Abstract
The focus on the practice of remembering has been highly productive for memory studies, but it creates difficulties in understanding personal commitment to particular versions of the past. Autobiographical memories of difficult and distressing past episodes – or ‘vital memories’ – require extensive and ongoing management. We describe the issues that arise when vital memories are expressed across a range of specific interactional contexts. Seven themes – autobiography, agency, forgetting, ethics, affect, space and institutional practices – are discussed. Each theme draws out a particular facet of the relationship between the content and contexts of vital memories and demonstrates that while vital memories frame problematic experiences, they remain essential for those who express them.
Highlights
One of the great accomplishments of the highly varied traditions and bodies of work brought together within memory studies has been to recognise that the enormous significance of the forms and modalities through which remembering
If we leave aside differences over whether autobiographical remembering is best considered as a purely personal or a distributed activity, there is little here that diverges from what feminist approaches, such as Janice Haaken (1998) and Sue Campbell (2003), would say about remembering childhood sexual abuse (CSA)
Our aim in this paper has been to explore the specific relationships between vital memories, as a subset of autobiographical memory, and a range of particular interactional contexts
Summary
One of the great accomplishments of the highly varied traditions and bodies of work brought together within memory studies has been to recognise that the enormous significance of the forms and modalities through which remembering. Remembering episodes of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) (see Haaken and Reavey, 2009), or of being caught up in violent events such the 2005 London Bombings (see Allen and Brown, 2011) Autobiographical memories of this nature do not tend to waver in terms of their emotional power or personal significance. This is particular acute in Margalit’s work, who sees ethical questions, such as duties of care, as only relevant to the ‘thick relations’ constituted by families or communities, whilst moral obligations around what is right and wrong, are abstractions that apply to the ‘thin relations’ of nationhood or common humanity This makes it difficult to apply evaluative criterion within a community of memory, since by Margalit’s definition the presence of caring in thick relations means that they cannot be immoral (since caring is an unalloyed good). We can begin to think that remembering must follow these topological planes of connection which diverge considerably from our usual understanding of (Euclidean) space and (chronological) time
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