Construction Of Social Memory Research Articles

The education concept and its false dichotomies

Introduction: The conceptual complexity inherent in the term "education" has been associated with numerous analyses from various disciplinary approaches, paradigms, and theoretical currents. Objective: This article aims not to offer a univocal definition of the meaning of education but to consider it from a sociological perspective that integrates the false dichotomies of individual/society, continuity/discontinuity, and reproduction/change. Development: In the first part, the text presents a theoretical proposal on the articulation between culture, identity, and memory. Culture is understood as the set of objectified and subjectivized forms in historically specific contexts, which provides the individual with intersubjective elements for identity formation, where memory acts as an active dialogue between the psycho-individual and the socio-collective dimension. In the second part, education is proposed as a complex and dynamic process of cultural communication, identity formation, and social construction of memory. It emphasizes the importance of analyzing education from a theoretical perspective that considers the interaction between the individual and society, offering the possibility to understand its crucial role in processes of social reproduction and continuity, as well as in those of change and discontinuity. Conclusions: The mentioned false dichotomies in approaches to studying education polarize and create an antagonism between structures and subjects, individual and society, and reproduction and social change, consequently providing little understanding of how these phenomena articulate with educational processes, overlooking the multiple possibilities of co-participation and mutual determination.

“When Everything was Forest”: Aikanã Histories and Environmental Destruction in Southern Amazonia

This article explores how the Aikanã, speakers of an isolate language, who live in the south-eastern Amazon, in the Brazilian State of Rondônia, make sense of the drastic transformations brought about by the colonisation of this region. Through an analysis of Aikanã narratives and life histories, the article highlights how Aikanã social memory gives meaning to experiences of contact, land loss and environmental destruction. It will contemplate the temporal markers, i.e. periodisations that occur in narratives and life histories and that delineate Aikanã historicity. These temporal markers refer predominantly to an experienced past between the beginning of the 20th century and the present, from a distant period of displacement from their traditional territory and the severe loss of human lives to the transformation of the forest into pastures for cattle and soy. In this vein, temporal markers are also anchored in space, unveiling sentiments of nostalgia and ecological grief for a past fertility of social life, interconnected with the fertility of the more-than-human world of the lost forest. Exploring Aikanã narrativity and its operation in the construction of social memory, the article aims to contribute to contemporary debates on Amazonian historicities, as well as to the theoretical and political role of Amazonian socialities in face of the current environmental crisis.

Rethinking Victimhood: Violence and Female Agency in Contemporary Argentine Memory Cinema

Rethinking Victimhood: Violence and Female Agency in Contemporary Argentine Memory Cinema Ana Marina Gamba In the opening images of the 2011 film Infancia clandestina a young child asks his parents to quickly open the door of the house as he needs to go to the bathroom. What appears to be a rather ordinary event abruptly becomes a scene from an action film. Gunshots are fired from a moving vehicle towards the family, in response to which the parents draw their own guns. Using an aesthetic that distinctly evokes a superhero comic book, the film shows the famous actress and pop singer Natalia Oreiro firing back at the unknown aggressors. In spite of the considerable number of Argentine movies depicting the events that took place in that country in the 1970s, the scene described above appeared as quite novel. As pointed out by Gonzalo Aguilar, this film was the first one to give a fictional portrayal of the activities of the revolutionary groups from that period (17)—more specifically in this context, of the political organization called Montoneros.1 This article addresses a yet unstudied aspect of this wider phenomenon: the specific transformation that the figure of the female activist suffered in this strain of “memory cinema.”2 It argues that there is a fracture in contemporary cinema concerning previous cinematic representations of female revolutionary activists. The main aim of this essay is to comprehend the relationship between narratives portraying women as mere “innocent victims,” on the one hand, and figurations more centered on the political agency of female characters, on the other. The former narratives appeared in the immediate aftermath of the return to democracy, while the latter emerged in the second decade of the 21st century, exploring the duality of the female characters as both victims and perpetrators of violence. The present analysis is inspired by the theoretical framework of memory studies which holds that any discourse about the past should also be considered an expression of the present where it emerges. In this case, the unprecedented growth of feminist movements in Argentina in recent years3 will provide an essential background to our analysis. From this perspective, the shift in the way female victimhood is portrayed should be analyzed as twofold: as a new perspective on the social understanding of events that occurred during the last dictatorship (1976–1983), and as a transformation in the relationship between women and politics that characterizes contemporary culture and politics in Argentina. [End Page 17] 1. Innocent victims The production of films—both fictional and documentary—has been of great significance in the construction of social memory throughout history, as the case of the Holocaust has clearly demonstrated (Lewis, 7). Argentina is by no means an exception. In the years following the end of the dictatorship in 1983, audiovisual productions constructed a narrative about that period that compensated for the absence of historic visual records—the clandestine character of the repression meant that there were no traces of the action of the army (Feld and Stites Mor, 20). The cruelty and cynicism of the atrocities committed by the military were so disturbing and inconceivable that the Argentine society resorted to visual representations to comprehend what had happened during those years. Therefore, artistic discourses—notably cinema—were granted a very important role in the collective production of memory, and, since the return of democracy, numerous films problematizing the 1970s have been released.4 Regarding this cinematic repertoire, Ana Amado distinguishes different cycles in post-dictatorship memory (13). The years immediately following the return of democracy in Argentina, identified as the first cycle, were characterized by a heated public debate on the events that took place in the country during the military government. Central issues were the responsibility of the different parties involved and the most viable alternatives to overcome the tremendous suffering as a society. The new government, backed by human rights associations, instructed a commission5 to investigate the crimes perpetrated by the military. The purpose of such investigations was to pursue legal action on the basis of the information gathered. The version about the past supported by these social actors tried to decouple the victims of the State repression from their...

The Important Role of the Relationship between Photography and Reality in the Construction of Social Memory

The Important Role of the Relationship between Photography and Reality in the Construction of Social Memory

Religião, memória e cultura: perspectivas teóricas a partir de Maurice Halbwachs

Os grupos humanos desenvolveram toda a espécie de recursos mnemotécnicos e sistemas de registo para facilitar o acesso posterior a algo que foi descoberto, produzido e adquirido. A religião, na medida em que condensa uma parte das experiências humanas de construção da coletividade, é um laboratório relevante no que à construção social da memória diz respeito. A conservação da memória implica sempre estratégias de inovação. Assim, as tradições religiosas da humanidade dão testemunho de um longo trabalho de (re)construção de uma certa perspetiva sobre o mundo (cósmico e social), sobre os modos de nele e sobre ele agir, projetando as pontes para outros «mundos». Este ensaio parte da noção de memória, nas suas aceções socioantropológicas, para compreender a religião como fenómeno cultural em várias das suas dimensões estruturantes: propagação, distribuição, durabilidade, transmissão. Esta via de teorização alicerça um percurso que, tendo como ponto de partida a obra de Maurice Halbwachs, visa estabelecer um quadro interpretativo para um duplo problema: o lugar da religião enquanto memória das culturas; os processos de memoração como cerne da atividade religiosa.

The Graffitour of the 13: an aesthetic, political and historical trajectory through Medellín

Abstract To think the borders of the metropolis beyond the representations associated with precariousness and crime presupposes recognizing the abundance and vitality of aesthetic practices and productions that are reconfiguring the discourses on the peripheries. In both Brazil and other Latin American countries, the emergence and diffusion of languages produced in the "margins" of cities call into question the center/periphery dualism - relativizing the existence of fixed boundaries, while proposing other ways of narrating different collective experiences. Commonly seen as a peripheral product, graffiti is an artistic language that express the multiplicity of agencies on the metropolitan edges. In the city of Medellín, Colombia, different groups formed mainly by young people from the edges have been taking on graffiti and hip hop as a resource to understand, narrate and distance themselves from the violence that crosses them. A significant sample of this type of collective experience is the Graffitour proposal, an "aesthetic, political and historical" route organized by the Centro Cultural Casa Kolacho in the Commune 13. Based on the assumption that the Graffitour transcends the simple representation of the medellinense periphery and constitutes a form of cultural and political organization to speak about the violence that appears in the city, this work reports the experience of having carried out this journey through Commune 13. In this sense, it aims to reflect on how discourses are produced on metropolitan edges in contemporary times and on the role of urban artistic manifestations in the interpretation of violence and in the construction of social memory.

Média, tempo e memória

Os média noticiosos tradicionais atuam enquanto dispositivos de seleção, configuração narrativa e difusão dos acontecimentos. A par do poder da narrativa na estruturação do tempo e da experiência, pode considerar-se que a seleção pelos média do que se entende marcar o presente e o passado constitui um mecanismo de construção da memória social. Nessa medida, os média "fazem história", entrando no terreno da historiografia, e "fazem memória", participando e intervindo no processo de construção da memória coletiva. Porém, os média digitais, enquanto dispositivos caracterizados pela instantaneidade, velocidade, retenção e propagação de imagens e mensagens, introduzem novas possibilidades de comunicação, divulgação e arquivo, alterando, simultaneamente, as relações ao espaço e ao tempo. Interessa- nos interrogar se, uns e outros, média tradicionais e média digitais, de modos distintos, concorrem para a construção da memória coletiva ou, contrariamente, para o seu enfraquecimento, já que as novas tecnologias de informação e comunicação desenvolvem possibilidades ilimitadas de disseminação, de arquivo e de memória técnica, mas também desmaterializam e destemporalizam. Nessa medida, importa indagar se as relações ao tempo, ao lugar e à memória, estão em vias de sofrer alterações.Para compreender como os média tradicionais e as novas tecnologias digitais intervêm na construção da memória, começa por esboçar-se um ponto de vista sobre uma fenomenologia e uma pragmática da memória, passando à questão da memória coletiva e da relação entre a história e a memória, para aplicar este questionamento às relações entre acontecimento, média e arquivo, à tecnicidade da memória, e às novas relações ao tempo e ao lugar nas redes.

Remembering the rejection of Muhammad Ali: identity, civil rights and social memory

ABSTRACTWhen Muhammad Ali died in June 2016, he was remembered by the media as a hero in the fight for racial equality. Tributes for the great boxer were meaningful in many respects, but they were also incomplete, sanitised and misleading. This paper aims to re-complicate our understanding of Ali's portrayals in the media by analysing newspaper discourse in the years immediately following his conversation to the Nation of Islam. Specifically, this investigation compares and contrasts the complex ways that black and white journalists used both his birth name (Cassius Clay) and his adopted name (Muhammad Ali) as a way of signalling their attitudes toward him. Close reading of newspaper articles published between March 1964 and September 1967 reveals that black journalists rejected Ali's adopted name and identity almost as comprehensively as their white colleagues. This aspect of Ali's legacy has been largely forgotten by the contemporary media, which calls us to consider the cultural construction of social memory, particularly when it revolves around sporting icons.

The Local Church\u2019s Defence of Human and Ethnic Rights in Choc\xf3, Colombia

The article analyses the role of the local church in the construction of ethnic organisations in the 1970s–80s and later in the defence of human rights in the 1990s–2010s in Chocó, Colombia. It studies the transformation of their peacebuilding and humanitarian strategies influenced by liberation theology and the culture of indigenous and Afro-Colombian people. The construction of social memory through workshops has been one of the preferred tools analysed in this article due to their significance in the creation of ethnic organisations and in grassroots peacebuilding. The black social movement accompanied by the local church in Chocó has not only supported the defence of their territory as collective property in an attempt to strengthen their welfare and autonomy but as a form to resisting the violence of the conflict, particularly in the form of forced displacement. This article uses interviews, archive and participant observation in the study of this important transformation that traces one of the most important periods of the conflict in Colombia.

A construção da memória social das produções artísticas na saúde mental pós reforma psiquiátrica no Brasil

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1807-1384.2017v14n2p75Desde a Reforma Psiquiátrica no Brasil, surgiram muitos grupos artístico-culturais na saúde mental que contribuem para a construção da participação sóciocultural da população atendida. A construção da memória dessas produções se dá em meio a disputas de sentido e inclui as dimensões ética, do trabalho e da invenção. O objetivo foi explorar o processo de construção da memória social das produções na interface arte e saúde mental no Brasil pós Reforma Psiquiátrica, compreender os embates sócio-históricos nas construções discursivas acerca dessas produções e investigar como essa memória pode redimensionar as concepções em arte, potencializar a diversidade cultural e dinamizar as representações sobre a loucura. Como método utilizou-se a revisão bibliográfica de artigos brasileiros utilizando descritores: arte, saúde mental, e cultura e uma análise das categorias de memória concebidas como trabalho e invenção. A memória dessas produções é utilizada como instrumento de transformação social e se faz através do trabalho de atores que, afetados pela potência transformadora dessas experiências, constroem visibilidade e apostam em uma mudança da sensibilidade coletiva. Como invenção, ela conjuga fluxos de desejo e exercícios estéticos que deslocam identidades e motivam a criação de políticas públicas para grupos à margem do campo artístico-cultural. Concluiu-se que a memória dessas produções encontra-se em tensionamento. Por um lado, a transversalidade das concepções de arte e saúde, afirmando as diferenças e transformando o mapa do perceptível; por outro, as tendências de categorização em segmento específico, ou como produção diretamente vinculada a um efeito social esperado pelas iniciativas da Reforma Psiquiátrica contra a estigmatização da loucura.

Communicative Citizenship and Human Rights from a Transnational Perspective

Cet article examine l’expérience de deux mouvements sociaux de victimes de la région d’Antioquia orientale en Colombie. Ces mouvements ont développé une variété de symboles, adopté une perspective transnationale et mis en œuvre des actions de citoyenneté communicative afin de porter des revendications de droits humains au milieu du conflit armé. L’article se base en particulier sur l’étude de cas de deux associations : L’association des femmes organisées de l’Antioquia orientale (AMOR) et L’association provinciale des victimes vers les citoyens (APROVIACI). L’article explore la façon dont ces acteurs ont transféré, puis adopté différents symboles et mis en œuvre des actions de citoyenneté communicative. Les formes d’engagement politique déployées se réfèrent à d’autres groupes de victimes du Sud Global, tels que Les mères de Plaza de Mayo (Argentine) et Que nos filles puissent rentrer à la maison (Mexique). Nous démontrons que les deux associations colombiennes, AMOR et APROVIACI, sont des exemples réussis de transfert, d’adaptation et de mise en œuvre d’actions politiques et de symboles provenant d’autres parties du Sud Global, afin d’améliorer l’activisme social et politique dans leur contexte particulier. Nous introduisons à cet égard le concept de citoyenneté communicative, où les affects et les émotions agissent comme les catalyseurs des actions collectives menées par des groupes contre-publics dans des sociétés marquées par le conflit armé. Par ce biais, la citoyenneté communicative permet de transformer le statut de victime en une condition de citoyenneté active. Enfin, cet article soutient que la construction de symboles qui articulent les dimensions communicatives des droits politiques, sociaux et culturels, peuvent aider les groupes de la société civile et les mouvements sociaux à réparer le sens de la citoyenneté et de l’appartenance collective. Ils permettraient en outre de générer des processus de construction de mémoire sociale, de reconnaissance et de solidarité du point de vue des contre-publics.

LA CONSTRUCCIÓN SOCIAL DE LA MEMORIA EN EL ESPACIO: UNA APROXIMACIÓN SOCIOLÓGICA

El tema de la memoria colectiva constituye uno de los tópicos más dis- cutidos dentro del amplio campo de las ciencias sociales en las últimas décadas. Este artículo tiene como objetivo central efectuar una reflexión teórica sobre la construcción social de la memoria —a partir de las relaciones intersubjetivas, las prácticas sociales, el poder, la cultura y la historicidad— y su nexo con el espacio, así como las dimensiones sensorial, simbólica y política de dicha relación. Se analiza también la manera en que los diversos actores sociales y políticos despliegan una lucha política y simbólica en el espacio público en aras de marcar en él la memoria y, como tal, una visión del pasado.

Genetimes and lifetimes: DNA, new media, and history

The last decade has seen the increased use of direct-to-consumer genetic testing for constructing genealogies. These services, offered by companies such as 23andMe, combine biotechnology with new media technologies such as blogging and social networking. Individual consumers are able to construct new identities, communities, and personal histories on the basis of their DNA. Such technology-based and technology-mediated historical reconstructions have the potential to reshape our relationship to the past. In particular, DNA histories entail a particular notion of temporality, specific standards of evidence, and a particular vision of identity. By analyzing the development and use of these new technologies, we can begin to identify specific ways in which biotechnologies and new media technologies are impacting the construction of social memory in the twenty-first century.

Memories in Context via Cyber Reminiscing: The Case of Marilyn Monroe

This paper attempts to extend the various existing lieux de memoire available hitherto in the perpetuation and (re)construction of social memory by looking at the cyber landscape. Marilyn Monroe as an icon of American popular culture and thus of popular memory in this context, is explored, by looking at various select websites designed in commemoration of her stardom. Within this investigation, I also invoke the link between the production of social memory, with frames of remembrance and collective memory that therefore indicates memory as indubitably, a social phenomenon. The value of cyber reminiscing is also addressed briefly, by exploring how the cyber landscape offers as an additional outlet for the perpetuation and maintenance of fan discourse. A short section that ruminates upon the Internet as an entity of postmodernity with regards to the presentation of knowledge and information is also submitted.

El Centro de Historia de Santander y la gestión de la memoria regional entre 1934 y 1944: Conmemoraciones centenarias de Eloy Valenzuela, Solón Wilches y Vicente Azuero

Este artículo parte de la construcción de la memoria social y las políticas de la memoria para mostrar cómo las regiones y sus élites letradas acudieron a personajes egregios con el fin de crear y fortalecer sus proyectos identitarios. Se pretende mostrar cómo el Centro de Historia de Santander, en cumplimiento de su misión de creación y difusión del pasado regional, utilizó las efemérides de tres hombres destacados en la historia regional con el propósito de posicionarlos en la memoria como ejemplos de orgullo santandereano. En esta medida el artículo se estructura a partir de tres conmemoraciones: Eloy Valenzuela 1934, Solón Wilches 1935 y Vicente Azuero 1944. El trabajo concluye que las referencias a estos personajes fueron asociadas a un conjunto de virtudes cívicas como hidalguía, herencia castellana, sencillez, sabiduría, adhesión a principios democráticos, espíritu industrial y de progreso.

Commemorating bodies and lives at Kish’s ‘A Cemetery’: (Re)presenting social memory

Over the course of a decade, the Joint Oxford-Field Museum Expedition to Kish recovered artifacts and skeletal remains from one of the most influential city-states in ancient Mesopotamia. We focus here on the process of commemoration of the dead as evidenced in the graves excavated from Kish’s ‘A Cemetery’. We use skeletal remains, fieldnotes, and artifactual evidence to situate these individuals within their biological and mortuary contexts and to explore elements of living, dying, and remembering at Kish. The repetitive actions involved in burying the dead in the ruins of a razed palace suggest the construction of social memory aimed at creating communal cohesion and reinforcing local norms. The details afforded each individual and their grave suggest that burials functioned both to engage a new political landscape and to create spaces in which the bereaved commemorated individual lives.

Occulting the past. Conceptualizing forgetting in the history and archaeology of Sylvester Manor

AbstractIn this paper I argue that we should attend to why and how forgetting happens in concert with the construction of social memory, history, identity and heritage. Through a focus on processes of forgetting, this discussion offers a new set of interpretations of early colonial Sylvester Manor, a 17th-century plantation site in coastal New York. More specifically, the construction of racial categories over several centuries implicates social memory and forgetting, and introduces issues to the manner in which we remember the site where people of European, African and Native American ancestry met. This analysis views memory and forgetting not only as historical vectors in racialization, but also as factors in current identity politics.

Historical legacy, social memory and representations of the past within a Polish community

Shared representations of national history play a significant role in the construction of social memory and the development of a common cultural worldview. Representations of 20th-century history studied within a small Polish community in the UK with respect to their content, meaning and effect on identity produced themes of injustice, abandonment, betrayal by the West, trauma and victimization, which continue to evoke strong emotions. The simplified, subjective and selective nature of historical representations was evident in the way in which a legitimate and coherent narrative on key aspects of the past was accompanied by omissions, contradictions and a lack of clarity on other aspects of the same period. The past continues to weigh on the present for a new generation of Poles, which demonstrates that historical legacy remains a significant factor in the social psychological analysis of mind, identity, social action and international relations.

Memories in Motion: The Irish Dancing Body

The aim of this article is to explore the Irish dancing body by combining the growing social science interest in mobility with the established area of the body as a site of culture. On the basis of ethnographic observations and interviews about dance and culture in Ireland, I will discuss the Irish dancing body in relation to the construction of social memory, the embodiment of values linked to Irish national identity, mobility, dance competitions and global touring. First, I will detail three distinct movement sequences from different dance forms in Ireland: competitive Irish dancing, dance theatre and Riverdance(the commercial Irish dance show). Second, I will look at how dance can be said to travel around Ireland, north and south, as well as back and forth to Ireland. The idea of the Irish dancing body offers an example of the unity of body and mind in dance, revealing also that abstract dance and movement communicate stories about their societies. In Irish dance, these stories feature displacement, longing and resistance, often steeped in the history. I conclude that this social memory connects a distinct Irish tradition with European modernity.

The Memory-History-Popular Culture Nexus: Pearl Harbor as a Case Study in Consumer-Driven Collective Memory

In this paper I examine the fusing of collective memory, history and popular culture by analyzing current trends in American-made commercial films with historical events as subject matter that have also been distributed to a global audience. Pearl Harbor is the primary case study. Analysis shows that dominant historical narratives are reified by the use of what I term an ‘anticipatory-driven’ film experience where audience members engage in an interaction with pre-existing mainstream collective memory while their anticipation for impending climactic trauma is systematically heightened. Comparisons are made to other widely released US films about national and international events and ‘non-events.’ Questions are also raised about the increasing global importance of the memory-history-popular culture nexus post 9-11, and, how US produced films about 9-11 may or may not engage in the practices detailed in this analysis. In this vein the paper concludes with a discussion of how Pearl Harbor was marketed, edited and received in Japan, the second largest audience for Hollywood films and what this implies about social memory construction in a global commercial context.