Abstract
Reviewed by: Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past Jean-Pierre V. M. Hérubel (bio) Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. By Eviatar Zerubavel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. xii, 180 pp. $25.00. ISBN 0-226-98152-5. It would be unthinkable to speak of history or the past without mentioning time. The very notion or concept of time is open to a myriad of possible definitions if not interpretations. It is known that different cultures conceive of the passage of events, either personal or collective, differently, adding significance according to culturally bound perceptions. Scientifically, time possesses characteristics that can be measured; therefore, it has practical qualities. But time or the perception of the past is laden with layers of interpretation. How and perhaps why the past is loaded with such interpretations and perceptions of significance are the basis of the overarching challenge Eviatar Zerubavel has undertaken. A sociologist by profession, Zerubavel explores how collective memory animates the past and its historical presentation in societies. Fluid and not strictly chronological, the past is malleable and often quite reflective of various conscious and subconscious agendas. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past is a valiant attempt to offer a conceptual framework that speaks to the very animus of human perceptions and relationships to the past. From a social scientific perspective, Zerubavel leads the reader into a world where human beings, sociologically constructing individual and collective identities, necessarily reconfigure the past. Current events and concerns are perforce reconstituted within the appropriation of the past according to memory and its mental mapping. Without truly delving into contemporary historical and historiographical scholarship specifically treating memory as opposed to history, a sociological analysis ensues. Structures, subtle and highly adaptive to social construction, assume articulated advantage when examining past events. Contemporary politics, economic and social [End Page 343] policies, diplomacy, military conflict, and so on are interwoven within these memories, which are acculturated in all societies. Did Rome fall in A.D. 476 or later, or are declarations of new beginnings, or the end of a golden age, reflective of temporal veracity, or social constructions, dependent upon colorations? Such phenomena have fallen under the purview of some historians, especially cultural historians, attempting to assess hidden meanings and symbols of behavior. Zerubavel utilizes sociological methodologies and perspectives to plumb these subterranean conditions of human temporality. Such constructions of memory are not subservient to an objective reading of past events but serve as social and psychological markers, capable of informing comportment. It is not rationally possible to assume that contemporary events are objectively framed and predicated upon historian-driven consensus. Actors fulfill their functions according to these reconstituted memories and act upon them as though they were actual and correct histories. National political or religious celebrations are predicated upon memorial interpretations that recalibrate past events and their signifying power. Thus, the founding of ALA as the true beginning of public librarianship may or may not reflect historical veracity. Long memories can exert deleterious effects upon national consciousness, so much so that conflicts between nations or the remembrance of past transgressions, either real or imagined, can gain the force of conviction and impose themselves upon the present. What lessons are there for librarianship in Zerubavel's work, and can they be effectively acknowledged and utilized? First, Zerubavel's sociological perspective can frame a profession's most cherished mythologies, recasting them as a way to further comprehend a profession's core beliefs and operational tenets. For library historians, serious examination of salient belief systems that originate in library science's prehistory to the present can emerge as they parallel practice and theory. According to Zerubavel, memory is punctuated, rarely seamlessly fluid, and open to recasting, so well exemplified in his accompanying twenty-four diagrams and figures. The historian can acknowledge memory, mapping time with the power of cultural and social signification, further articulating the past within the prescriptions of the historical profession. But historian beware—human beings create their own memories, investing signifying temporal markers of what for them is the reality of the past, and they imbue it with their existential colorations. Jean...
Published Version
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