Collective Remembering Research Articles

Collective Narcissism: Americans Exaggerate the Role of Their Home State in Appraising U.S. History

Collective narcissism—a phenomenon in which individuals show excessively high regard for their own group—is ubiquitous in studies of small groups. We examined how Americans from the 50 U.S. states (N = 2,898) remembered U.S. history by asking them, “In terms of percentage, what do you think was your home state’s contribution to the history of the United States?” The mean state estimates ranged from 9% (Iowa) to 41% (Virginia), with the total contribution for all states equaling 907%, indicating strong collective narcissism. In comparison, ratings provided by nonresidents for states were much lower (but still high). Surprisingly, asking people questions about U.S. history before they made their judgment did not lower estimates. We argue that this ethnocentric bias is due to ego protection, selective memory retrieval processes involving the availability heuristic, and poor statistical reasoning. This study shows that biases that influence individual remembering also influence collective remembering.

‘Y el olor de la sangre manchaba el aire’: Tlatelolco 1521 and 1968 in José Emilio Pacheco’s ‘Lectura de los “Cantares Mexicanos”’

When Octavio Paz compared the Tlatelolco 1968 massacre to the conquest of the Aztec empire he created a foundation (and indeed, at times, the inspiration) for the view of the massacre as a symbol of a long-lasting internal conflict. This paper explores how the Tlatelolco 1968 poetry reflects (or appropriates) the 1521 texts. Are these texts used as extra metaphors of what happened in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas on 2 October, as links to the square’s infamous past, or is there a more enduring reason for the retelling of the story of the fall of Tenochtitlan? To answer these questions, I will examine four versions of Jose Emilio Pacheco’s poem ‘Lectura de los “Cantares Mexicanos”: Manuscrito de Tlatelolco (octubre 1968)’. The reading will be informed by the theory of habit (Bourdieu) and collective remembering and forgetting (Halbwachs and Bartlett).

Seeing Like a Settler Colonial State

In 1998, the Canadian historian and politician Michael Ignatieff wrote: “All nations depend on forgetting: on forging myths of unity and identity that allow a society to forget its founding crimes, its hidden injuries and divisions, its unhealed wounds.” Ironically, Ignatieff's home country has belied his assertion. Canada has engaged in collective remembering of one of its hidden injuries—the Indian residential schools—through a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from 2009 to 2015. Australia, too, has reckoned since the 1990s with its own unhealed wounds—the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, or, in common parlance, the “Stolen Generations.”

Organizational Fields as Mnemonic Communities

The organizational field has become an influential construct in management theory. Despite its prominence, the construct has defied precise definition. Most definitions emphasize either structural elements of fields (fields as place) or their ideational elements (fields as meaning systems). Missing from this analysis is an appreciation of how meaning is given to structural relations. The authors’ core thesis is that memory is a critically important bridging construct through which meaning is given to place. They demonstrate that organizational fields are historical accretions of shared memories that are reproduced and become objectified over time until they acquire the status of ontological reality. The term mnemonic fields is introduced to capture the understanding that fields are cognitions of network relations that are created, maintained and changed through processes of collective remembering.

Personal trajectories, collective memories: Remembering and the life-course

How do we understand the broad history to which we belong? What meaning do we give to it and what role does it have in our lives? This paper proposes to approach collective memory from the perspective of the subject, adopting a developmental perspective to explore how people build specific relations and representations of the historical past. Building on the literature on collective remembering and on life-course studies, it conceptualises memory an as oriented, culturally mediated and dialogical action with a developmental history, embodied in ‘trajectories of remembering’. This conception is applied to the life trajectory of Alain, a 44-year-old Belgian journalist, with a particular interest in the social and intersubjective dimensions of collective remembering. From this analysis, it will be concluded that people's relation to history is the product of the different positions they assume through time. The study of these successive experiences and their integration can thus shed new lights on how we relate to history and give it meaning.

Mobilising towards and imagining homelands: diaspora formation among U.K. Sudanese

ABSTRACTThis paper examines diasporic identity formation among Sudanese migrants in the U.K. From constructivist perspectives, diasporas form when mobilisations towards a ‘homeland’ initiate processes of collectively imagining that homeland. These mobilising agendas have been analysed as either emotional and/or political and correspond to processes of collective remembering, forgetting or future-making. Drawing on interviews with, and observations of, Sudan-born residents of the U.K., this paper examines diaspora formation among U.K. Sudanese. It asks what mobilising agendas unite U.K. Sudanese and what kinds of imaginative processes orient them towards their shared homeland(s). This investigation uncovers how multiple and seemingly contradictory processes of diasporic identity formation overlap within the same ‘national’ migrant community. It analyses how different mobilising agendas initiate imaginative processes of ‘past-making’ and ‘future-making’ which correspond to various types of diasporic identity. In doing so, this paper contributes to debates within constructivist approaches to diaspora formation.

Creating Memory and Negotiating Power in the Olmec Heartland

The creation of political landscapes requires the production of places made significant through acts of social remembering. The Gulf lowlands of Mexico exhibit some of the best known acts of social remembering in Mesoamerican prehistory. In this article, we engage political and practice-based frameworks for understanding the process of collective remembering in an examination of how the Olmecs and their successors inscribed their landscape with buildings, monuments, and rock art in ways that invoked the past while reframing it within the needs of their present. In particular, we explore the Olmecs’ memorialization of individuals and events in sculptures and offerings and their creation of narratives through the juxtaposition of sculptures and architecture. We then examine the creation and erasure of collective memory at the regional center of Tres Zapotes as expressed in the biographies of six monuments. We end with a comparison of “metropolitan” and hinterland carvings recorded in regional survey around Tres Zapotes. These examples situate social memory as an evolving entity molded and stretched by competing interests in an ongoing process of conflict and negotiation.

Collective Remembering in Archaeology: a Relational Approach to Ancient Maya Memory

Drawing on a case study from the Maya site of Actuncan, Belize, this article presents collective remembering as a way to conceptualize the relational construction of memory by ancient societies. Emphasizing the process of remembering allows archaeologists to investigate how memory divides as well as unites. Over time, the interactions between humans and between humans and their landscape that take place as part of everyday life produce memories of the past that are inaccurate and inconsistent between individuals. In particular, people who interact frequently, either due to geographic proximity or similarity in socioeconomic status, tend to form mnemonic communities—communities based on a similar understanding of the past—that may serve as identity markers differentiating them from other groups. At Actuncan, the community’s past was collectively remembered across times of prosperity and subjugation. First, the site was a Late and Terminal Preclassic seat of an early divine king who built a monumental ceremonial center. Second, when the site was subjugated during the Early and Late Classic periods, the ceremonial center fell out of use, but the site’s commoner households remained continuously occupied. Finally, in the Terminal Classic period, the site’s residents reestablished Actuncan as a local seat of authority following the Classic Maya collapse. The community’s use of the Preclassic monumental core during the Terminal Classic period indicates that the memory of the site’s Preclassic apogee served to legitimize their Terminal Classic authority. However, the Preclassic past was remembered in a manner consistent with contemporaneous cultural forms and the site’s recent past of subjugation.

Introduction to Webs of Memory, Frames of Power: Collective Remembering in the Archaeological Record

Over the past few decades, archaeologists have increasingly viewed collective memory as critical to the establishment and legitimation of power relations. For societies in the past and present, collective memory can be drawn on to clarify group identity, justify or subvert hierarchies, invent traditions, and define behaviors. The contributors to this special issue focus on the process of remembering, how it produced multiple archaeologically visible understandings of the past, and how these viewpoints impacted power-laden social negotiations. To better elucidate this process, this introduction situates the concept of collective remembering within recent materialist frameworks that emphasize the integration of human and nonhuman actors into webs of interaction. We suggest that by viewing collective memory from the standpoint of interactions, multiple viewpoints can be recognized. We argue in turn that accounting for the diverse actors invested in memory production provides archaeologists a means to delineate how the past becomes a site of contested values that social groups are constantly reworking to define membership, justify social hierarchy, and validate resistance.

Exhibiting the German Past: Museum, Film, and Musealization ed. by Peter M. McIsaac and Gabriele Mueller

Reviewed by: Exhibiting the German Past: Museum, Film, and Musealization ed. by Peter M. McIsaac and Gabriele Mueller Alexandra M. Hill Exhibiting the German Past: Museum, Film, and Musealization. Edited by Peter M. McIsaac and Gabriele Mueller. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Pp. 300. Cloth $60.00. ISBN 978-1442649651. This fine collection of essays is built on the premise that museums and films share common strategies and that "both engage in processes of representation, interpretation, and canonization that … are necessary to render ephemeral forms of social memory into more durable symbols and practices, thus shaping collective remembering and contributing to the construction of institutionalized top-down memory and historical master narratives" (5). Of primary concern to both museums and films are questions of authenticity, the tension between education and entertainment, and modes of seeing. The first two chapters focus in particular on modes of seeing. Simon Ward applies his theory of the "urban museal gaze" to film and finds examples specifically in Wim Wenders's Himmel über Berlin (1987). Mark W. Rectanus argues that "civic seeing" can help visitors understand the very different intentions and strategies between two museums: the BMW Welt complex including the BMW Museum, and the Jewish Museum Munich, specifically the installation "Speaking Germany" by Sharone Lifschitz. These two articles, both rich with theory, serve as an introduction to the many case studies that follow. The next pair of very engaging articles focuses on film. In her excellent article, Alice Kuzniar closely examines the documentary Unser täglich Brot (2005), which documents various aspects of European factory farming. While Kuzniar finds that the film "participates in a musealization to the extent that it documents … what would otherwise remain invisible and unarchived" (72–73), she wonders whether the film techniques (characterized predominantly by long shots and the absence of narration) tacitly condone the "technologization at work in this industry" (65). Catriona Firth compares the book Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (1985) by Stefan Aust and the eponymously named film by Uli Edel and Bernd Eichinger, considering [End Page 701] the consequences of representing history through a "testimonial mode" (in the case of the book) versus an "experiential mode" (in the case of the film). The next articles by Anne Winkler and Jonathan Bach engage with museums of East German everyday life. Winkler, a sociologist, is especially interested in the amateur museums that are privately funded, thereby escaping aspects of museum tradition (e.g., didactic panels) and the official policy of understanding the East German past within the framework of life under dictatorship. Bach's more theoretical article, which focuses on the authenticity and tactility of objects in museums of GDR Alltagskultur, is less interested in distinguishing among types of such museums—a difference that I would argue is still quite important. The following three articles do not limit themselves to one type of media but consider how memory of the National Socialist past is remediated using a variety of genres and techniques. Stephan Jaeger looks at popular representations of World War II in museum exhibits and documentary/docudrama films. Annika Orich and Florentine Strzelczyk's very well-researched and contextualized article traces the difficulty in discussing the National Socialist film Jud Süß (1940) in a museum exhibit, a documentary, and a feature film. Kathryn M. Floyd considers questions of authorship and narration by examining exhibition photographs, specifically those of the Nazi-era exhibit Entartete Kunst taken by photographer Arthur Grimm, and ties exhibition photography to still photography taken on the set of films. Christine Sprengler considers Harun Farocki's 1995 installation Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik in elf Jahrzehnten, in conversation with the Lumière brothers' film Workers Leaving the Factory (1895) and Farocki's one-screen installation by the same name from 1996. This stand-alone article (i.e., not grouped with others in the volume) nonetheless engages with many of the red threads that link all the articles together: archiving (here, via film), the creation of space for the viewer to enter, the intersection of film and museums, and the didactic function of museum exhibits. The final two essays in the book bring the perspectives of museum curators to the chorus—a wise choice that helps...

Traces of the Past: Raising the Allumettières (Matchworkers) in Sites of Collective Remembering

Engaging with historical events, people and places encourages students to envision history as a dynamic process where individual, group, and national identities are reproduced. These types of educational interventions can foster recognition that history—both past events and our records about them—result from a process of authorship. The recent surge of interest amongst history educators and within recent publications of provincial curricula that focus on historical thinking concepts—historical significance, primary source evidence, continuity and change, cause and consequence, historical perspectives, and the ethical dimension of historical interpretations—encourages educators to consider ways to integrate these concepts within their teaching practice. Our case study of the narrative account of the allumettières (matchworkers) of Hull, Quebec is an example of one type of classroom inquiry into local places of remembering that could be taken up in the context of recent developments in, and aspirations for, the history curriculum. Our project invites readers to engage in the historical process of understanding the past within contemporary classrooms by drawing upon a range of interdisciplinary approaches including web-based exhibits and artefacts, visits to historic sites, published accounts and dramatic representations to meet these curriculum expectations.

Contesting the Collective Memory of Nazism in Norway: The Case of Kjartan Fløgstad’s Novel Grense Jakobselv (2009)

This article conceptualizes Kjartan Fløgstad’s novel _Grense Jakobselv_ as a literary site in the public process of collective remembering. Fløgstad’s stated intention for this novel was to challenge the received Norwegian memory of Nazism as an ‘unrefined’ mass phenomenon and to emphasize instead its basis in the cultured and educated elite. Drawing on James W. Wertsch’s work on the term ‘collective memory’ in the humanities and social sciences, the article explains the novel’s memory project and its contemporary political significance. After critically examining the novel’s portrayal of a connection between Nazism and bourgeois humanist culture, I look into aspects of its controversial reception. While acknowledging the flaws identified by some critics, I propose that Fløgstad’s ultimate aim is to promote a more self-critical use of political memory and history in the public sphere.

Contesting conservation-planning: insights from Ireland

In most European countries, the 20th Century witnessed a growing interest in urban conservation as both a social movement and public policy domain, and by the 1960s urban conservation had emerged as a key planning and urban policy goal and a central feature of how cities positioned themselves within the globalised economy. However, where it evolves in contentious political contexts, urban conservation can be framed by competing priorities reflecting collective remembering, cultural politics and identities intertwined with the symbolic representation of the built environment. Ireland provides a unique lens to examine these themes in a western European context. Ireland is the only western European country to experience colonial domination. In relation to built heritage, Ireland’s urban centres have their historical roots in successive waves of colonial settlement, and buildings within these urban centres were inevitably perceived as tools of colonial oppression, representing the colonial state and power and domination of colonial capital interests. The built environment was also shaped by the tastes and preferences of the colonial elite, particularly in relation to prominent residences in the urban landscape, and outside of the main urban centres, landlord estates represented domination of landownership and agricultural production, manifested in large estate houses (referred to as the ‘big house’) and remodelled rural villages. This context provides an important backdrop to the evolution of conservation policy and practice in Ireland and to how representations of heritage have been continually (re)shaped in the urban development process. The aim of this paper is to chart the shifting representations of built heritage in Ireland, and their relevance in the emergence of conservation and heritage policy, set in the context of broader social, political and economic change over time. This is achieved, firstly, by a review of secondary source material to identify key events, eras and trends. Discourses of heritage are then examined in debates of the Oireachtas (the Irish legislature), which provide a consistent record of national heritage debates in the Irish state. This identifies tensions around the emergence of built heritage policy in a historic environment largely associated with colonial power and identity, and shifts in how the historic built environment was represented in different eras. These representations range from outright antipathy, towards a more positive revalorisation of heritage, and a recent awakening amongst policymakers to the potential of heritage as a driver of urban regeneration. We then relate these shifting discourses to policy evolution, particularly the late adoption of comprehensive legislative framework for conservation (in 1999) and the important influence of international charters rather than bottom-up or national priorities in policy agenda-setting. Finally, conclusions are developed to identify wider lessons from the production of urban conservation priorities in the context of contested heritage.

Waging peace: a new generation of Ixiles confronts the debts of war in Guatemala

ABSTRACTThis article describes the impunity embedded in the Guatemalan peace process after the genocide that shapes how Ixiles approach the debts (incurred by complicity, death and kinship) of war, as illustrated by their response to the 2013 trial of Efraín Ríos Montt. The trial preceded a precipitous 2015 political crisis over corruption within the government of Otto Pérez Molina, a former army general and intelligence chief for Ríos Montt. The question that haunts the trial and these more recent marches for justice, in a country where citizens have long been subject to a life of democratic dictatorship, is how men like Pérez Molina and Ríos Montt maintain and grow their power even while their names are synonymous with murder, torture and clandestine graves. By examining the assumptions made by those in authority as they determine forgiveness, punishment, amnesty and reparations, I show how wartime debts act through generations. In the mixed reaction, popularly called pensamientos divididos, ‘divided thoughts’ or aq’olaj iyol yansa’m, of young Ixiles to the Ríos Montt trial, I illustrate a disjuncture that occurs when radically different forms of care intersect in the area most impacted by the genocide. Through fifteen years of ethnographic engagement, I trace the story of one Ixil family and their reactions to the trial to show how humanitarian efforts to confront war crimes are not simply restorative. While the trial opens the possibility for a collective remembering of violence and the (re)ordering of social ethos, in the Ixil area it also produces a moral economy of violence.

"Forward and Not Forgetting" - How do Workers' Memories Impact International Solidarity?

<p>Collective remembering in multinational corporations is a field at the intersection of social memory studies and organisational science that has so far been widely neglected within the academic community. Drawing on empirical findings, this article analyses the impact of the organisational memories of South African workers’ representatives in processes of cross-border coordination. What is found is that strong ties of international solidarity, dating from the 1970s and 1980s, serve as an interpretative background against which today’s situation (which is constituted through different frameworks such as the end of apartheid and economic globalisation) is evaluated critically.</p>

Modern apocrypha as an example of cultural memory “in action”

The aim of this paper is to analyze the role modern apocrypha play in the processes of collective remembering. From the perspective of cultural studies the modern apocrypha can be seen not only as literary or religious texts but also as an important element of cultural autocommunication. And if we understand autocommunication as a crucial mechanism of cultural memory, we can describe intertextuality (which is a form of cultural autocommunication) as an autoimmune technique of preventing the basic cultural meanings from the oblivion. The canon is a basic tool of collective memory in the so called ‘literate cultures’ or ‘Cultures of the Book’. That is the reason why the apocrypha, which deal with canonical contents, build the unique set of texts playing an essential role in protecting the source myth and tradition from the ‘semiotic death’.

Collard v Western Australia: Stolen Generations victims fail to achieve justice

In December 2013, the Supreme Court of Western Australia decided Collard v Western Australia, the test case for families affected by the Stolen Generations policies in Western Australia. The Collards, a Noongar family, had their nine children removed from them by the government between 1958 and 1961. They alleged breaches of fiduciary duties against the state for this removal and the subsequent treatment of the children. The action was dismissed entirely. The court found that the children were not removed pursuant to a policy of assimilation. Instead, the judgment invites the view that the Collards were neglectful parents who had their vulnerable children taken by a government that sought only to protect the children. This article outlines the main legal findings and explores how certain findings of the court have an effect upon reconciliation, the collective remembering of the Stolen Generations policies, and the healing of the Collard family. The article discusses the ‘fiction of consent’ in Indigenous child removal, the disproportionate impact of child welfare policies on Indigenous families, and the ‘defence of a colonialist history’ applied by the courts.

Collective remembering of organizations

Purpose – How organizations’ pasts are presented to the public is crucial, because this presentation shapes corporate reputations. Increasingly, various actors contribute to the public remembering of organizations with new information and communication technologies (ICTs). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as a global memory place, where the pasts of organizations are communicatively co-constructed by actors of a loosely connected community. Design/methodology/approach – The authors analyze 1,459 edits of Wikipedia pages of ten organizations from various industries. Quantitative content analysis detects Wikipedia edits for their reputational relevance and reference to formal sources, such as corporate communication or newspapers. Furthermore, the authors investigate to which degree current corporate communication in form of 177 press releases has an influence on the remembering process in Wikipedia. Findings – The analysis shows how the continuous construction of collective memories bridges past formal corporate communication, news media, and other sources with the present, exposing, and suppressing relevant information concerning corporate reputation for large audiences. The analysis of press releases shows that current frames provided by corporate communication finds only little resonance in the ongoing remembering processes in Wikipedia. Originality/value – Conventional approaches toward remembering of organizations embrace an organization centric view, whereby corporate communication strategically leverages organizational pasts. This paper contributes to the understanding of the ongoing, networked, and collective co-construction of organizational pasts by various authors through ICTs.

Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire by Isabel Torres (review)

TORRES, ISABEL. Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire. Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2013. xv + 228 pp.In her book Isabel Torres sets out to study Spanish Golden Age love poetry in relation to the historical and social pressures found in the "imperial 'home' space" (ix). Torres takes as a starting point the "nagging" question "What has love got to do with it?" However, she soon reformulates it, discarding either a strictly biographical or, on the other hand, purely formal answer to the question. Instead, the author prefers to inquire "what love, as a complex and contestatory signifier, actually does" (xii). The context is an imperial Spain in which the idealism and anxiety of an emerging and yet threatened national self-consciousness are embedded in the coordinates of desire, temporality, and loss represented in love poetry.The section on Garcilaso de la Vega focuses on the tension made patent between a productive imitation of the Petrarchan model-which transforms and nourishes the work-and a "project of lyric self-creation" that simultaneously needs to move beyond "imitative/emulative" poetics (5). This terrain has been previously covered by Anne J. Cruz and Ignacio Navarrete, yet Torres brings admirable nuance to the analysis. In Chapter 1, "Garcilaso: Transfiguration and Transvaluation," the author delves into the synthesis of dialectical opposites (immediacy/mediation, unity/loss, rest/motion, origin/originality, memory/imagination) without forcing through her reading an erasure of the residues of conflict that remain and may be recalled within any given opposition. For example, in her reading of Sonnet XI Torres notes how the reader is faced with what seems to be "an objective site of aesthetic contemplation" that can nonetheless only be accessed through "immersion in a subjective imagination that is rendered in deceptively material terms" (29). The summing statement for the analysis of Eclogue III follows the same logic: "The anxieties expressed in the text about the vulnerability of the voice, and of the written artifact itself, as it takes shape and is shaped in time, are integral to Garcilaso's self-conscious poetics. But in Eclogue III such concerns are balanced by a sophisticated self-elaboration that is enabled and sustained through appropriation, and by the sheer rhetorical force of a sensed infinity that promises infinite renewal" (34).Chapter 2, "Garcilaso de la Vega: luz de nuestra nacion?," further explores the manifest-and less clearly resolved-tensions in the poet's more patently political poems (or segments thereof), specifically the imbalance in the arms and letters dichotomy. Once more, critics such as Cruz provide a precedent that Torres develops with considerable finesse. Elegy II demonstrates an encounter between the aesthetic distance provided by letters and the "anguished questioning of a subject voice" which cannot escape the tragedy caused by imperial arms (38). Sonnet XXXIII, with its lyrical movement from the position of the conqueror to the position of the conquered, displays a transfer also between the historical past, literature's role in the creation of a collective remembering and forgetting, and a poetsoldier's intimate experience, all together revealing how "the new literary political orders he proclaims are marked very deliberatively with the anxieties of the old" (43). Eclogue II receives close attention with the aim of bridging the apparent incongruity in the shift between the pastoral scene and the historical account of the House of Alba. In this section Torres identifies the consistency throughout of "water/mirror poetics" (59), which play out inherent tensions between reality and illusion, past and present, art and time (as found in ekphrasis), and integration and disintegration both at the level of the self (think Albanio and Nemoroso) and in relation to an emergent national consciousness. Against readings that would interpret Garcilaso's political poetry as harmonizing the arms and letters, and would offer the poet as a model "luz de la nacion," Torres highlights the paradox of the self as haunted by an "indeterminate human condition" navigating imperial ideology as reflected in its literary reconstructions, revealing how the success of the individual and the community often depends on the sacrifice of one for the other (59). …

A Walking Memory: State-Designed Processions as a Tool of Collective Remembering in Late Medieval and Early Modern Dubrovnik

The state authorities of late medieval and early modern Dubrovnik used processions as a cultural tool to create a collective remembrance of traumatic historical experience, such as conspiracy, pestilence, or earthquake. Until the sixteenth century, the commemoration was amalgamated with the saint’s cult (“watermark” model), while in the last two centuries of the Republic the link to an underlying historical event became explicit. This shift may be accounted by the growing dominance of the secular over ecclesiastical authorities, and the increasing ambition of the state to manage its self-representation.