Eviatar Zerubavel, “Social Memories”
Not only does our social environment influence the way we mentally process the present, it also affects the way we remember the past. Like the present, the past is to some extent also part of a social reality that, while far from being absolutely objective, nonetheless transcends our own subjectivity and is shared by others around us. As evident from the universalistic tendency of those who study memory today to focus primarily on the formal aspects of the processes of organizing, storing, and accessing memories which we all share, they are largely interested in how humans remember past events. And yet, when they come to examine the actual contents of those memories, they usually go to the other extreme and focus on the individual. Nowhere is this individualistic bent more glaringly evident than in psychoanalysis, which deals almost exclusively with our distinctly personal memories. Once again one can identify a relatively unexplored intellectual terrain made up of various "remembrance environments" lying somewhere between the strictly personal and the absolutely universal. These environments (which include, for example, the family, the workplace, the profession, the fan club, the ethnic group, the religious community, and the nation) are all larger than the individual yet at the same time considerably smaller than the entire human race. Admittedly, there are various universal patterns of organizing, storing, and accessing past experiences that indeed characterize all human beings and actually distinguish human memory from that of dogs, spiders, or parrots. At the same time, it is also quite clear that we each have our own unique autobiographical memories, made up of absolutely personal experiences that we share with nobody else. Yet we also happen to have certain memories which we share with some people but not with others. Thus, for example, there are certain memories commonly shared by most Guatemalans or art historians yet only by few Australians or marine biologists. By the same token, there are many memories shared by nearly all Beatles fans, stamp. collectors, or longtime readers of Mad Magazine, yet by no one else besides them. The unmistakably common nature of such memories indicates that they are clearly not just personal. At the same time, the fact that they are almost exclusively confined to a particular thought community shows that they are not entirely universal either. Such memories constitute the distinctive domain of the sociology of memory, which, unlike any of the other cognitive sciences, focuses specifically on the social aspects of the mental act of remembering. In doing so, it certainly helps us gain a finer appreciation of the considerable extent to which our social environment affects the way we remember the past. The work on memory typically produced by cognitive psychologists might lead one to believe that the act of remembering takes place in a social vacuum. The relative lack of explicit attention to the social context within which human memory is normally situated tends to promote a rather distorted vision of individuals as "mnemonic Robinson Crusoes" whose memories are virtually free of any social influence or constraint. Such a naive vision would be quite inappropriate even within the somewhat synthetic context of the psychological laboratory, where much of the research on memory today (with the notable exception of "ecologically" oriented work) 1 typically takes place. It is even less appropriate, however, within the context of real life. Consider the critical role of others as witnesses whose memories help corroborate our own. 2 No wonder most courts of law do not give uncorroborated testimony the same amount of credence and official recognition as admissible evidence that they normally give to socially corroborated testimony. After all, most of us tend to feel somewhat reassured that what we seem to remember indeed happened when there are others who can verify our recollections and thereby provide them with a stamp of intersubjectivity. The terribly frustrating experience of recalling people or events that no one else seems to remember strongly resembles that of seeing things or hearing sounds which no one else does. 3 Furthermore, there are various occasions when other people have even better access to certain parts of our past than we ourselves do and can therefore help us recall people and events which we have somehow forgotten. A wife, for example, may remind her husband about an old friend of his which he had once mentioned to her yet has since forgotten. 4 Parents, grandparents, and older siblings, of course, often remember events from our own childhood that we cannot possibly recall. In fact, many of our earliest "memories" are actually recollections of stories we heard from them about our childhood. 5 In an odd way, they remember them for us! Yet such social mediation can also assume a somewhat negative form, since such "mnemonic others" can also help block our access to certain events in our own past, to the point of actually preventing some of them from becoming memories in the first place! This is particularly critical in the case of very young children, who still depend on others around them to define what is real (as well as "memorable") and what is not. A 35-year-old secretary whose boss tells her to "forget this ever happened" will probably be psychologically independent enough to store that forbidden memory in her mind anyway. However, a five-year-old boy whose mother flatly denies that a certain event they have just experienced together ever took place will most likely have a much harder time resisting her pressure to suppress it from his consciousness and may thus end up repressing it altogether. Such instances remind us, of course, that the reasons we sometimes tend to repress our memories may not always be internal and that our social environment certainly plays a major role in helping us determine what is "memorable" and what we can (or even should) forget. Needless to say, they further demonstrate the ubiquity of sociomental control. The notion that there are certain things that one should forget also underscores the normative dimension of memory, which is typically ignored by cognitive psychology. Like the curricular institutionalization of required history classes in school, it reminds us that remembering is more than just a spontaneous personal act, as it also happens to be regulated by unmistakably social rules of remembrance that tell us quite specifically what we should remember and what we must forget. Such rules often determine how far back we remember. In the same way that society helps delineate the scope of our attention and concern through various norms of focusing, it also manages to affect the extent of our mental reach into the past by setting certain historical horizons beyond which past events are regarded as somehow irrelevant and, as such, often forgotten altogether. 6 The way society affects the "depth" of individuals' memory by relegating certain parts of the past to official oblivion is often quite explicit, as in the case of the 1990 ruling by the Israeli broadcasting authorities prohibiting television and radio announcers from referring to places in present-day Israel by their old Arab names. Just as blatant is the aptly-named statute of limitations, the ultimate institutionalization of the idea that it is actually possible to put certain things "behind us" The very notion of such a statute implies that even events that we all agree happened can nonetheless be mentally banished to a "pre-historical" past that is considered legally irrelevant, and thereby officially forgotten. The unmistakably conventional nature of any statute of limitations, of course, reminds us that it is very often society that determines which particular bygones we let be bygones. Yet the extent to which our social environment affects the "depth" of our memory is also manifested somewhat more tacitly in the way we conventionally begin historical narratives. 7 By defining a certain moment in history as the actual beginning of a particular historical narrative, it implicitly defines for us everything that preceded that moment as mere "pre-history" which we can practically forget. Thus, for example, when the founders of Islam established the flight of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina in A.D. 622 as the pivot of the conventional Mohammedan chronological dating system, they implicitly defined everything that had ever happened prior to that momentous event as a mere prelude to the "real" history that every Muslim ought to remember. 8 By the same token, when sociologists say (as they often do) that sociology was "born" in the 1830s with the work of Auguste Comte (who was indeed the first ever to use the term "sociology"), they are implicitly saying that their students need not really read the work of Aristotle, Hobbes, or Rousseau, which is somehow only "pre-sociological." 9 Nowhere is the unmistakably social partitioning of the past into a memorable "history" and a practically forgettable "pre-history" more glaringly evident than in the case of so-called discoveries. When the New York Times, for example, offers its readers a brief historical profile of Mozambique that begins with its "discovery" by the Portuguese in 1498 and fails to remind them that that particular moment marks only the beginning of the European chapter in its history, it relegates that country's entire pre-European past to official oblivion. A similar example of such "mnemonic decapitation" is the way Icelanders begin the official history of their island. Both the Book of Settlements (Landnámabók) and Book of Icelanders (Íslendingabók) mention in passing the fact that when the first Norwegians arrived on the island in the ninth century, they found Irish monks already living there, yet their commitment to Iceland's Scandinavian identity (and therefore origins) leads them to present those Norwegians as its first settlers! 10 While not trying to explicitly conceal the actual presence of Celts prior to Iceland's official "discovery" by Scandinavians, they nevertheless treat them as irrelevant to its "real" history. Consider also the way we conventionally regard Columbus's first encounter with America as its official "discovery," thereby suppressing the memory of the millions of native Americans who were already living there. The notion that Columbus "discovered" America goes hand in hand with the idea that American history begins only in 1492 and that all events in the Western Hemisphere prior to that year are just part of its "pre-American" past. From this historiographic perspective, nothing that predates 1492 truly belongs in "American history." Indeed, it is conventionally considered part of a mere "pre-Columbian" prologue. America's "pre-history" includes not only its own native past but also earlier, "pre-Columbian" European encounters with it, which explains why the Norse voyages across the Atlantic (to Greenland, Newfoundland, and possibly Nova Scotia) in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries are still not considered part of the official narrative of "the discovery of America." 11 Despite the fact that most of us are fully aware of the indisputable Norse presence on the western shores of the Atlantic almost five centuries before Columbus, we still regard his 1492 landfall in the Bahamas as the official beginning of American history. After all, if "America" was indeed born only on October 12, 1492 (a notion implicitly supported by the official annual celebration of its "birthday" on Columbus Day), nothing that had happened there prior to that date can be considered truly part of "American history." 12 Needless to say, this grand division of the past into a memorable "history" and an officially forgettable "pre-history" is neither logical nor natural. It is an unmistakably social, normative convention. One needs to be socialized to view Columbus's first voyage to the Caribbean as the beginning of American history. One certainly needs to be taught to regard everything that had ever happened in America prior to 1492 as a mere prelude to its "real" history. Only then, indeed, can one officially forget "pre-Columbian" America. We usually learn what we should remember and what we can forget as part of our mnemonic socialization, a process that normally takes place when we enter an altogether new social environment, such as when we get married, start a new job, convert to another religion, or emigrate to another country. 13 (It is a subtle process that usually happens rather tacitly: listening to a family member recount a shared experience, for example, implicitly teaches one what is considered memorable and what one can actually forget.) In acquainting us with the specific rules of remembrance that operate in that environment, it introduces us to a particular "tradition" of remembering. A mnemonic tradition includes not only what we come to remember as members of a particular thought community but also how we remember it. After all, much of what we seem to "remember" is actually filtered (and often inevitably distorted) through a process of subsequent interpretation, which affects not only the actual facts we recall but also the particular "light" in which we happen to recall them. Thus, it is hardly surprising that a girl who grows up in a highly traditionalistic family which tends to embellish and romanticize the past would come to "remember" her great-grandfather as a larger-than-life, almost mythical figure. Indeed, that is why Americans who grow up today in liberal and conservative homes "remember" so differently the great social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. As the very first social environment in which we learn to interpret our own experience, the family plays a critical role in our mnemonic socialization. In fact, most subsequent interpretations of early "recollections" of particular events in one's life are only reinterpretations of the way they were originally experienced and remembered within the context of one's family! That explains why we often spend a lot of mental effort as we grow up trying to "reclaim" our own personal recollections from our parents or older siblings. Indeed, what is often experienced in intensive psychotherapy is the almost inevitable dash between recalling certain people and events through the mnemonic lenses provided by our immediate family and recalling those same people and events by gradually regaining contact with deeper layers of our selves. Yet mnemonic traditions affect our memory even more significantly by prompting us to adopt a particular cognitive "bias" 14 that leads us to remember certain things but not others. As an increasing body of research on memory seems to indicate, familiarity usually breeds memorability, as we tend to remember information that we can somehow fit into ready-made, familiar schematic mental structures that "make sense" to us 15 (the same structures that, as we have already seen, affect the way we mentally process our perceptual experience). That is why it is usually much easier to recall that a particular character in a story we have read happened to wear glasses when she is a librarian, for example, than when she is a waitress or a nurse. This tendency to remember things schematically applies not only to actual facts but also to the way we recall the general "gist" of events (which is often all we can remember of them) 16 as well as to the way we interpret those memories. 17 To further appreciate such tendency to remember events that proceed according to a certain schematic set of prior expectations, consider also the formulaic, script-like "plot structures" 18 we often use to narrate the past, a classic example of which is the traditional Zionist view of the history of Jews' "exilic" life outside the Land of Israel almost exclusively in terms of persecution and victimization. 19 I find it quite interesting, in this regard, that only in my late thirties did I first realize that Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who I had always "remembered" languishing in the penal colony on Devil's Island until he died (following the infamous 1894 trial at which he was wrongly convicted for treason against France), was actually exonerated by the French authorities and even decorated with the Legion of Honor twelve years later! Having grown up in Israel during the 1950s and having been socialized into the Zionist mnemonic tradition of narrating European Jewish history, it is hardly surprising that that is how I "remembered" the end of the famous Dreyfus Affair. Needless to say, the schematic mental structures on which mnemonic traditions typically rest are neither "logical" nor natural. Most of them are either culture-specific or subculture-specific, 20 and therefore something we acquire as part of our mnemonic socialization. Thus, if we tend to remember so much better situational details that are salient in our own culture or subculture, 21 it is mostly because so many of our pre-existing expectations are based on conventionalized, social typifications. 22 Once again we are seeing indisputable evidence of society's ubiquitous cognitive role as a mediator between individuals and their own experience. In fact, since most of the schematic mental structures that help us organize and access our memories are part of our unmistakably social "stock of knowledge" much of what we seem to recall is only socially, rather than personally, familiar to us! Indeed, it is what we come to "remember" 23 as members of particular thought communities. The fact that I can actually "recall" the Dreyfus Affair also reminds us that what we remember includes far more than just what we have personally experienced. In other words, it underscores the unmistakably impersonal aspect of memory. I was already forty-three when I first saw Venice, yet I soon realized that it was actually quite familiar to me. The majestic Grand Canal, for example, was something I had already "seen" on the cover of an album of brass concerti by Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi when I was eighteen. And when I saw the infamous "Lion's Mouth" (where anonymous accusers once dropped their denunciations of fellow Venetians to the secret police) in the Palace of the Doges, I was actually seeing something I remembered from a book I had read some twenty years earlier. Stored in my mind are rather vivid "recollections" of my greatgrandfather (who I never even met and about whom I know only indirectly from my mother's, grandmother's, and great-aunt's accounts), the Crucifixion (the way I first "saw" it in Nicholas Ray film The King of Kings when I was twelve), and the first voyage around the world (the way I first envisioned it when I read Stefan Zweig's biography of Ferdinand Magellan as a teenager). I have somewhat similar "memories" of the Inca Empire, the Punic Wars, and Genghis Khan, despite the fact that I personally experienced none of them. In fact, neither are my recollections of most of the "historical" events that have taken place in my own lifetime entirely personal. 24 What I usually remember of those events is how they were described by others who did experience them personally! They are socially mediated memories that are based entirely on secondhand accounts of others. 25 Thus, for example, I "remember" the French pullout from Algeria and the Soviet invasion of Prague mainly through the way they were reported at the time in the newspapers. I likewise "recall" the Eichmann trial, the Cuban missile crisis, and the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon mainly through radio and television reports. 26 In fact, much of what we seem to "remember" we did not actually experience personally. We only do so as members of particular families, organizations, nations, and other mnemonic communities 27 to which we happen to belong. Thus, for example, it is mainly as a Jew that I "recall" so vividly the Babylonian destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem more than twenty-five centuries before I was born. By the same token, it is as a member of my family that I "remember" my great-great-grandmother (whose memory is probably no longer carried by anyone outside it), and as a soccer fan that I recall Uruguay's historic winning goal against Brazil in the 1950 World Cup final. Consider also the special place of the Stonewall riots and of Charlie Parker's early gigs with Dizzy Gillespie at Minton's Play House in the respective memories of homosexuals and jazz aficionados. Indeed, being social presupposes the ability to experience events that happened to groups and communities long before we even joined them as if they were somehow part of our own past, an ability so perfectly captured by the traditional Jewish claim, explicitly repeated every Passover, that "we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and God brought us out of there with a mighty hand." (On Passover Jews also recite the following passage from the Haggadah: "In every generation, a man should see himself as though he had gone forth from Egypt. As it is said: 'And you shall tell your son on that day, it is because of what God did for me when I went forth from Egypt.'") 28 Such existential fusion of one's own biography with the history of the groups or communities to which one belongs is an indispensable part of one's unmistakably social identity as an anthropologist, a Mormon, a Native American, a Miami Dolphins fan, or a member of the U.S. Marine Corps. In marked contrast to our strictly autobiographical memory, such sociobiographical memory 29 also accounts for the sense of pride, pain, or shame we sometimes experience as a result of things that happened to groups and communities to which we belong long before we even joined them. 30 Consider the national pride of present-day Greeks, much of which rests on the glorious accomplishments of fellow Greek scholars, artists, and philosophers some twenty-four centuries ago, or the institutional arrogance of many current faculty of academic departments that were considered great forty years ago but have since been in decline. Consider also the long tradition of pain and suffering carried by many present-day American descendants of nineteenth-century African slaves, or the great sense of shame that pervades the experience of many young Germans born many years after the collapse of the Nazi regime. Indeed, identifying with a particular collective past is an important part of the process of acquiring a particular social identity (hence the appeal for some students of African-American and Women's Studies programs in universities, for example). Familiarizing new members with their collective past is an important part of groups' and communities' general efforts to incorporate them. Business corporations, colleges, and army battalions, for example, often introduce new members to their collective history as part of their general "orientation." Children whose parents came to the United States from Ghana , Ecuador, or Cambodia are likewise taught in school to "remember" Paul Revere and the Mayflower as part of their own past. From Poland to Mexico, from Israel to Taiwan, the study of national history plays a major role in the general effort of the modern state to foster a national identity. 31 At the same time (and for precisely the same reasons), exiting a, group or a community typically involves forgetting its past. Children who are abandoned by one of their parents, for example, rarely carry on the memories of his or her family. Children of assimilated immigrants likewise rarely learn much from their parents about the history of the societies they chose to leave, both physically and psychologically, behind them. Given its highly impersonal nature, social memory need not even be stored in individuals' minds. Indeed, there are some unmistakably impersonal "sites" 32 of memory. It was the invention of language that first freed human memory from the need to be stored in individuals' minds. As soon as it became technically possible for people to somehow "share" their personal experiences with others, those experiences were no longer exclusively theirs and could therefore be preserved as somewhat impersonal recollections even after they themselves were long gone. In fact, with language, memories can actually pass from one person to another even when there is no direct contact between them, through an intermediate. Indeed, that has always been one of the main social functions of the elderly, who, as the de facto custodians of the social memories of their communities, have traditionally served as "mnemonic go-betweens," essentially linking historically separate generations who would otherwise never be able to mentally "connect" with one another. Such "mnemonic transitivity" allows for the social preservation of memories in stories, poems, and legends that are transmitted from one generation to the next. One finds such oral traditions 33 in practically any social community-from families, churches, law firms, and college fraternities to ethnic groups, air force bases, basketball teams, and radio stations. It was thus an oral tradition that enabled the Marranos in Spain, for example, to preserve their secret Jewish heritage (and therefore identity) for so many generations. It was likewise through stories that the memory of their spectacular eleventh-century encounter with America was originally preserved by Icelanders, more than a century before it was first recorded in their famous sagas and some 950 years before it was first corroborated by actual archaeological finds in Newfoundland. 34 Furthermore, ever since the invention of writing several thousand years ago, it is also possible to actually bypass any oral contact, however indirect, between the original carrier of a particular recollection and its various future retrievers. Present-day readers of Saint Augustine's Confessions can actually "share" his personal recollections of his youth despite the fact that he has already been dead for more than fifteen centuries! Doctors can likewise share patient histories readily, since the highly impersonal clinical memories captured in their records are accessible even when those who originally recorded them there are not readily available for immediate consultation. 35 That explains the tremendous significance of documents in science (laboratory notes, published results of research), law (affidavits, contracts), diplomacy (telegrams, treaties), business (receipts, signed agreements), and bureaucracy (letters of acceptance, minutes of meetings), as well as of the archives, libraries, and computer files where they are typically stored. 36 It also accounts for the critical role of history textbooks in the mnemonic socialization of present and future generations.
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