[Autobiographical Memories VS Social Memories] .... it is ... 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.. . . 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. .... 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
[The "Mnemonic Others"] 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. [Social Rules of Remembrance] 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. .... [R]emembering 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 [Historical Narratives] ....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. ....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.
[Scripts] 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 ... 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. ....
[Thought Communities] 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, ... 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. [Impersonal Sites of Memory] 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. Yet preserving social memories requires neither oral nor written transmission. Given the inherent durability of material objects as well as the fact that they are mnemonically evocative in an immediate, "tangible" manner, they too play an important role in helping us retain memories. 37 Hence the role of ruins, relics, and old buildings as social souvenirs. A visit to the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, for example, helps "connect" modern Mexican "pilgrims" to their Toltec, Maya, and Aztec origins. A walk through the old neighborhoods of Jerusalem likewise allows present-day Jews a quasi-personal "contact" with their collective past. 38 As evident from the modern advent of preservationism 39 as well as from the modern state's political use of archaeology as part of its general effort to promote nationalism, 40 we are certainly more than just passive consumers of such quasi-physical mnemonic links to our collective past. Numerous medals, plaques, tombstones, war memorials, Halls of Fame, and other commemorative monuments (and the fact that we make them from stone or metal rather than paper or wood) 41 serve as evidence that we purposefully design such future sites of memory well in advance. Like souvenirs, class yearbooks, and antiques, 42 such objects have a purely commemorative value for us, and we design them strictly for the purpose of allowing future generations mnemonic access to their collective past. 43 The entire meaning of such "pre-ruins" derives from the fact that they are mnemonically evocative and will therefore help us in the future to recover our past.... Since the invention of the camera (as well as its two major offspring, the motion-picture and television cameras), these more traditional means of "capturing" the past have gradually given way to photographs and films. 45 The family photo album and the television archive, indeed, are among the major modern sites of social memory. In fact, it is primarily through snapshots, home movies, and television footage that most of us nowadays remember old relatives, family weddings, or the Gulf War.
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