen of oral history, Alessandro Portelli, added: ‘Errors, inventions, and myths lead us through and beyond facts to their meanings’.5 This reframing of oral history encouraged the development of the burgeoning field of memory studies, which bolstered the theorisation of oral history. Part of this theorisation included debates on the connections between individual and collective memory, which is the subject matter of this article. These links are examined to ask whether individual recollections of women religious6 fit into an (often unconscious) cultural script determined by the social norms, values and practices of religious life. If they do, than this suggests individual memories are pre-determined and constructed into grand narratives that are subsumed into collective memory.7 Cultural historian Anna Green suggests otherwise: that there is room for the ‘consciously reflective individual, or for the role of experience in changing the ways in which individuals view the world’.8 What better way to evaluate the question of cultural scripts than using the oral testimony of religious sisters?9 This short piece explores the subjectivities of Catholic women religious (their sense of themselves which includes their experiences, human inter-relationships and emotional states), Carmen Mangion Studies • volume 107 • number 427 302 as they frame their life-stories during the course of an interview (or series of interviews).10 One would expect, in communities of women who were socialised together, typically from youth to old age, a common narrative shaping their personal accounts of religious life. These narratives would then reflect in part the collective memory and corporate identity of the religious institute to which they belong. This article begins with a brief discussion of individual and collective memory, corporate identity and cultural scripts, before investigating three potential cultural script narratives. It concludes by arguing that collective memory does shape individual recollections but, given the disruptions to religious life many women religious experienced, personal stories do not always depend on a shared history. Collective memory and corporate identity The concepts of collective memory and corporate identity are important for understanding how religious life operates, as they allow us to connect communities of women religious to their historical traditions, customs and myths. They are also useful for understanding how cultural scripts are created. Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs employed the term ‘collective memory’ to identify how an individual used their social and cultural surroundings to link their individual memories with that of the larger community. He argued that ‘The individual calls recollection to mind by relying on the frameworks of social memory’.11 For much of the twentieth century, the intricate layering of frameworks of religious life included a two-part formation period, first as a postulant, then as a novice, with each stage punctuated by very specific milestones in the form of ceremonies and vows. Throughout this educative process, women were absorbing the history of the religious institute, learning community customs and studying the Rule and constitutions which guided their governance, prayer, work and even physical movements. Once a sister was professed and entered her community, collective memories were transmitted from sister to sister in order to create a cohesive message and identity.12 There was a consistent and repetitive emphasis on the Rule and constitutions, which was linked to the identity of a religious institute, and was used to build community and influence the self-perception of the community. Life for all women religious was structured by the horarium, which timetabled waking, praying...