Shaping Collective Memory Research Articles

Burying, Unearthing and Archiving German Colonial Records in Tanganyika, 1914-1960s.

The article is about the intricacies involved in the handling of government records, with particular reference to German colonial records in Mainland Tanzania during and after the First World War. It provides an account of how the Germans hid their official records before departing from their East African colony upon defeat by the allied forces, and how the records were eventually uncovered and used by both the British colonial regime and the post-colonial administration. The author explains the manner in which official records were handled during and after the War in terms of cultural symbolism, which ultimately contributed to the shaping of state power, collective memory and national identity. This explanation leads to the author’s main argument; that besides the direct and practical functions they are intended to serve, archival records also function as cultural objects which eventually contribute to the shaping of collective memory and national identity.

THE REPRESENTATION OF THE NATO BOMBING OF YUGOSLAVIA IN FOREIGN ARTISTIC AND MASS MEDIA TEXTS: UNJUSTIFIED WAR OR JUSTIFIED INTERVENTION?

In addition to scientific and historical accounts, artistic and media texts also construct stories of significant events, thus constructing ideologically charged narratives of present and past events. These narratives can become official versions of the past that shape collective memory and identity. Unlike history books, which are written with a greater time distance, media and artistic texts directly influence the formation of narratives about current events and therefore the self-confidence and self-understanding of the collective. Based on an interest in the question of how identity is formed in today's Serbia, this article deals with media and artistic texts that speak about one of the most significant events in Serbia’s recent history - the NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Opinions about this event are divided, and the totality of information about the bombing seems unknowable. To establish a more objective approach to this issue, the images of the bombing created by foreign media and artists are analyzed from the point of view of Memory Studies and through theories of arts and media (Assmann, Hartman, Felman, Laub, Kuljić), primarily using content and linguistic discourse analysis (Foucault, Spitzmüller, Warnke). The analysis has shown that most of the analyzed media texts justify the bombing, while all artworks criticize and condemn it. This has led us to the conclusion that that the bombing wasn’t justified, and that media texts on the subject served as political propaganda. In other words, artistic texts have a greater potential for social and political criticism than the media.

Ties That Remind: Known Family Connections to Past Events as Salience Cues and Collective Memory of Stalin’s Repressions of the 1930s in Contemporary Russia

Building on ideas of Halbwachs and others regarding how families shape collective memory, we argue that known family connections to past events serve as salience cues. Due to kin preference (humans’ tendency to empathize with family members more than strangers), awareness that a relative participated in a specific past event increases its visibility, moral relevance, and emotional resonance, compared to that of the vast number of other historical occurrences, with intuitive consequences for whether and how the event is remembered in the present. We illustrate this effect of known family connections to the past by analyzing whether and how contemporary Russians recall a controversial episode from the Soviet period: Stalin’s repressions of the 1930s. We use qualitative data from focus groups and unusually detailed survey data, collected in 2010, to illustrate this property of recognized family connections to a past mass trauma. We also propose four distinct components of perceptions of past events: awareness, knowledge, importance, and moral valence. Our findings confirm the strong influence of known family ties to victims, which exhibit more consistent connections to memories of the repressions than do other factors, although family socialization through childhood discussions, cohort differences, education, and exposure to official narratives also matter.

“A Life Lived”: Collective Memory and White Racial Framing in Digital Opioid Overdose Obituaries

With a rise in overdose deaths in the United States, opioid awareness has come in a variety of ways. One of these, as reporters suggest, is obituary writing. Obituaries are considered in news media as offering “brutally frank” depictions of addiction that “chronicle the toll of heroin.” Moreover, obituary sharing by parents and loved ones has increasingly taken place on digital platforms, memorial websites expanding the visibility of overdose death while facilitating the building of virtual grief communities. Not solely commemorating individual loss, obituaries thus contain symbolic power—they reflect dominant social values and shape collective memory. As such, overdose obituaries inform how opioid crisis is framed, represented, and addressed. From a qualitative content analysis of 533 opioid-related U.S. obituaries published on Legacy.com and ObitTree.com , I find that while obituaries reduce stigma associated with drug use, addiction, and overdose, they primarily tell white tales of addiction. In affording a white racial framing of drug addiction, obituary writing corresponds with a larger whitewashing of the opioid crisis while implicitly constructing symbolic boundaries between those memorialized, who are predominantly white and middle-class, and those who are deemed as raced and classed Others. Such storytelling, particularly when popularized in news media and made visible on digital platforms, contributes to ongoing systemic inequality in the prevailing drug war.

Theorizing Media Memory: Six Elements Defining the Role of the Media in Shaping Collective Memory in the Digital Age

AbstractThis article wishes to untangle the relationships between media and collective memory and present the contribution of communication scholarship in general, and journalism studies in particular, to our understanding of the term “collective memory.” After presenting the roots of the concept, the article deconstructs it by providing six perspectives on the term: (a) its multidirectional disposition (from the present to the past and vice versa), (b) its concretization in media texts and other products, (c) the functional role it plays for the community, (d) its socio‐political aspects, (e) the technological qualities of the process of the mediatization, (f) its narratological characteristics and formation. Each of the abovementioned attributes throws a different light on the mediation of collective memory and provides insights regarding the role of the media in the construction of cultural memory and shared recollections in the digital age.

The voices of silence: The case of Georgian history textbooks

ABSTRACT Multiple studies in the Social Sciences and Humanities emphasize the importance of textbooks in shaping collective memory as well as the process of transmission to a new generation. The state is considered the main agent in the formation of dominant narratives transmitted through textbooks. This article attempts to demonstrate that public opinion and judgment are as such important vectors of the official rhetoric or policy meant to influence the prevailing discourse. In post-conflict societies, the wider scholarship suggests that silencing, a type of forgetting, is an effective tool when telling stories of traumatization. Silencing is not only a form of forgetting, but rather a self-sufficient, independent category, and a deliberately selected technique of remembering. It is an intentional strategy of voiceless speaking. Using a qualitative research method, I build my arguments on a textual analysis of the six most common Georgian school history textbooks from 1993 to 2018, focusing on chapters relating to the 1992–93 war in Abkhazia. I propose three types of silencing: traumatic, personalized and victimized. This study contributes to the vibrant discussion about memory agents, as well as correlations between individual, collective and official memory. It explores the impact of such memories on the national curricula.

Średniopolskie katalogi władców jako narzędzie kształtowania pamięci zbiorowej

The study presents communication strategies (credibility of content, mythical and legendary stylization, evaluation of content) and language resources that are used to shape collective memory in the so-called catalogues of rulers, a genre of historiographic writing characteristic of Old Polish culture. The linguistic ways of shaping collective memory which are presented lead to the statement that in the more distant past people were aware of the possibility to influence what will be remembered and how, and Middle Polish catalogues of rulers viewed in the light of the category of collective memory appear as a mnemonic course of knowledge about their own past.

Ch. 5. Writing Culture: Historiography, Hybridity, and the Shaping of Collective Memory

Ch. 5. Writing Culture: Historiography, Hybridity, and the Shaping of Collective Memory

MEMORY IN MOVEMENT: COLLECTIVE IDENTITY AND MEMORY CONTESTATION IN HONG KONG'S TIANANMEN VIGILS

Collective memory shapes collective identity in social movements, yet the cultural process of transforming collective memory into collective identity and actions is anything but linear. While preserving an established historical narrative can maintain movement solidarity, this process is actively contested by multiple actors, which may weaken solidarity and disrupt mobilization. Why does the memory process facilitate collective identity building at one point but not another? What accounts for its success and failure in mobilizing through memories? This article studies the three-decade commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen protests in Hong Kong to unpack the memory making in movements. We argue that collective-identity building is shaped by the interaction between the repository of memories and the repertoires expressing them. Although the performative repertoire of the vigil has long bestowed moral power to memories of the Tiananmen crackdown, this repertoire is contested by competing repertoires, even though the memory itself is not disputed. Our findings highlight the performative and filtering role of repertoires in reproducing collective memory. They also reveal a dynamic and nuanced relationship between collective memory and identity, especially the mediating factors at work.

Migration Histories, National Memory, and Regional Collections

Migration Histories, National Memory, and Regional Collections

Generational succession, culture, and politics: The shaping of Euro-Atlantic sites of memory

Memory studies have often looked to the Cold War and the fall of the Iron Curtain as the principal mediators of collective memory for the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Scholars have often assumed the primacy of political factors in memory work with Cold War politics understood as shaping collective memory both West and East of the Iron Curtain. The present article proposes to problematize these assumptions. While not negating the role of politics, it suggests that the changing cultural priorities of each successive generation were of greater importance than current memory analyses permit. Using the former KL Plaszow (Kraków, Poland) as a case study, this essay draws attention to the common features of memory work shared across the Euro-Atlantic world. Establishing how each of the postwar generations engaged with memory work to suit their particular needs this article analyses the impact that generational sensibilities had on memory sites.

Pamięci. Pomiędzy milczeniem a zapomnieniem

Artykuł jest poświęcony kwestii istotnej dla zrozumienia kształtowania pamięci zbiorowych w XX w., a mianowicie mechanizmom tworzącym obszary „zbiorowego zapomnienia” oraz działaniom przywracania tego, co z pamięci zostało usunięte, przemilczane, pominięte lub wyparte. Przywołane w erudycyjnym szkicu badania i teksty wychodzą daleko poza granice pamięci europejskich, dając tym samym ogląd zjawisk pamięci i milczenia w ich globalnym wymiarze. Tym samym Luisa Passerini zachęca do porzucenia aroganckiego przekonania o naszej unikatowości i kulturowej wyższości.
 Tłumaczenie na podstawie: L. Passerini, Memories Between Silence and Oblivion, [w:] Memory and Utopia. The Primacy and Intersubjectivity, London–New York 2007, s. 15–32. Zgoda na publikację przetłumaczonej wersji artykułu została udzielona przez Autorkę. Licencja CC BY-SA 4.0 (przyp. red.).

Sterowanie pamięcią zbiorową. Propagandowy wielogłos o wojnie polsko-sowieckiej/radzieckiej 1919–1921

Controlling the collective memory. A multitude of propaganda voices on the Polish-Soviet War 1919–1921The author of the article discusses the creation — in three successive historical periods — of the image of the 1919–1920 war between the Second Polish Republic and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, referred to as the Polish-Soviet War, Polish-Bolshevik War, Polish-Russian War, 1920 War. The name, description and opinion about the war — in the Second Polish Republic, in the Polish People’s Republic and in Poland today — depends on propaganda objectives, current politics and attitude to Poland’s eastern neighbour. The image of the war of 1919–1921 is highly ideologised, as is evidenced by the choice of words and metaphors used to provoke emotions, to provide strong value judgements with regard to the enemy and thus to control society’s behaviour as well as create myths and stereotypes which are kept in the collective memory for a long time. The history of this armed conflict has been and still is written under the pressure of various ideologies and propaganda strategies. The aim of the article is to demonstrate that the image of wars in verbal accounts history textbooks, historical monographs, literary works, oral histories etc. and visual accounts paintings, films etc. depends on the historical context, socio-political determinants as well as the point of view of the individual creating the narrative of a given event. The shaping of collective memory is always accompanied by value judgements, selection of events and strong emotions.

(NIE-)POWROTY. ESEJ O DOŚWIADCZENIU I PAMIĘCI ROKU 1945

The study brings up sensitive problems of the contemporary Polish history, revealing some mechanisms of historical discourse in the public space. Refl ection on the historical memory, the war trauma and the problem of shortened perspective puts emphasis on the absence of alternative narrations around such categories as: nation, Catholic Church, patriotism, the left, polish Jews. Th is issue is associated with the question of contemporary historical research and the politics of history shaping collective memory in Poland.

Why do public monuments play such an important role in memory wars?

In this paper I explore the role played by public monuments in the narration of national stories. I examine several monuments that have been built to promote various national narratives, with a particular focus on the South Australian National War Memorial, located in Adelaide, Australia. My analysis reveals that monuments have a dynamic capacity to embody simplified narratives of the past, and to shape collective memory accordingly. I contend that, owing to this capacity, monuments play a significant role in the narration of national stories. I also consider the power of monuments to serve vehicles for the promulgation of dissenting narrative strands. I ultimately argue that the prevalence of such strands reveals that many “memory wars” can never definitively be won—that is, that it is impossible to achieve homogeneity in history.

The Aftermath of War Experiences on Kosovo's Generation on the Move Collective Memory and Ethnic Relations among Young Adults in Kosovo

Experiences of the past are very important in forming collective identities and therefore in shaping collective memories. In the post-war and particularly in divided societies, the politics of memory provides effective mechanism for ethno-political elites to gain power and legitimacy. The memory of war, through narratives, commemoration of sacrifices, and glorification of heroism is omnipresent in post-war Kosovo. Through articulation of war remembrance, the political authorities influence significantly also identities and political affiliation of certain groups. This research will examine the correlation between political power and war remembrance, by exploring the way they are emerged and transmitted in the Kosovar society. Moreover, it examines the impact of war remembrance in the generation of 1990s and particularly in the so called ‘born during the war children’, focusing on how these events are influencing ethno-political attitudes among them. Further it outlines how post-war narratives and memorialisation have emerged and evolved along ethno-national belonging, thus resulting in contested and divided memories, and failing to improve ethnic relations. The article explains further the role of the education system, through history textbooks in building identity and affecting political attitudes of the younger generations.

– „...kupa gruzów, kupa trupów, wielkie szambo, wielka dziura wypełniona czarną krwią”. Powstańcze fantazje w Kinderszenen Jarosława Marka Rymkiewicza

The article focuses on the memory practices activated in Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz’s Kinderszenen, an essay devoted to the Warsaw Uprising. The text refers to Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies analyzing the language of male soldiers, and examines the work of the same linguistic logic which determines the way in which the events in the capital are presented. The Nazification of memory involves here the demonstration of obscenity of the uprising and recognizing it as constitutive to the national identity. The purpose of the text is to capture the relationship between shaping collective memory and creating “genogenic” imaginarium integrating the Polish community.

What journalists reminder us of: representation of a crucial ınternational event in turkish press – Malta Summit of 1989

The role of media in crafting storing, retrieving, reactivating, preserving and shaping collective memories is now a thriving field of. This work, combi- ned with van Dijk’s (1988a; 1988b; 2011) studies of news discourses, alows us consider in more de- tail, the role of journalists as an ideological group in shaping collective memories through their social representations of news events. This study explores this process through an analysis of the way Turkish journalists represented one of important international events of recent years, the “Malta Summit” meeting between US President George Bush and Soviet leader Mikhael Gorbachev on December 2-3, 1989 in Malta. Prior to it taking place, most East Euro pean countries had already begun the process of political transformation. The summit resulted in the declaration of the “end of the Cold War” and important decisions concerning the disarmanent process. For the purposes of this study, five days of news coverage acrosss a representative sample of the Turkish opinionpress (Cumhuriyet, Gunes and Tercuman), popular press (Hurriyet, Sabah and Gunaydin) and quasi-opinion/popular press (Milliyet) were selected for analysis. The analysis addressed thematic and schematic structures at the macro structural level; local semantics and local coherence at the microstructural level; together with the lexical style of the news and the content of the news photographs.

The battle over sovereignty: Stamps, post, and the creation of a new Palestinian socio-political order, 1994–2000

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the visual analysis of stamps that were printed, distributed, and used in the Palestinian Authority during the period of 1994–2000. The stamp is an important source for historians and scholars of nationalism. The use of icons, images, and ideas that were designed to shape public opinion in the Palestinian Authority can shed light on political and social issues that were at the heart of the Palestinian society during this period. The article will also discuss the broader implications of the postal service, the status of its sovereignty, and the significance that status represents in a national context. Postage stamps intended for interior and international use play an important role in shaping collective memory. In the case of the Palestinians, where a people had to maintain and build a memory without having self-determination and found itself fragmented between competing factions, stamps and the visual aspects of their graphic design played an important role in shaping the national mind. The mail, in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, became an arena within the political struggle, not only a means of exchanging messages.

“Education based on tradition” on the level of units of the Polish People’s Army (1956–1980). Means and methods and their efficacy in influencing collective memory of soldiers

The author, interested in the history of the Polish People’s Army (political work on the level of military units), focuses his attention on the problem of shaping collective memory of Poles in Poland under communists. The article is devoted to one of the elements of political and educational work in the Polish People’s Army – to the so-called “education based on tradition”, which was a tool of inculcation of the special vision of history in line with the political principles (emphasising “progressive traditions”, the history of workers’ movement and activities of communists during the World War II). Tools used for this “education based on tradition” included halls of tradition (which were the centres of this activity), political training, celebrations of important feast days and anniversaries, visual propaganda and cultural-educational work. In the closing part of the article the author presented also some limitations of this education, together with a selection of results of sociological research conducted in the army in the 1960s, which evidenced the effectiveness of propaganda work.