Collective Memory and Public Discourse

1. Collective Memory and Public Discourse Click on the highlighted words for discussions of this project as “Guerilla Gardening” and Commemoration of the history of African-descended Vancouverites.

2. Course Administration • Handout # 1: Syllabus, Grading, Schedule • Course Server Site (access to documents): https://webdav.sfu.ca/web/cmns/courses/2012/487 Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931

3. Readings: • Weeks 1-3: Selections from Part 1 • Weeks 4-5:

4. Researching ideas for projects • 1-Viewing • Films (documentary, « fact-based » fictionalized) • archival collections of images 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 or event that is intended to commemorate or express memories of a group or event. • UBC Museum of Anthropology • Stevenson Town, Museum & Brittania Historic Site (Cannery, Shipbuiding, Reconstruction of Workers’ accommodations, Photos, etc.) • Compare the virtual museum , other documents & testimony of descendants to the actual reconstruction of the Cannery living & working conditions

5. More FieldworkIdeas • Sites with some traces of the past: • Historic Powell Street area – former Japanese Canadian urban community in Vancouver (before internment camps) • Museums and memorials: • UBC Museum of Anthropology (First Nations Art & History) • Chinese Cultural Centre of Vancouver

6. Today: Introduction to Studies of Collective Memory • Collective Memory as Communication • Overview: History of scholarly work on “collective memory” 19th-century Statue of King Kamehameha, Hawaiii

7. Communication as ritual (Carey) “Maintenance of a society in time” “Construction of an ordered and meaningful world” • Not mutually exclusive-- how are “significant” forms created, apprehended and used?

8. Replaces Transmission Models: Example Communication as transmission from source to receiver • Research Uses: Study of Propaganda

9. Maletzke’s Model (Mass Media)

10. Collective Memory in the Field of Communication • Finding Collective memory • Political speeches, laws • TV, films, newscasts • Public policy • Photos, museums, monuments…etc. • Memory in message production

11. Collectivized Understanding • Focus on group work in meaning-making (communities, ethic groups, families, nation-states, professional organizations) • Not individual cognition • Capacity to re-present the past necessary for past to be present

12. History vs. Memory? • Different concepts • Memory: affective, calls for analysis, criticism • Collective Memory: political

13. Collective Memory as Communication (Blair) • Depends on Pre-understandings & systems of communication (language, codes, symbolic systems) • Shared assumptions (background) • Cumulative (is it always?) • Constructs & reconfigures identities according to membership in collectivities • Depends on material supports or technologies • Involves power struggles (multiple registers of meaning, conflicting interpretations of different groups, etc)

14. Implications of Material Supports or Technologies • 1- Capacity to preserve communicative messages (even in oral traditions) • Will they be preserved? Used? By whom? How? • 2-- Decision-making about what to save (or discard or ignore) aspects of the pasts represented • 3- Opens possibilities for studies of memory & place (space)

15. Expanding Notions of What is Memorialized. Exhibition of Storefront Display covered with toxic dust from September 11, 2001, New York City. Source NYTimes, Aug. 25, 2006 See also article by Fried about another exhibition related to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks

16. Theories about Social Forms of Remembering “Young Farmers”, “Pastry Chef”, “Circus People”. Photos by August Sander, People (Man) in the 20th Century. Sources

17. Early Interest in Collective Memory: Social Construction of ’Knowledge’ & Individual/Society • Social origins of categories of thought (Durkheim) • Memory as a “social fact” (Schwartz, 1996) • Social morphology, collective life & consciousness as clues to understanding « big questions » (like the persistance of class distinctions etc…) Image Source-Canada Day Celebrations & history

18. Memory & Knowledge as social constructions • Maurice Halbwachs • Social Frames of Memory, On collective Memory • Revolt against rationalism, promoted idea of contemplation • Influences: • Henri Bergson (importance of time as source of self-knowledge, immediate experience) • Annales School of historiography (Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre) « duration » (intuitive perception of innner time) • Emile Durkheim (social morphology, search for causes and explanation)

19. Collective vs. individualistic memories? • Contextualized: Social classes, families, associations, corporations, religious groups, linguistic groups etc. • Constructed: Members construct collective memories in the context of the social group to remember, forget or recreate the past • Social Communication : not individualistic consciousness or subjective time

20. Halbwachs on Collective Memory as a Social Process • a reconstruction of the past in light of the present • depends on social environment & identification with groups • Examine how we recollect things & make connections • External prompting: Answering questions others ask us or that we suppose they have asked • “Reconstruction” as part of participating in society • placing ourselves in the perspective of a social group

21. Themes in Halbwach’s work on Memory • Dreams & Memory Images • Language & Memory • Family, Religion, Class and Memory traditions Salvador Dali, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a pomegranat a second before awakening

22. « Sites of Memory » (Pierre Nora) • "where [cultural] memory crystallizes and secretes itself" (Nora 1989: 7) • "A lieu de mémoire is any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community…" (Nora 1996: XVII) (article by Hortloff)

23. Sites of memory • archives, • museums, • cathedrals, • palaces, • cemeteries, • monuments.

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

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

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

27. Intangible Heritage as Sites of Memory • Languages • Practices, skills • Traditions African Drum Workshop, Healing Weekend, Black Loyalist Heritage Site, Nova Scotia, 2006

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

29. Typology of Memory Claims (Connerton) • 1-Personal Memory • 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 specific memories

30. Silencing: Memories of Amish SchoolhouseKillings • Site where children were killed • Destruction of Amish Schoolhouse

31. Censorship & Iconoclasm • Censurship & Iconoclasm : deliberate destruction of images rooted in religious, political or other socio-cultural beliefs • Ex. Destruction of 3rd c. A.D. Buddhas by Taleban in Afghanistan completed March 12, 2002

32. Problems in understanding how collective or individual “memories” originate & are used • Difficult to link: • “Grand Theory” & structural or contextual determinants (economy, politics, Zeitgeist or spirit of the times) • Individual agency & cognition • Observable practices

33. Example: Multiple Meanings of Same Site • Visits to the “Holyland” connect pilgrims & the past in context of present (inspired Halbwachs) • BUT vary with different generations, different groups (ex. Muslims, Christians, Jews, etc..) Wailing Wall, Jerusalem

34. Functions of social memories of the past (Connerton) • Commonly legitimate a present social order • Factors & issues • Generational difference • Experiences of the present depend on knowledge of the past • Images of the past conveyed & sustained by ritual performances • Recollection cultural rather than an individual activities of commemoration and performance

35. Changing visions of the past as a way to change the present (Connerton) • Ex. Acts of repudiation, like the execution of leaders.: • King of France during the French revolution (Connerton) • Saddam Hussein in December 2006

36. Social Memory vs. Historical Reconstruction (Connerton) • Historical reconstructions independent of social memory • Historians, evidence & authority • Traces of the past (documents, artifacts, first hand observations) • Notions of “truth” • Historical writing and politics (differing collective representations of memories of the past and its meaning for the present)

37. Historical reconstructions and the shape of shared memories of the past • depends on group membership • Belief & disbelief • Survival of witnesses • Context (village vs. urban)– different opportunities for deceit (film– the Return of Martin Guerre)

38. Memories as Habits • Individuals (even bodily practices) • “universal” or shared mental traditions or processes • Conventions or norms or practices of “sameness” (rule-following behaviours like language systems or clothes)

39. What binds recent memories and distant ones? • Groups provide frameworks to locate memories • Different groups have different frameworks • Collective memory about communication • in specific contexts between group members

40. Life Stories and Collective Memory • Rescuing the lived experience of marginalized or subordinate groups ? • Problems in confronting personal histories with “objective” records (ex. Connerton, Zerubavel)

41. Film: Evangeline’s Quest 1996 (G. Pellerin, dir.)