Social Remembering Research Articles

Factor structure of overall autobiographical memory usage: The directive, self and social functions revisited

According to theory, autobiographical memory serves three broad functions of overall usage: directive, self, and social. However, there is evidence to suggest that the tripartite model may be better conceptualised in terms of a four-factor model with two social functions. In the present study we examined the two models in Danish and German samples, using the Thinking About Life Experiences Questionnaire (TALE; Bluck, Alea, Habermas, & Rubin, 2005), which measures the overall usage of the three functions generalised across concrete memories. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the four-factor model and rejected the theoretical three-factor model in both samples. The results are discussed in relation to cultural differences in overall autobiographical memory usage as well as sharing versus non-sharing aspects of social remembering.

The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (review)

Reviewed by: The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory Sika Alaine Dagbovie Tavia Nyong’o. The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. 230 pp. $22.50. In one scene in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976), Mammy Barracuda, a slave, and Abraham Lincoln waltz out of a room while Barracuda sings “Hello Abe” to the tune of “Hello, Dolly!” Her white master, Master Swille, and another slave, Uncle Robin, joyfully clap along. The scene, ludicrous and absurd, in some ways speaks to Tavia Nyongo’o’s description of what the “ ‘amalgamation waltz’ is meant to evoke: a momentum that spins the body into and out of the symbolic order, a performance that becomes a mirror in which seeing and being convene, without ever quite converging” (103). While Reed’s pairing satirizes Lincoln’s assumed affinity with blacks, Nyong’o’s discussion of antebellum “amalgamation waltzes” underscores the panicked public discourse about racial hybridity. Nyong’o’s The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory examines responses to the threat of [End Page 317] amalgamation in the U. S., exploring the performativity of race. “The external, intersubjective, and embodied aspects of social remembering,” Nyong’o declares, “are critical to the ways in which I make use of performance and performativity in this study” (13). The first half of Nyong’o’s title draws on the title of a nineteenth-century political cartoon by E. W. Clay, An Amalgamation Waltz. This satirical cartoon attacked abolitionists’ views of black freedom and equality by illustrating the supposed hideousness of black and white interracial couples dancing “cheek-to-cheek, breast-to-breast” (81–82). Nyong’o informs us that the waltz was initially seen as a sensual, transgressive, and threatening dance in its European birthplace; it thus serves as apt metaphor for thinking about racial amalgamation and performance in the U. S. With a mixed-race president, a myriad of mixed-race memoirs and biographies, and ongoing academic inquiry into and public interest in racial mixing, racial crossings, and racial identity, The Amalgamation Waltz is timely and relevant. Nyong’o’s goal is to “both assert and show the performative effects of history rather than simply add to the weight of history’s pedagogy” (7). To this end, the book’s four body chapters chronologically examine four “historical flashpoints”: competing and conflicting representations of Crispus Attucks, black abolitionism in the 1830s, blackface minstrelsy in the 1850s, and present-day artistic responses to race and racism in the antebellum South. Throughout the book, Nyong’o employs the motif of the “circum-Atlantic fold,” a metaphor that concerns both time and space. As he explains, “[b]etween the potential and performance of black freedom . . . there lies the hollow of a fold within which many of our conceptualizations of race, inheritance, and hybridity were formulated” (18). In chapter one, “The Mirror of Liberty: Constituent Power and the American Mongrel,” Nyong’o explores contradictory portrayals of Crispus Attucks, the first martyr of the American Revolution, and demonstrates how the figure of Attucks has been (mis)construed and reproduced in the fold. Examining various illustrations of the Boston Massacre, Nyongo’o discusses how artists of the late eighteenth century (such as Henry Pelham and Paul Revere) and nineteenth-century abolitionist texts (such as the frontispiece of William Cooper Nell’s The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution) portray Attucks as whitewashed, mulatto, or black, according to their political purposes. Nyongo’o highlights how Attucks (and his “blackness”) has been both included and excluded from pictorial representations, revealing a national ambivalence about this revolutionary exemplar. He ends by describing how Attucks was recovered in black collective memory, a move prompted by black abolitionist William Cooper Nell. In chapter two, “In Night’s Eye: Amalgamation, Respectability, and Shame,” Nyong’o asserts that the 1830s present a unique decade because of its “lawless violence” and the “moral status of the scapegoated minority” (72). He reminds his readers that abolitionists saw themselves as morality enforcers. Not all abolitionists were amalgamationists; many abolitionists portrayed the South as a cesspool of cross-racial immorality, pointing to the sexual exploitation of black...

The Mediating Role of Objects in Recollections of Adult Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

Recollection of child sexual abuse involves complex issues of agency—both in the past and in the present. Adult women survivors face the further obstacle of ingrained cultural tendencies to question women’s testimony. Ambiguity and ambivalence are found in adult women’s accounts of their past abuse and present particular dilemmas. Drawing on social remembering approaches developed in memory studies, it is argued that recollections have to negotiate issues of incidence and intentionality in the past as well as the potential contribution made by non-human participants (e.g. objects, spaces, bodies). Using examples from interviews with survivors of child sexual abuse, we illustrate how objects (largely domestic objects and spaces) emerge in the memories as a way of posing and subsequently disposing ambiguity. Objects, as well as humans, ‘modify the state of affairs’ (Latour, 2005) and serve as the means to punctualize recollected episodes. An analytic approach sensitive to the role of objects in recollection, which is grounded in material-semiotics, is offered.

Social Remembering and Organizational Memory

Organizational Memory Studies (OMS) is limited by its managerialist, presentist preoccupation with the utility of memory for knowledge management. The dominant model of memory in OMS is that of a storage bin. But this model has been rejected by psychologists because it overlooks the distinctly human subjective experience of remembering, i.e. episodic memory. OMS also fails to take account of the specific social and historical contexts of organizational memory. The methodological individualism that is prevalent in OMS makes it difficult to engage with the rapidly expanding sociological and historical literature in social memory studies, where a more social constructionist approach to ‘collective memory’ is generally favoured. However, for its part social memory studies derived from Maurice Halbwachs neglects organizations, focusing primarily on the nation as a mnemonic community. From a critical perspective organizations can be seen as appropriating society’s memory through corporate sites of memory such as historical visitor attractions and corporate museums. There is scope for a sociological and historical reorientation within OMS, drawing on social memory studies and focusing on corporate sites of memory, such as The Henry Ford museum complex, as well as the mnemonic role of founders and beginnings in organizations. Taking a social constructionist, collectivist approach to social remembering in organizations allows connections to be made between memory and other research programmes, such as organizational culture studies.

On Memory Work in Post-communist Europe

Taking the memory of pronatalism in contemporary Romania as a case study, this article is an attempt to view the national politics of memory of contemporary Europe with regard to its communist past from an anthropological perspective. From 1966 to 1989, the communist regime imposed extreme policies of controlled demography in Romania, as it was imputed, for 'the good of the socialist nation'. Profamily measures were developed in parallel to the banning of abortion on request and the making of contraception almost inaccessible. The social remembering of such a difficult past is still a taboo in contemporary Romanian society. This general lack of public remembering, which is still playing a role in the current situation of Romania's reproductive health, is influenced by the interrelations between the different forms of pronatalist memory. The analysis is based on oral history fieldwork conducted between 2003 and 2008, and is theoretically informed by the interdisciplinary field of Memory Studies.

The Role of Narratorship and Expertise in Social Remembering

Are individuals more likely to serve as a vehicle for social contagion because they are perceived as experts or because they talk a lot? This study parses the contribution of expertise and narratorship by asking groups of three or four individuals to study variants of a curriculum vitae (CV) and then to recall the CV individually, as a group, and once again individually, with a recognition test following the final recall. The group was falsely led to believe that one member had expertise. Narratorship was also determined. Expertise and Narratorship contributed independently to critical false recollections, with Narratorship contributing more than Expertise. The way a conversation unfolds and the emergence of a narrator can reshape memories.

Deliberative Democracy, Critical Rationality and Social Memory: Theoretical Resources of an ‘Education for Discourse’

This article brings interconnects three debates to show what this might imply for the ‘redemocratisation’ of UK society and for pedagogical reform. One debate concerns deliberative types of democratic reform, arguing in favour of a ‘creative agnosticism’ towards the two philosophical frameworks which dominate this literature. This leads into a discussion of education and critical rationality, arguing for an aptitude-based account of moral agency, one which relates to the sociocultural resources we inherit from the past. The final debate therefore concerns social memory. I do not offer a theory of social memory but critique various commentators in arguing for what I call a ‘multipolar analysis’. This both describes the analytical method adopted in this article and the skills and capacities which a system based upon ‘education for discourse’ would need to facilitate. The article therefore proposes that democracy, education and memory—deliberativeness, critical rationality and social remembering—be brought closer together for the mutual benefit of each debate.

Vicarious and post‐memory practices in adopting families: The re‐production of the past through photography and narrative

AbstractIn this paper, we explore how adoptive parents manage and order visual information relating to their adoptive child's birth or foster family. More specifically, our task is to make sense of the ways in which the memories that children have of their past families are (re)constructed and managed within the context of present adoptive parental concerns. Life story books have become a dominant way in which narratives of the child's past family are formed. The aim of this book is to provide the child with relevant information, objects, possessions and images of the past and to create a coherent narrative between the past and the present. Parents are encouraged to make use of visual images, consisting mainly of photographs of birth families and foster carers to order the autobiography of the child. To date, there is no research that has examined how the process is experienced by parents and children. In order to examine how parents made use of visual information in particular, we carried out two focus groups with adoptive parents who participated in an adoption agency support group. A social remembering approach informed the questions asked, and a discursive analysis of the data was developed. The main analytical focus in this paper is on how photographs, objects and places serve as active participants in the production of the adoptive children's memory. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Networked] Memory Institutions: Social Remembering, Privatization and its Discontents

Memory institutions are social entities that select, document, contextualize, preserve, index and thus canonize elements of humanity's culture, historical narratives, individual and collective memories. Archives, museums and libraries are paradigmatic examples for traditional memory institutions. Content-sharing platforms, social networks, peer-to-peer file-sharing infrastructures, digital images agencies, online music stores and search engines' utilities represent emerging novel entities with a de-facto derivative function as networked memory institutions. This article includes an in-depth inquiry regarding the manners in which digitization and networked communication technologies implicate on the identity, structure and attributes of society's memory institutions. More specifically, I focus on privatization processes that networked memory institutions are increasingly undergoing. My basic hypothesis is that the transformation from tangible/analogue preservation to digitized cultural retrieval tends to result in intense privatization of society's memory institutions - both traditional and novel ones. Among other aspects, I examine the fundamental role of copyright law in facilitating and supporting these dynamics of privatization. The article then analyzes the consequences of privatizing memory institutions in the light of their unique social functions in a democratic culture. Commercialization and unequal participation are two elements that characterize privatized memory institutions and that may conflict with a democratic vision of social remembering. Privatized memory institutions also avoid institutional separation between the social function of cultural production and the social function of cultural preservation. The resulted outcome is that groups and sectors with dominant positions in contemporary media are able to reproduce, leverage and manipulate their social dominance from one generation to another. The power to remember, as well as the power to forget, is thus gradually being concentrated in clusters of commercial enterprises with very particular interests, beliefs, ideologies and preferences. I conclude with several reform proposals for deprivatizing networked memory institutions. As general matter of policy, reduced copyright protection is also likely to result in an equilibrium that strengthens the capacities of public-oriented memory institutions while reducing the incentives - and therefore the dominance - of commercial intermediaries entering this field. More specifically, I focus on two distinct types of reforms. One type of reform proposals focuses on ex-ante copyright privileges for networked memory institutions. The second type of reforms introduces my novel proposal to impose ex-post obligations on networked memory institutions. I argue that deprivatization of memory institutions requires also regulation that takes into account and moderates imbalanced proprietary regimes of networked memory institutions. Based on this argument, I offer a complementary set of reciprocal share-alike obligations that come on top of the general ex-ante privileges that memory institutions should benefit from.

For the record

Phonography and photography have been extensively discussed and analysed, but their complementary features as media of communication have received relatively little attention. Chief among these is the way in which, as technologies of recording, preservation and retrieval, they have affected forms of social remembering and orientations to historical time. Over the last century and more, phonograph music and photographic images have acquired strong and resonant associations with both personal and public memory, but how they actually help us engage with the past remains difficult to assess. When we look behind their familiar, everyday presence we realise that in their relations with time, memory and the process of remembering, they are both highly accurate and highly elusive. That is the paradox defining their mutual connections with the past.

The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins: Ordering and Disordering Memory in Excessive Space

In this paper I investigate how the effects of the disordered spaces of industrial ruins can interrogate and contest the normative ways in which memory is spatialised in the city. By focusing upon confrontations with the ghosts which haunt ruins, I will suggest that the affective and sensual memories conjured up act as an antidote to the fixed, classified, and commodified memories purveyed in heritage and commemorative spaces. In contradistinction to the didactic and constrained remembering that prevails across Western cities, a form of remembering which is inarticulate, sensual, and conjectural allows improvisatory scope to supplement and challenge ordered forms of social remembering.

Vectors of hope and possibility: Commentary on reckless vectors

Reckless Vectors is an important contribution to our understanding of the social, cultural, legal, and political dimensions of AIDS. It addresses what has become a largely neglected aspect of AIDS research, the continuing stigmatization and criminalization of people living with AIDS/HIV (PLWA/HIVs). Such stigmatization and criminalization were central themes in AIDS organizing and scholarship in the 1980s and early 1990s but subsequently suffered from a “peculiar eclipsing” (Smith, 1987a). The increasing management of AIDS groups through state funding, professionalization, and strategies of consultation and partnership (Kinsman, 1997) as well as a downturn in most forms of AIDS-related social and political activism further contributed to the diminished focus and emphasis on these questions. At the same time, many AIDS groups have been forced into participating in, or have become complicit in, the process of social stigmatization described in the contributions in this collection. Reckless Vectors places these under-documented and under-theorized questions back on the agenda as central questions for AIDS research, scholarship, and activism. In doing so, it troubles and undermines aspects of the new common sense constructed around AIDS, which is to some extent based on a normalization and naturalization of AIDS that takes for granted that treatments are now available that can extend people’s lives (despite all the complications and side effects that have arisen) and assumes once again that some PLWA/HIVs are the problem in HIV transmission. Instead Reckless Vectors opens up space for more socially and culturally critical perspectives. In part it does this by reconnecting us as readers with some of the more forgotten insights, perspectives, and memories of earlier AIDS activism and organizing. The papers, especially those by Mary Petty (2005), Cindy Patton (2005), and Worth, Patton, and Goldstein (2005), help us to remember and to keep alive what we learned from earlier AIDS activism and thereby allow us to have a clearer idea of how our historical present has emerged. These contributions work against the social organization of forgetting (Kinsman, 2004)—a process that I believe is key to maintaining ruling capitalist, professional, and bureaucratic relations (Smith, 1999)—and encourage instead an active social and historical remembering of earlier struggles and what they taught us. I further believe that these papers taken together present us with a number of vectors of hope and possibility that can assist in revitalizing AIDS activism and scholarship. While this special issue does not cover every aspect of the current social organization of the AIDS crisis—for example, it does not address current treatment issues and politics or the AIDS-related devastation in sub-Saharan Africa—the papers in it do complement and build on each other to establish an important beginning for further discussions and explorations.

Waging War on Wartime Memory: Recent Swiss Debates on the Legacies of the Holocaust and the Nazi Era

In recent years, Holocaust legacies have attained an unprecedented and unexpected political significance on an international scale. The failure not only of Germany but also of Allied and neutral countries to appropriately compensate the victims of the Nazis and to return looted assets eventually became a scandal. At the center of these debates were the "dormant accounts" of Nazi victims in Swiss banks. For many observers, these assets came to symbolize how justice had been denied to Holocaust survivors and their children. Though initially confined to the Swiss banks, subsequent research soon revealed the international dimensions of the issue.1 Many other European countries, as well as the United States and Israel, had to admit the existence of dormant accounts in their banks and launched investigations into the problem of looted property and heirless assets.2 In addition, big corporations such as insurance companies, financial institutions, and industrial companies were forced to open their archives to historians.3 The entire process of examination and restitution was accelerated by the dozens of class-action suits filed by Holocaust survivors. Although in many cases no settlement has yet been reached, these lawsuits have pushed governments and corporations to allow investigations into their wartime past and, eventually, to consider offering compensation to Holocaust survivors and their descendants.4 [End Page 116] In most European countries, these activities have led to efforts to reconsider the impact of World War II and the Holocaust on contemporary society. But, rather than generating unanimity, the recent discussion has proved highly contentious. In most countries, portions of the public are reluctant to acknowledge previous failures and omissions toward Holocaust victims. Critics have also complained of a "Holocaust industry" and a "Shoah business," pointing to the monetary demands of victims' groups and their lawyers.5 Yet more is at stake than money. For the victims, clearly, neither monetary payments nor the belated restitution of property can do justice. Instead, survivors who have had to wait for decades often experience the recent, politically motivated attempts to bring to closure the Nazi legacies as demeaning and insulting. In these debates it is the symbolic issues that count most, such as whether governments and companies are willing to acknowledge their responsibility as beneficiaries from or collaborators with the Nazi regime. At stake, therefore, is a reevaluation of wartime history with regard to the Holocaust and its impact on contemporary society. This reassessment of the Nazi legacies requires paradigms and analytical categories that reach beyond the familiar frameworks of interpretation. Recent scholarship indeed shows that Nazi racial policy left no area of social life untouched. Further, the meticulously organized program of exploitation, looting, and robbery, which was an intrinsic part of the "Final Solution," involved many more individuals and organizations than just the SS and the Wehrmacht.6 Slowly but surely the behavior of bystanders—individual persons as well as companies, political bodies, and whole nations—has come to be regarded as a decisive factor in the ability of the Nazis to accomplish their murderous goals. Such insights raise new questions about political and moral responsibility during World War II and suggest the need for many nations to rethink their understanding of the Nazi past. Subsequently, the question of how authorities, business circles, and the wider public have reacted to Nazi mass murders, deportations, and persecution has challenged representations of the wartime past all over Europe. The debate over Holocaust legacies has become entwined with a broader set of issues about the construction of collective or cultural memory—a topic that has lately attracted growing scholarly attention but has also caused dissent regarding the term's usefulness as an analytical category.7 Borne by living societies, highly selective, and susceptible to manipulations, collective memory (according to Pierre Nora) determines the implicit presence of the past and structures the process of social remembering and forgetting as a...

Emotion regulation during social remembering: Differences between emotions elicited during an event and emotions elicited when talking about it

This paper examines emotion regulation as a function of autobiographical remembering in social contexts. Two studies (n = 38 and 123, respectively) are presented that provide evidence that autobiographical remembering in social settings can result in changes in the emotions associated with an experience. However, the results also suggest that whether changes occur depends on features of the recall context, including the gender of participants, and the responses of their listeners. Across both studies, men showed greater emotional benefits from talking about events than women. Moreover, greater listener agreement was associated with greater benefits for emotion. The results are discussed in terms of functions of autobiographical remembering, gender, social support, and emotion regulation.

Identity, Memory and the Social Status of Groups in Northern Ireland: Relating Processes of Social Remembering with Beliefs about the Structure of Society

It has often been noted that identity and memory are important forces shaping social life in Northern Ireland. This research set out to explore these issues from a social psychological perspective using empirical research methods, drawing upon recent theory and research work from across the social sciences in the emerging field of social or collective remembering. The research specifically focused upon the relation between social remembering and shared beliefs about the shape of society, including the perceived status positions of groups. The results revealed the manner in which social identifications and group membership serve to shape both social remembering and perceptions of current society. Secondly, the results revealed interesting areas of consensus and disagreement between Catholic and Protestant respondents and amongst Protestant respondents. The implications of the results for the theoretical literature as well as future socio-political initiatives in Northern Ireland are discussed.

National Identity and the Politics of Memory: Remembering Bruce and Wallace in Symbolic Space

In this paper, I examine the different and competing practices through which symbolic places, and the events and figures they commemorate, are woven into national memories. By exploring the semiotic, commercial, expert, narrative, and bodily practices of remembrance that centre upon Bannockburn and the Wallace Monument, in Stirling, Scotland, I highlight the complex ways in which forms of remembrance are currently proliferating and fragmenting. I then move on to discuss how the common themes in these shifting politics of social remembering have been echoed in popular responses to the Hollywood film Braveheart, which celebrates Wallace. I conclude by looking at how these practices of remembrance indicate the contemporary unstable and contested condition of national identity.

Social Remembering: Individual and Collaborative Memory for Social Information

The study of individual memory and remembering has a very long history in experimental psychology. However, it was not until recently that experimental studies systematically investigated social aspects of remembering. In particular, relatively few studies have examined remembering (a) as both an individual and group phenomenon, and (b) when the stimulus material to be recalled is a purposive social interaction. The present chapter reviews the theoretical implications of a continuing series of social remembering studies which compare individual with social (or collaborative) remembering in terms of both the quantity (accuracy and error) and the quality of what was recalled, and particular attention is paid to the relationship between accuracy and confidence. The applied implications of this research in the area of the social psychology of law are also discussed.

"Out of Myth Into History"

The reinsertion of historical and mythological images of Irish women is thought to be essential for the social and self re-membering of women's rights in the 1990s. Past and current erasures are recalled at the point of a new resurgence of womenkind in Ireland. The most important symbol of this revival has been the unexpected but welcomed election of the country's first woman President in 1990. Since her election women's rights are seen to have gained more prominence in the government and public mind.

Social remembering: Quantitative aspects individual and collaborative remembering police officers and students

Psychologists have generally investigated remembering as an intrapersonal phenomenon. However, everyday remembering often has a more social interpersonal flavour, particularly when two (or more) people jointly recall and discuss an event they have experienced or witnessed. This study examines quantitative differences between individual, dyadic and four‐person group free and cued recall of a purposive social interaction — a fictional police interrogation — and contrasts the findings from two subject samples, police officers and students. Overall, groups outperformed individuals in terms of accuracy, made fewer evaluative comments about the interaction, but were also more prone to a misplaced overconfidence in inaccurate recall than were individuals. Several interesting differences in accuracy and the incidence of different types of error were found between police and student subjects. These findings are discussed in terms of differences in familiarity with task requirements and the type of interaction recalled between subject samples, and the ecological validity of the findings for each subject sample.

記憶痕跡に関する社会心理学的研究

An attempt was made to investigate the organization of social remembering and the transformation of memory traces through social attitudes.Ten subjects are observed: five were radical and five were conservative.Ten statements are used for the remembering materials, including five radical and five conservative statements concering capitalists and workers.The experiment was run individually. The subject was asked to underline those statements with which he agreed, and next day twenty-five minutes were allowed to memorize the ten statements. The recollection of the materials was tested twenty minutes, one, two, four and eight days later.The results are as follows:(1) The differences in the recollection ratio between the two groups are small and the radical group shows a higher ratio of recollection of the radical statements, and the conservative group, of the conservative ones; that is, the statements suited to the social attitude of the subjects are recalled in a higher ratio and those unsuited are more apt to be forgotten. This may be explained in terms of the organization of the Ego-system in the process of social remembering.(2) This reasoning may be further confirmed by the following observation: the recollection ratio of the statements the subjects support are very high, and increase gradually with the passage of time. This fact may be attributed to the organization of the Ego-system in social remembering.(3) When the transformation of memory traces is viewed from the points of simplification, rationalization, substitution and omission of the words, substitution is found most frequently in both groups for the statements endorsed by the subjects, followed by omission, simplification and rationalization in this order.On the other hand, the transformation by the simplification of words is most often for the statements not endorsed, followed by rationalization, omission and substitution.