Visualized Collective Memories: Social Representations of History in Images Found in Finnish History Textbooks

Abstract

AbstractThis study focuses on visual collective memory, a topic that has long been neglected in the social sciences and particularly in social psychological research on social representations of history. It explores the contents and meanings of images in the construction of Finnish national history. Through examination of official history writing, a better understanding is sought of how collective memory is constructed as part of history politics. The data for the present study consist of images (N = 541) included in recent textbooks on Finnish history. Barthes' three‐meaning approach is used in combination with qualitative content analysis to examine a large corpus of images. The visualized collective memory is approached from five perspectives: (i) the years of memory; (ii) the places of memory; (iii) the themes of memory; (iv) the main actors and (v) the silence of memory. The investigation shows that, in official discourse, politics, culture and war are the main contents of Finnish visual collective memory. The key actors in the narrative are politicians, especially the eighth president of Finland, Urho Kekkonen. The most important moments in time are situated in the war years 1918 and 1939, while the geographical focus is the central square in the capital, Helsinki. The result is a national history that is positive, homogeneous and exclusive. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.