Social Memory Studies Research Articles

Turning Points and Myths of German Memory

What have been the contributions of social memory studies to the discourse of German history, particularly about the Nazi past? This essay seeks to distinguish between the memory boom in politics and culture and the more durable insights of social theory and historiography about memory, including insights about this memory boom itself. In particular, it explores mythologies of ‘turning points’ in the discourse of memory, arguing that the attribution of such turning points is often overstated. To be sure, 1989 did mark significant ruptures. But comparing present debates to the Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute) of the mid-1980s, and the Historikerstreit to earlier debates shows that as much has stayed the same as has changed. We remember not just the Nazi past, but the previous ways in which we have remembered the Nazi past, and our mnemonic practices are as much comments on earlier practices as on the event itself.

Between Chaos and Diversity: Is Social Memory Studies a Field?

Is (or are) memory studies, social or otherwise, a field? If so, does anything hold it together beyond the mere use of the phrase “collective memory”? Memory studies is simultaneously still in its charismatic phase, though it no longer has a right to be, as well as highly resistant to efforts to escape from it, though it clearly needs to do so. To be a field, it needs a memory of its own.

Fixing the floating gap: The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia as a global memory place

The article proposes to interpret the web-based encyclopaedia Wikipedia as a global memory place. After presenting the core elements and basic characteristics of wikis and Wikipedia respectively, the article discusses four related issues of social memory studies: collective memory, communicative and cultural memory, `memory places' and the `floating gap'. In a third step, these theoretical premises are connected to the understanding of discourse as social cognition. Fourth, comparison is made between the potential of the World Wide Web as cyberspace for collective remembrance and the obstacles that stand in its way. On this basis, the article argues that Wikipedia presents a global memory place where memorable elements are negotiated. Its complex processes of discussion and article creation are a model of the discursive fabrication of memory. Thus, they can be viewed and analysed as the transition, the `floating gap' between communicative and collective frames of memory.

Tracing landscapes of the past in class subjectivity: Practices of memory and distinction in marketizing Russia

ABSTRACTThe creation of class subjectivities is an important but understudied topic for social memory studies, particularly in former socialist contexts. Soviet policies generated fertile conditions for the intertwining of class subjectivity and popular memory by deploying the categories of “intelligentsia” and “worker” as reified, enduring, and oppositional groups and privileging these groups in contradictory and often hypocritical ways. In this article, I explore the traces such policies left on contemporary, educated Russians’ sense of themselves as long‐standing victims of class‐based dispossession. Ethnographically, I examine debates I had with Russian friends about Mikhail Bulgakov's popular novel, Heart of a Dog, which depicts the Bolsheviks’ establishment of power in the 1920s through the eyes of an elite physician–scientist. Exploring Russians’ reactions to this story and their sense of its broader relevance reveals how aspiring middle‐class subjects embraced a narrative of the Soviet past to justify the emerging inequalities of market reforms. Narrative landscapes of the socialist past illuminate a politics of victimization and moral restitution that underlies the contemporary embrace of inequality and stratified consumption. [memory, class, stratified consumption, health care, postsocialism, Russia]

Remembering the year of the French: Irish folk history and social memory

Remembering the Year of the is a model of historical achievement, moving deftly between the study of historical events - the failed French invasion of the West of Ireland in 1798 - and folkloric representations of those events. Delving into the folk found in Ireland's rich oral traditions, Guy Beiner reveals alternate visions of the Irish past and brings into focus the vernacular histories, folk commemorative practices, and negotiations of memory that have gone largely unnoticed by historians. Beiner analyzes hundreds of hitherto unstudied historical, literary, and ethnographic sources. Though his focus is on 1798, his work is also a comprehensive study of Irish folk and grass-roots social memory in Ireland. Investigating how communities in the West of Ireland remembered, well into the mid-twentieth century, an episode in the late eighteenth century, this is a history from below that gives serious attention to the perspectives of those who have been previously ignored or discounted. Beiner brilliantly captures the stories, ceremonies, and other popular traditions through which local communities narrated, remembered, and commemorated the past. Demonstrating the unique value of folklore as a historical source, Remembering the Year of the offers a fresh perspective on collective memory and modern Irish history.

'Collective memory': A memoir and prospect

This article reflects on the past, present and future states of social memory studies. Despite the proliferation of work employing the term `collective memory', the field retains the `non-paradigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless' qualities identified in 1998. As a result, this essay celebrates the appearance of Memory Studies along with a number of other endeavors promising systematization and institutionalization in the vast literature on social memory.

Cultural Memory and Group Identity in Q

The Q Document includes a significant number of references to characters and events of Israelite history. The purpose of that intense recollection of the past was to construct a new social identity. Social memory studies have made an important contribution to the understanding of this process by which groups construct their identities. In this article some basic conclusions of social memory and social identity studies are applied to the analysis of the Q references to Abraham (Q 3:8; 13:29.28), to the persecuted prophets (Q 6:23; 11:33-34, 47-48, 49-51), and to non-Judean individuals and groups (Q 10:13-14; 11:30-32).

Imagining a Baltic Paradise

Thinking Peaceful Change: Baltic Security Policies and Security Community Building. By Moller Frank. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006. 368 pp., $39.95 (ISBN: 0-8156-3108-1). Frank Moller's Thinking Peaceful Change argues that the three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) have developed security policies aimed at constructing their newly independent states rather than taking advantage of an historic opportunity to build a “security community.” Moller claims that, after the peaceful retreat of Russian troops in the 1990s, the Baltic states did little to imagine and realize possible new forms of security, based on what he labels “peaceful change.” The book radiates regret that the Baltic states have missed an opportunity to reject the classical pattern of state-building, in which an “Other” is imagined and a security discourse is constructed on the basis of confrontation with, and fear of, that “Other” (Walker 1993; Booth 1998). Moller argues that the building of a security community requires a break with conventional security thinking and such arrangements as military alliances and strict border regimes that are based on classical notions of the balance of power. By building up their militaries and joining NATO, the Baltic states clearly chose the “realist path” to security. Thinking Peaceful Change is a valuable contribution to the foreign policy analysis of the Baltic states, especially given that it takes into account aspects of social memory studies (see, for example, Olick 2003; Ricoeur 2006) as well as discourse analysis. The book is, in this respect, decidedly eclectic in its methodology, which Moller …

The first disciples of Jesus in Galilee

Early Christian writings provide little information about the Jesus movement in Galilee, but the study of the pre-Synoptic-, and especially the pre-Markan collections, can shed some light on this important period of the beginnings of Christianity. This essay starts by reconstructing the pre-Markan collection of Galilean controversies (Mk 2:1-3:6) and argues that its composition could have taken place in Galilee. These controversies reflect a process of construction of group identity whose main traits can be identified with the aid of social identity and cultural memory studies. This process can also be placed in the historical context of the emergence of sectarian groups within Second Temple Judaism. The contention of this enquiry is that the pre-Markan collection of the Galilean controversies can provide valuable information about the first disciples of Jesus in Galilee.

The World is Dead and Cooking's Killed It: Food and the Gender of Memory in Samburu, Northern Kenya

What is frequently construed as women's special relationship to food has provided an important entry point for gender into studies of social memory. Although such studies offer important insights into the relationship of food, femininity, and memory in the Euro-American contexts upon which they often focus, masculine aspects of food-centered memory have received far less attention, despite their importance in many non-Western settings. Focusing here on Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya, I examine how a shift from a diet oriented around livestock products to one dominated by purchased agricultural foods forms a potent arena of collective memory, particularly in contrasting present forms of masculinity with historically validated and remembered ones. Most importantly, the new-found emphasis on cooking presented by agricultural foods, “foods of the pot,” disrupts social boundaries that are fundamental to patterns of respect that define the most masculinized of Samburu men, the age-grade of bachelor-warriors. The iconic role these historically validated forms of masculinity hold for the cultural identity of Samburu of all age-gender sectors thus means that collective memory not only becomes oriented around disruptions in food-centered gender relationships, but moreover that Samburu social memory itself becomes in a sense disproportionately masculinized.

Social Memory and Biblical Studies: Theory, Method, and Application

Social Memory and Biblical Studies: Theory, Method, and Application

Tarrying with Repression: Political Anecdotes and Social Memory in Northern Mongolia

AbstractThis article1 explores different forms of social memory about the state socialist repression of Mongolian Buddhism in the 1930s. Based on two political anecdotes collected during fieldwork among Darhads in Northern Mongolia as well as on recent studies of social memory in Mongolia and Buryatia by Christopher Kaplonski and Caroline Humphrey, I identify three ‘mnemonic tropes,’ which are appropriated by people in recounting these tragic events of the past, namely, what I call the digital, the paranoid, and the comical mode of collective remembering respectively. In broad terms, these mnemonic attitudes seem to correspond to three scapes of remembering: a radically liberal, a mildly conservative, and a neo-authoritarian political climate respectively.

Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices

Despite substantial work in a variety of disciplines, substantive areas, and geographical contexts, social memory studies is a nonparadigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless enterprise. To remedy this relative disorganization, we (re-)construct out of the diversity of work addressing social memory a useful tradition, range of working definitions, and basis for future work. We trace lineages of the enterprise, review basic definitional disputes, outline a historical approach, and review sociological theories concerning the statics and dynamics of social memory.