Post on 29-Dec-2015
Social Theory: Collective Memory
Bin Xu
Assistant Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies
Florida International University
Cultural Memory (Aleida and Jan Assmann)
Communicative Memory
Cultural Memory
Content Historical experiences within the framework of individual biographies
Mythical past/ancient history, events from an absolute past
Forms Informal, loosely shaped, natural, created through interaction and everyday experience
Consciously established, highly formalized, ceremonial communication, festival
Media Living memory in individual minds, experience, hearsay
Established objectivations, traditional symbolic encoding/staging in word, image, dance, etc (cultural objects)
Temporal Structure
80-100 years, 3 or 4 generations
Absolute past of a mythical ancient time
Carriers Non-specific, eyewitness within a memory community
Specialized carriers of tradition
Characteristics of Cultural Memory
• Concretion of identity
• Capacity of reconstruct the past
• Formation/formality
• Organization
• Obligation
• Reflexivity
Implications from the Cultural Memory Approach
• The distinction between communicative and cultural memory (better than other distinctions)
• Study of the relationship between communicative and cultural memory
• Compatible with cultural object approach
Erll’s Semiotic Theory of Memory
• What is semiotics? The study of signs
• Semantics: the relationship of signs to what they stand for
• Syntactics: the formal or structural relations between signs
• Pragmatics: the relation of signs to interpreters
Memory as metonymy and metaphor
Three Dimensions of Cultural Memory
Systems and Modes of Cultural Memory
Critiques
• Lots of concepts but few arguments
• Not sure about uses of the Cultural Memory theories except for a few obvious ones (media; cultural objects)
Olick’s Dialogical Memory
• Historical sociology of memory has to be historical. (Elias)
• Sociology of mnemonic practice. (Bourdieu)
• Memory as dialogue. (Bakhtin)
Olick’s Dialogical Memory
• Article “Genre Memories and Memory Genres”
• Dialog: utterances take place within historical contexts and contain memory traces of earlier usages.
• Memory: 1) history of memory; 2) memory of memory/commemorations.
• Case: German commemoration of August 8.
Critiques
• Sociology of mnemonic practices: ironically, focused on utterances and discourses instead of actions.
• Olick’s use of Bourdieu’s practice: Where are class and habitus?