Processes & Social Forms of Remembering & Shaping Memories

1. Processes & Social Forms of Remembering & Shaping Memories Collective Memory and Public Discourse School of Communication, SFU, Spring 2007 Professor: Jan Marontate African Drum Workshop, Healing Weekend, Black Loyalist Heritage Site, Nova Scotia, 2006

2. Recall: Course Administration • Handout # 1: Syllabus, Grading, Schedule • Course Website • Handout #2: Partial List of Readings for Weeks 1-4 Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931

3. Last Day: Core concepts in Studies of Collective Memory • Focus on • History of scholarly work on “collective memory” and origins of early interests • Terminology & related issues • Early Interest in Collective Memory: Social Construction of ’Knowledge’ & Individual/Society • Memory as a “social fact” & the social frameworks of memory

4. What constitutes a “Site of Memory”? • "where [cultural] memory crystallizes and secretes itself" (Nora 1989: 7)

5. places • archives, • museums, • cathedrals, • palaces, • cemeteries, and • memorials;

6. concepts and practices • commemorations, • generations, • Mottos • rituals;

7. objects • inherited property • mementos • monuments • manuals, • emblems, • basic texts • symbols.

8. Non-places, Silencing: Memories of Amish Schoolhouse Killings • Site where children were killed • Destruction of Amish Schoolhouse

9. Innovations as Rejection of Memories of the Past or revivals? • Invention of new ceremonies • new “fashions” (today could it be rejection of the burka?)

10. Typology of Memory Claims (Connerton) • 1-Personal Memory • Sources: Connections with individual’s life history • 2-Cognitive memory • Not necessary about the past but enabled by something we have learned to help us decipher past, present & future • 3-Habit Memory • Performative but not necessarily grounded in specifiv memories

11. Discussion of Last week’s Film Screening • Rabbit-Proof Fence • Fact-based story • Personal Memories? • Collective Memories?

12. Today: Processes & Forms • Historical notions • memory as “positive” • way of preserving • knowledge & skill • ways of life • sense of identity • Assumptions about mnemonic traces • Cognitive vs. unconscious processes • Time Maps as ways of making connections (Zerubavel)

13. “Time Maps” & the Social Shaping of Memory Discourses • Questions of relevance • Long and short term (Annales School notion of longue durée) • Making connections • Delimiting discontinuities

14. Progress narratives Decline narratives (examples from Zerubavel Time Maps) Example: Plotlines & Narrative Forms

15. Legato (connected) Staccato (breaks) Historical “Phrasing” in Narratives

16. “Triggers”, memory retrieval (types of Mnemonic devices) • Words, facts, skills, events • Ideals, goals, intentions, promises • Feelings, states-of-mind, earlier selves etc… • Things, odours, ex. Madeleine (Proust, Remembrance of things past, triggered by smell and taste of Madeleines, a style of French cupcake)

17. Varieties of Personal Memory • What do we become aware of when we remember and how do we do it? (David Gross Lost Time, 2000) • Semantic memory (words) • Propositional memories (kinds of Info.) • Implicit memories (ex. How to play an instrument) • Episodic memory (beginning & end, aura) • Other kinds • Projects (Odysseus and faithfulness to project of returning home) • Revisionist (confessions) • Happy/sad episodes, feelings & emotions (ex. Proust) • Amnesia (deliberate, unconscious etc..)

18. Biography (Personal & Collective Dimensions) • Biography & Autobiography as ways of creating relationships • Discursive process that shapes memories • Example: Rabbit-proof fence • Fact-based film • Historical reconstructions • Personal? • experiences of group(s) of people (mnemonic communities)? - other perspectives?

19. Ways of mapping personal to collective memories • Family, ancestry & descent • Dynasty • Not always based on consanguinity • as historical contact chains • as continuous structures

20. Interconnectedness • Genealogical Distance (consanguinity) • Ancestral depth (# of generations)

21. Ancestral Depth

22. Tracing “Families” over time • Not just people • Can be practices, things, events

23. Monogenist & Polygenist Models of Human Descent • Direct ancestors • Socio-mnemonic dimensions of ancestry

24. Phylogeny

25. Divergence Modelling

26. Mnemonic Cutting • Conceptualizing Discontinuities (breaks)

27. Association/assimilation • Periods, epochs as mnemonic transformation of historical continuum

28. History & Prehistory in Mnemonic Traditions • Example: Pre-contact and Post contact history of N. American

29. Discussion of Fieldwork: ideas for term work by • 1-Viewing one of each • a documentary film • a « fact-based » fictionalized film Must be about past events (can be very recent past) or the history of a group, a place etc….something that involves sharing memories • 2-Doing « fieldwork ». Visiting an historic site, reconstruction or public monument or building that is intended to commemorate or express memories of a group or event.

30. Vilm Clip Screening: The Return of Martin Guerre • Personal story of impersonation? • Framing collective memories of the past?