Construction Of Collective Memory Research Articles

Recounting a difficult past: a South African accounting firm's “experiences in transformation”

This article examines the role of oral history in the social construction of collective memory and forgetting. The article presents a case study of a South African public accounting firm's attempt to document the history of race relations within the firm through the publication of a collection of oral histories. The research draws from the sociology of memory and recent scholarship on individual and collective memory in South Africa to analyze the firm's account of its experiences in making the transition from Apartheid to a multiracial democracy. The analysis finds that the firm's portrayal of its history reflects a narrative of reconciliation and redemption that minimizes the deep social and economic divisions that characterize South Africa's past, their relevance to accounting history, and the continuing salience of race to employment in public accounting.

A Study on the Social Construction of Collective Memory: Focusing on NRC and CGC

A Study on the Social Construction of Collective Memory: Focusing on NRC and CGC

Archaeological Heritage in Guatemala: Indigenous Perspectives on the Ruins of Iximche’

In Guatemala local perspectives on heritage often remain unheard. In this paper a case study is presented to show the complex relationship between the highland site of Iximche’ and Tecpan, an Indigenous community nearby. Although Iximche’ is of little importance to the local economy, its significance is derived from its role as a field for different kinds of social and religious interactions. Traces of a spiritual relationship to this place can be dated back to the colonial period and today Maya from all over Guatemala go there to perform ceremonies. The place has also become a focal point of identity constructions for locals, Pan Mayan activists and the nation itself. The ruins of Iximche’ play an important role in the construction of collective memory which also includes ideas coming from external players such as Christian churches, the national government, Mayan activists, and archaeologists as well.

Remembering to forget: Testimony, collective memory and the genesis of the ‘new’ South African nation in country of my skull

In this essay I consider the role of memory in the creation of the post‐apartheid nation: how does memory – individual and communal – function in the shaping of nationhood? Specifically, how does a text such as Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull, which seeks to straddle the divide of personal, individualised memory and collective memory, contribute to this process in post‐apartheid South Africa? Drawing on the proliferation of testimonies which emerged from the Truth Commission, in this text Krog actively contributes to the construction of collective memory. But, as Ernest Renan reminds us, although “the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common” – and shared historical narratives are crucial in this regard – it is equally important that the nation collectively suppresses specific aspects of knowledge of the past. Renan continues: “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of the nation”. What is it that Country of My Skull asks us to remember, what should we forget? And what are the ethical implications thereof?

The Vectors of Postwar Victim Reparations: Relief, Redress and Memory Politics

This article discusses the reparation schemes that were developed in response to the nazi policies of persecution and genocide. It looks at the measures aimed at redressing nazi atrocities in a wider context of postwar planning and reconstruction and asks how proposals for individual compensation payments dealt with the shortfalls in international law. In comparing French, East German and Swiss compensation policies, it also focuses on intersections between victim reparations and the construction of collective memory. Depending on a country's history in the nazi era and its desire to construct meaningful narratives of this period, reparation policies were often aimed at bolstering dominant interpretations of the past. At the same time, they also mirrored the degree of political influence that specific victim groups could mobilize in favour of their rehabilitation. This raises the question of how such interconnections affected the chances of individual victims to find recognition of their victimhood as well as financial relief for the damages they had suffered.

Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum

Museums, memorials, and other historic places are key sites in the construction of collective memory and national identity. The Plains Indian Museum in Cody, Wyoming is one such space of memory where the (pre)history of “America” and its native peoples is told. Based on the view of texts as experiential landscapes, it is argued that this museum works to absolve Anglo-visitors of the social guilt regarding Western conquest through a rhetoric of reverence. This rhetorical mode invites visitors to adopt a respectful, but distanced observational gaze. A concluding section assesses the social and political consequences of memorializing in this mode.

Constructing National Identity: The Case of Youth Aliyah

This study is part of a wider research, which examines different strategies of exclusion and inclusion in public discourse and in the construction of collective memory in Israel. At the beginning of the 1930s, following the great economic crisis and the rise of National Socialism in Germany, a plan was conceived to send Jewish German youth to Palestine. Thus began the Project of Youth Aliyah, and with it the debate within the Zionist Movement and the Yishuv in Palestine on the proper station of immigrants in the emerging Israeli national identity. We characterize the discourse on the young refugees in the 1930s by highlighting two issues: first, the aims of the project for the emigration of Jewish German youth; and secondly, the national identity which should be inculcated in these young immigrants.

Corporations and commemoration: first world war remembrance, Lloyds TSB and the national memorial arboretum

This paper explores the role of corporations and financial organisations in maintaining a memory of employees who have served during the wars of the 20th century. Focusing initially on memorial schemes devised by finance houses in the commemorative era after the Great War, the paper examines the emergence of a broader approach to organisational memory and the social construction of collective memory. Taking the Lloyds TSB finance group as a case study, the origins of the company’s war memorial in central London are examined, and the recent attempts to re‐locate a number of memorial objects and icons accumulated during the expansion of the group. This case study indicates how the social memory of an organisation might be understood through an appraisal of the monumental furniture that lives, often invisibly, within an organisation. The paper concludes with a number of questions concerning the nature of organisational memory when confronted with a history of merger and acquisition, and the difficulties in finding a commemorative site able to represent and safeguard these histories.

Tormented Memories: The Individual and the Collective

THIS ARTICLE SETS OUT TO probe the public debate that evolved in Israel over the dedication of a forest to the memory of King Boris III of Bulgaria. It will also address the image of Bulgaria in Israel's collective memory in relation to the rescue of Bulgarian Jews and to the deportation of the Macedonian and Thracian Jews to the death camps. This particular case study sheds light on the ways by which individuals and subgroups attempt to shape the Holocaust's historical consciousness. This effort is a consequence of contested memories of experiences during the Second World War, which furthermore demonstrates the existing tensions between individual memory and the construction of collective memory.' More importantly, it also reveals how subgroups form their identity and how they present themselves in the national arena, where the construction of collective memory is negotiated and shaped. While the number of survivors is naturally declining, the centrality of the Holocaust in Israeli society has not abated. Indeed, the impact of survivors' personal narratives on Israel's historical culture and consciousness has in fact deepened over time. The history of the Jews during World War II and the memory of the Holocaust occupy a central place within the Israeli discourse and self-identity. It is a multi-vocal discourse, which represents the variegated memory of the Holocaust and the different experiences of Jewish survivors during those years.2 Although the number of Holocaust survivors in Israel (and in the world in general) is declining due to aging, their personal narratives continue to have a great impact on the historical culture and in the consciousness of Israeli society.3 Psychologists suggest that there is a process of transference between parent and children, and often between grandparents and their grandchildren, of the individual wartime experiences of survivors. This process, thereby, enables the second and third generations

The Construction of Collective Memory: From Franco to Democracy

A community's collective memory of a period or a concrete event largely consists of the representations shared by most of those, individuals or groups, who create that story. These representations are organized around a main axis giving them a meaning that allows them to function as the foundation for the community concerned. This founding condition of memory, which has already been highlighted by Maurice Halbwachs in his pioneering book La Mémoire collective, the act of rescuing the past from oblivion and setting it up as a reference point for community identity, transforms remembering into an imperative for survival, whose ethical character and collective influence make the duty to remember ‘a practice indispensable to any affirmation of belonging to a group’.

Building a Postcolonial Archive? Gender, Collective Memory and Citizenship in Post-apartheid South Africa

Since the ending of apartheid, the state, political parties, civil society and ordinary people in South Africa have attempted to deal with the traumatic legacies of the past to engender a common sense of nationhood. This paper examines this process of dealing with the past through the theoretical lens of post-colonialism, focusing, in particular, on attempts to establish historical truth and collective memory for black women, who have often been most marginalised by colonialism and apartheid and excluded from dominant accounts of history. It argues that if black women are denied a presence and agency in the construction of collective memory, their belonging and citizenship is consequently mediated in the process of nation building. It considers how exclusionary and discriminating patterns are reproduced through attempts to construct national memory-archives, focusing on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It then explores the measures being taken to create a more inclusive process of restoring collective memory. In particular, it discusses the importance and possibilities of creating a postcolonial archive, where the voices and texts of historically marginalised people can be incorporated into national projects of remembering and notions of belonging. The paper focuses specifically on recent attempts to archive black women's pictorial and written testimony in a memory cloths programme. It concludes that representations of the past by women are a valuable tool in tracing the ways in which the legacy of their belonging and social standing shapes their contemporary citizenship. The radical potential of postcolonial archives lies in the fact that they can work against more sanitised representations of contemporary South Africa and towards the requirements for social justice (especially for black women) that are embodied within, but were arguably not met by, the TRC and broader nation building processes.

Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies

The memory wave in the humanities has contributed to the impressive revival of cultural history, but the success of memory studies has not been accompanied by significant conceptual and methodological advances in the research of collective memory processes. Most studies on memory focus on the representation of specific events within particular chronological, geographical, and media settings without reflecting on the audiences of the representations in question. As a result, the wealth of new insights into past and present historical cultures cannot be linked conclusively to specific social collectives and their historical consciousness. This methodological problem is even enhanced by the metaphorical use of psychological and neurological terminology, which misrepresents the social dynamics of collective memory as an effect and extension of individual, autobiographical memory. Some of these shortcomings can be addressed through the extensive contextualization of specific strategies of representation, which links facts of representation with facts of reception. As a result, the history of collective memory would be recast as a complex process of cultural production and consumption that acknowledges the persistence of cultural traditions as well as the ingenuity of memory makers and the subversive interests of memory consumers. The negotiations among these three different historical agents create the rules of engagement in the competitive arena of memory politics, and the reconstruction of these negotiations helps us distinguish among the abundance of failed collective memory initiatives on the one hand and the few cases of successful collective memory construction on the other. For this purpose, collective memory studies should adopt the methods of communication and media studies, especially with regard to media reception, and continue to use a wide range of interpretive tools from traditional historiography to poststructural approaches. From the perspective of collective memory studies, these two traditions are closely related and mutually beneficial, rather than mutually exclusive, ways of analyzing historical cultures.

Re‐membering the European citizen: The social construction of collective memory in Weimar

Collective re‐membering is examined in the context of the production of Weimar as European city of Culture. Weimar, cradle of German culture, and location of the prototype concentration camp, is formulated as a site of antagonism. The relationship between a walking/talking tour of the city and remembering is discussed with reference to Freud and Wittgenstein. Re‐membering is considered as suturing, and as ideological interpellation, hegemonic practices which are deployed in the context of walking in the city. The subject interpellated in Weimar, European city of Culture, is the blasé cosmopolitan (Simmel) and the flâneur (Benjamin) a subject capable of living with irreconcilable antagonism; an ideal type citizen that would be the keystone of European unity. Limitations of this hegemonic project are considered in light of the conditions of post‐modernity.

A tale of three sites: The monumentalization of Celtic oppida and the politics of collective memory and identity

Three fortified hilltop settlements (oppida) of the ‘Celtic’ Iron Age have been resurrected in recent history as symbolic focal points in the highly politicized construction of collective memory and identity in modern France. This paper presents a brief comparative consideration of the processes of commemoration by which these three sites were ritually transformed into monuments that have served both to root constructed traditions of national collective imagination in place and to provide a sense of authenticity and continuity for them. In other words, it explores the ways in which attempts have been made to imbue certain places in the landscape with special symbolic value and turn them into historical ‘memory factories’ for the nation. It also examines the role of archaeology in this process of cultural production.

THE MWANZA TRIAL AS A SEARCH FOR A USABLE MALAWIAN POLITICAL PAST

The main iesis of this paper is that nations need memories and that iere is in many contemporary African states a need to create a memory of the period between independence and ie reintroductiorl of multipartyism. That process often takes the form of inquests into human rights abuses which can result in trials. The trial in Malawi of six people including the former president Kamuzu Banda and his most loyal follower J.Z.U. Tembo on the accusation of conspiring to murder four politicians in 1983 and to destroy relevant evidence is an example. This article discusses how the reactions of the present ruling party (UDF) and government and the previous ruling party (MCP) and their leadership to this trial differ. The trial is seen as a struggle about the interpretation of the past which is put in the context of the actual events in 1983 as these came out in the trial. The fundamental question which arose is whether responsibility for whatever happened in Malawi in iat period can squarely be put in the hands of a trimuvirate which was in total control of what happened or whether decision making including those concerning human rights abuses was much more diffused throughout society. The first version of events lacks evidence to substantiate it. The result of the trial was therefore an acquittal which was held up in an appeal by the state. The second version portrays Kamuzu Banda as a leader who could be deceived by his environment, which is at variance with the way many Malawians, not exclusively MCP supporters, saw his role. IT IS COMMONLY ACCEPTED that the human mind is selective in absorbing information and that repression is a major mechanism for coping with unpleasant memories. At the same time, some memory is necessary as people cannot function without a stable identity.l The same can be said about governments: they need to create a history which legitimates their accession to power, or perhaps even their very existence. Such histories can be selective and they need not even be true. They do need, however, Dr Jan Kees van Donge teaches in the Department of Public Administration, Chancellor College, University of Malawi, Zomba. 1. The classic social psychological study of the construction of collective memory is L. Festinger, H. W. Riecken and S. Schacter, When Prophecy Falls (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1956). See also: D. Krech, R. S. Crutchfield and E. L. Ballachey Individual in Society; a textbook of social psychology (McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York 1962). On the need for memory to create a stable identity see: O. Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (Duckworth, London, 1985). I. Buruma, Wages of Guilt: memories of the war in Germany and Xapan Jonathan Cape, London, 1994) is a superb oumalistic study of the same problematic in situations outside Africa.

Oral History and the Social Identity of Brazilian Women Under Military Rule

of oral history in capturing social narratives, and in the construction of collective memory, especially that of minority or suppressed groups. Nevertheless, it is still important to stress the extent of the application of this method and the intensity of its reach. I want to refer, in particular, to the impact of oral history in certain political contexts where societies face disruptive forces in the process of building and rebuilding their national and cultural identities. The use of this method in these political environments where democracy is only an intermittent political experience and not an established and existing political system is important for their democratization. It is important insofar as it represents a critical and fundamental breach in the ideological structures that fence off these political systems. By restoring and emancipating narratives within this type of historical framework, oral history can contribute to the elaboration of alternatives for the social and political dilemmas commonly created in authoritarian regimes and to the constitution of new social identities. In other words, this methodology is unquestionably an important instrument in any process of transformation of the status quo. The suppression of democratic practices not only suspends the participation of certain historical agents in political life; it also trans-

Le roi chronophage. La construction d'une conscience historique dans le Maroc postcolonial.

L. Valensi — The Chronophagous King. The Construction of an Historical Consciousness in Postcolonial Morocco. This essay on the construction of collective memory in new states presents a case study of Morocco after it became independent in 1956. Based on a study of Moroccan newspapers, it shows how the free market of national symbols that prevailed in the early years of independence was enventually transformed into a monopoly of the monarch who used the past as one of the devices for his self celebration.