Social Representations Of History Research Articles

Collective memory and social representations of history in Americas, Europe and Palestine

This article reviews and synthesizes 10 free-recall studies on collective memory carried out in Latin America, Europe, and Palestine. Results show the high prevalence of the topics of politics, collective violence and warfare, but around 50% of recalled events were appraised as positives, disconfirming a negative bias in collective memory. However, in Palestine most of the events were entirely or partially negative, reflecting country’s conflictual situation. The analyzed studies confirm a partial socio-centrism: in Latin America and Palestine most events were national. A meta-analysis confirms a generational effect in 24/100 historical events. Negative historical events were related to low social wellbeing in Palestine. Results are discussed in the framework of collective memory processes and social representations of history.

Implicaciones de los estudios sobre memoria colectiva para la enseñanza de la historia

La investigación sobre la memoria colectiva y las representaciones sociales de la historia en el campo de la psicología social puede proporcionar reflexiones de interés para el fortalecimiento de las competencias meta-cognitivas en la enseñanza de la historia. En este capítulo se revisa la bibliografía existente y la investigación empírica en este campo. En primer lugar, se analizan los procesos a través de los cuales se conforman las memorias y representaciones del pasado. A continuación, se exponen tres competencias de razonamiento necesarias para su aplicación en las prácticas de enseñanza: a) una centrada en la determinación de lo que es de importancia histórica; b) otra que aborda la identificación y la compresión de la continuidad y del cambio histórico; y c) aquella dirigida a identificar la multiplicidad de causas y consecuencias en la historia a través de la conciencia histórica y la toma de perspectiva. Concluimos nuestro capítulo con una serie de orientaciones prácticas dirigidas al profesorado o agentes relevantes en la enseñanza de la historia.

Representing the history of LGBT rights: political rhetoric surrounding the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act 1967

ABSTRACT To mark the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which partially discriminalised sex between men in England and Wales, all five living British prime ministers (Theresa May, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Sir John Major) wrote exclusively for the LGBT news website PinkNews. Drawing eclectically on recent work on social representations of history and a rhetorical psychological approach to commemorative discourse, this article examines how these prime ministers represented the history of LGBT rights and how such representations were used rhetorically. The prime ministers figuratively represented the Act as the start of a long road to LGBT equality. In doing so, the historical event was anchored in a contemporary political agenda for LGBT equality. However, despite this being an outward display of unified celebration, these prime ministers indirectly engaged in the business of party politics by selectively praising the achievements of their own parties and omitting how LGBT rights have been advanced by their opponents. Theresa May in particular managed the Conservative Party’s brand. It is argued that representations of the past provide a selective and partial view of the history of LGBT rights in the UK but that we should go beyond examining the content of representations to examine how they are put to political ends.

The useful past in negotiation: Adolescents' use of history in negotiation of inter-group conflict

Much of the concern with young people's historical knowledge centres on factual attainment or disciplinary skills. However, relatively little attention is paid to the relevance that young people attribute to history and how they use the past, and various social representations of history, to relate to the present. Research in this realm tends to emphasize the impact of collective memory narratives on individuals, rather than individuals' agency in using them. In this article, I will examine the ways 155 Jewish and Arab Israeli adolescents related the past to the present as they discussed the Jewish–Arab conflict and its resolution. Discussants made diverse references to the past: from family history, via biblical allusions and collective memories, to formal, schooling-based historical documents. Individuals used these references to the past to negotiate the present and future of inter-group relations. Furthermore, they made strategic use of references to others' narratives. Thus historical knowledge and collective narratives, which are usually perceived as constraining and structuring learners' perceptions, can be seen as repositories of resources and affordances.

Social representations of history, cultural values, and willingness to fight in a war: A collective-level analysis in 40 nations

Social representations of history, cultural values, and willingness to fight in a war: A collective-level analysis in 40 nations

Visualized Collective Memories: Social Representations of History in Images Found in Finnish History Textbooks

AbstractThis study focuses on visual collective memory, a topic that has long been neglected in the social sciences and particularly in social psychological research on social representations of history. It explores the contents and meanings of images in the construction of Finnish national history. Through examination of official history writing, a better understanding is sought of how collective memory is constructed as part of history politics. The data for the present study consist of images (N = 541) included in recent textbooks on Finnish history. Barthes' three‐meaning approach is used in combination with qualitative content analysis to examine a large corpus of images. The visualized collective memory is approached from five perspectives: (i) the years of memory; (ii) the places of memory; (iii) the themes of memory; (iv) the main actors and (v) the silence of memory. The investigation shows that, in official discourse, politics, culture and war are the main contents of Finnish visual collective memory. The key actors in the narrative are politicians, especially the eighth president of Finland, Urho Kekkonen. The most important moments in time are situated in the war years 1918 and 1939, while the geographical focus is the central square in the capital, Helsinki. The result is a national history that is positive, homogeneous and exclusive. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Monarchism, national identity and social representations of history in Indonesia: Intersections of the local and national in the sultanates of Yogyakarta and Surakarta

In the young state of Indonesia, old local authorities like sultanates have reasserted themselves. This reemergence of localized authority does not necessarily conflict with nation building. Survey research among adult samples (N = 399) in the neighbouring sultanates of Yogyakarta and Surakarta found that social representations of history were implicated in the relationship between monarchism and national identity. In Yogyakarta (but not Surakarta), a positive intersection between local and national representations of history was found: events and people associated with the sultanate were also regarded as instrumental to the birth of the nation. In Yogyakarta, support for the sultanate was higher than in Surakarta: respondents argued that Yogyakarta had the culture and history required to justify status as a special autonomous region. In Yogyakarta but not Surakarta, monarchism was positively related to national identity and trust in national democratic political institutions. The intersection between local and national representations of history, especially concerning the instrumentality of the local monarchy in giving birth to the nation in Yogyakarta, created historical continuity/positive intersectionality where the superordinate nation and the local monarchy are networked in a system of power and meaning that lends trust in democratic institutions from monarchism, and strengthens national identity.

A Cultural Perspective on Intergroup Relations and Social Identity

Violent instances of intergroup conflict in recent memory have usually involved cultural groups, but theory and research on the psychology of intergroup relations is largely culture free. The two most prominent theories, realistic group conflict theory (RGCT) and social identity/self-categorization theory (SIT/SCT) provide fundamental insight into basic processes in intergroup relations: (1) that behavior in intergroup situations is qualitatively different than that involved in interpersonal situations (including transformations of the self and relationships with others), (2) competition over material resources is the driver for intergroup conflict, but psychological identification with a group is sufficient to produce ingroup favoritism, and (3) social comparisons between groups provide psychological fuel for intergroup conflict. Social representations of history, encompassing shared knowledge about history and its meaning distributed across different groups, can be used to derive a more culture-specific approach to understanding intergroup relations. Empirical results show that popular history is a story about politics and war, and that historical symbols are part of cultural narratives that can be used to mobilize public opinion and construct national identity. Universal processes of intergroup relations and social identity are constrained by societal belief structures, which in turn are responsive to the identity and generational processes involved in collective remembering.

Social Representations of History and the Legitimation of Social Inequality: The Causes and Consequences of Historical Negation1

The stories of history tend to favor dominant groups. Two longitudinal studies indicated that ideologies negating historical injustice experienced by Māori (the indigenous peoples of New Zealand) predicted increased opposition toward social policies promoting material reparation among New Zealand European undergraduates. Historical negation was, in turn, predicted by right‐wing authoritarianism (Study 2). These findings suggest that the authoritarian motivation to protect the positive history of the in‐group causes New Zealand Europeans to actively position historical injustices performed by earlier colonial generations as irrelevant. Positioning history in this fashion has important consequences for the mobilization of political attitudes and, in particular, opposition toward social and political policies relating to the distribution of resources and status within society.

Historical Experiences, Collective Memory, and Willingness to Fight for One’s Country: Comments on Paez et al. (2008)

This article considers Paez et al.’s (2008) article “‘Remembering’ World War II and Willingness to Fight: Sociocultural Factors in the Social Representation of Historical Warfare Across 22 Societies.” Despite the importance of their focus on social representations of history and willingness to fight for one’s country, it is argued that Paez et al.’s article features a number of methodological flaws. Specifically, the way in which key variables (historical experience, collective memory, and willingness to fight for one’s country) are operationalized is especially problematic. The implications of these weaknesses for their conceptual conclusions are discussed briefly, as are the more general limitations of statistical analyses of survey data for addressing these issues.

Social representations of history, wars and politics in Latin America, Europe and Africa

This study analyzes how people perceive world history on three continents: Latin America, Europe and Africa. A total of 1179 university students form Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Portugal, Spain, Guinea-Bissau, and Cape Verde were asked to evaluate world events and leaders in terms of their valence and importance. The results demonstrated that social representations of history show a Euro/North American-centric, long-term positive evaluation, recency, and socio-centric bias. Euro/North American-centric events and leaders were found to be rated as more important and were more positively perceived in general. Distant political events, like French or American Revolution, were considered to be more positive than XX century similar events, which supports the long-term positive evaluation bias hypothesis. The hypothesis on recency bias was partially substantiated. Confirming the existence of such bias, World War II was rated as more important than the previous XX century wars and revolutions. Socio-centric bias also received partial support. African participants rated Mandela as a more important leader than other participants did. Latin Americans rated Che Guevara less positively, which suggests that some leaders are generally idealized icons, not based on group belongingness. However, results did not bring support to the centrality of war hypothesis. Wars were indeed negatively evaluated and World War II was rated as an important and negative event. Nevertheless, war- and politics-related events were not perceived as more important than the Industrial Revolution, suggesting that people appraise the importance of long-term socioeconomic factors of history when responding to close-ended quantitative measures (vs. open-ended salience measures). Results are discussed in the framework of social representations of history.

Social representations of history and the legitimation of social inequality: the form and function of historical negation

AbstractThree studies examined the form and function of ideologies that negate (versus recognise) the historical basis of claims for reparation for past injustices. Historical negation (a) predicted opposition towards the resource‐specific aspects of social policy and (b) functioned as the mechanism though which majority group members high in a threat‐driven security‐cohesion motivation (indexed by right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA)) legitimated policy opposition in both undergraduate student (Study 1) and general population (Study 2) samples of the majority group (New Zealand Europeans/Pakeha). Study 3 experimentally manipulated historical negation in a general population sample using extracts adapted from political speeches, and demonstrated that historical negation increased opposition among liberal voters towards the resource‐specific aspects of bicultural policy. These results suggest that history serves an important symbolic function in mobilising support for public policies regarding intergroup relations because temporal continuity is central to claims of legitimacy, especially where resources are involved. Research in this area is important for any nation with a history of intergroup conflict, as it aids not only in understanding the form and function of historical narratives that legitimate social inequality, but also provides insight into the ways in which such discourses can be countered and re‐formulated in order to promote social equality. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

How the past weighs on the present: Social representations of history and their role in identity politics

Socially shared representations of history have been important in creating, maintaining and changing a people's identity. Their management and negotiation are central to interethnic and international relations. We present a narrative framework to represent how collectively significant events become (selectively) incorporated in social representations that enable positioning of ethnic, national and supranational identities. This perspective creates diachronic (temporal) links between the functional (e.g. realistic conflict theory), social identity, and cognitive perspectives on intergroup relations. The charters embedded in these representations condition nations with similar interests to adopt different political stances in dealing with current events, and can influence the perceived stability and legitimacy of social orders. They are also instrumental in determining social identity strategies for reacting to negative social comparisons, and can influence the relationships between national and ethnic identities.

Social representations of history in Malaysia and Singapore: On the relationship between national and ethnic identity

Social representations of history were investigated using surveys among university populations of ethnic Malays, Chinese, and Indians in Singapore and Malaysia. Representations of history and historical leaders tended to be hegemonic or consensual, showing low levels of conflict across ethnicity and nationality, even regarding the separation of these two nations. Tendencies towards in‐group favoritism and ontogeny were slight, but statistically significant on some measures. National and ethnic identity were positively correlated, with ethnic identity stronger than national identity in Malaysia, and strongest among Malays in Malaysia. National identity was strongest among Chinese in Malaysia, followed by Chinese in Singapore. Results of regression analyses on national identity suggest that ethnicity is more sensitive in Malaysia than in Singapore. Results are interpreted through the frameworks provided by social representations theory and social identity theory. It is argued that hegemonic representations of history are associated with positive correlations between national and ethnic identity.

Social representations of history: preliminary notes on content and consequences around the pacific rim

Social representations of world history were examined among student populations in four Pacific Rim cultures: Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Nominations of the five most influential figures in the last 1000 years revealed a preponderance of political and wartime leaders (59 and 37% overall ), with Hitler number one by a wide margin. Nominations of the seven most important events were complementary, with politics and war again dominating. World War II was named most frequently, World War I next. There was little cultural variation in the emphasis on politics and war, and all nominations centred around the 20th century. Each culture showed evidence of relative in-group ontogeny, or a focus on their own ethnic or national in-group, but Europe was central to all representations, and neighbouring cultures relatively unimportant. Absolute ontogeny was found only at the level of ethnicity, not nationality, with Japanese showing the least ontogenic focus. Taken as wholes, Chinese and Japanese representations showed potential for conflict, but broad historical perceptions were unrelated to individual differences in political preferences or strength of social identity.