Remembering As A Cultural Process

This brief charts out principles for a cultural psychology of remembering. The idea at its core is a conceptualization of remembering as a constructive process--something that occurs at the intersection of a person and their social-cultural world. To do this, it moves away from the traditional metaphor of memory as storage and develops the alternative metaphor of construction as part of wider social and cultural developments in society. This new approach is developed from key ideas of Lev Vygotsky and Frederic Bartlett, in particular their concepts of mediation and reconstructive remembering. From this foundation, the authors demonstrate how remembering is conflictual, evolving, and transformative at both the individual and collective level. This approach is illustrated with concrete case studies, which highlight key theoretical concepts moving from micro-level processes to macro-level social phenomena. Among the topics covered are: The microgenesis of memories in conversation The role of narrative mediation in the recall of history Remembering through social positions in conflicts Urban memory during revolutions How memorials are used to channel grief and collective memory Remembering as a Cultural Process traces our ongoing journey to answer the question of the different ways in which culture participates in and is constitutive of what it means for humans to remember. It will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers in the fields of memory studies or cultural psychology.

This book aims at building a bridge between the social and political aspects of remembering and the cognitive and discourse processes driving such activities. By analyzing these cognitive and discursive processes, Bietti explores practices of individual and collective remembering in institutional and private settings in relation to periods of political violence in Argentina. This books begins to fill the conceptual gap between cognitive oriented approaches to remembering that draw conclusions about how memory functions in the mind without a detailed discourse analysis of the communicative interaction in which this process unfolds, and the discourse and pragmatic oriented approaches that are mainly interested in analyzing the rhetorical features of conversational remembering, in some cases disregarding that there are underlying cognitive mechanisms that drive the construction of discourses about past experiences. The empirical analysis shows that individual and collective remembering in relation to periods of political violence in Argentina vary in pragmatic ways due to the fact that these accounts of the past were constructed with reference to the communicative situation. Thus, this book also aims at shedding new light on the current practices of commemoration and remembrance related to periods of political violence in Argentina, in public and private settings.

The specific concern of this collection is linking the use of media to the larger socio-cultural processes involved in collective memory-making. The focus rests in particular on two aspects of media use: the basic dynamics of mediation and remediation. The key questions are: What role do media play in the production and circulation of cultural memories? How do mediation, remediation and intermediality shape objects and acts of cultural remembrance? How can new, emergent media redefine or transform what is collectively remembered?

This book questions the sociocultural dimensions of remembering. It offers an overview of the history and theory of memory studies through the lens of sociology, political science, anthropology, psychology, literature, art and media studies; documenting current international and interdisciplinary memory research in an unprecedented way.

Innovative research requires courageous methods. With this in mind, Courageous Methods in Cultural Psychology invites students and post-graduate researchers to develop methods that will let them grasp phenomena of interest more fully. Readers will learn how to use established methods, and may be asked to develop them further by combining single steps of extant procedures, or by taking a completely new approach to data collection and analysis. In this book, diverse researchers present projects in which they have tried to do just that. A comprehensive process — from narrowing down research questions to collecting and analyzing data — is given in detail, followed by critical reflections on how well the authors have understood and shared complex realities. Project presentations are framed by theoretical chapters that deal with the challenges and opportunities of cultural psychology and interdisciplinary research. Courageous Methods in Cultural Psychology is sure to inspire and encourage those who wish to venture on new roads “into the wild.”

This volume provides an overview of theories of cultural memory that are intensively discussed in cultural studies and humanities disciplines such as history, sociology, literary studies, art history, and media studies. Cultural memory encompasses all rituals, institutions and practices through which communities establish their identity and common origin, which are challenged by the digital turn today. The book presents, on the one hand, basic arguments by the most important memory theorists of the 20th and 21st centuries and, on the other, exemplary descriptions of the most significant forms of cultural memory.

Venturing out of the laboratory into the wild of natural settings, it becomes untenable to locate memory strictly in the head. Instead, memory appears as a materially extended and socially distributed process, embedded within culture and history. This book explores the complex relations between practices of remembering and the settings in which they are enacted. It advances a novel set of concepts developed from ecological, cognitive, cultural and narrative currents in psychology and further afield to analyze (1) trajectories of autobiographical remembering, (2) the relation between individual and collective memory, (3) memory and cultural transmission, as well as (4) various methodological techniques to investigate memory in the wild.

Popular music is increasingly being represented and celebrated as an aspect of contemporary cultural history and heritage. In many places across the world, popular music heritage sites – including museums, archives, commemorative plaques adorning buildings, and what could be referred to as DIY music heritage initiatives – constitute some of the key ways in which popular music artists, scenes and events are being remembered. Bringing together a selection of wide-ranging contributions, the purpose of this book is to present a number of case studies from Europe and Australia that demonstrate the variety of ways in which popular music is being cast as cultural heritage and as a medium that invokes the collective memory of successive generations whose identity and sense of cultural belonging have often been indelibly inscribed by the musical soundscapes of their teen and early adult years. This book was originally published as a special issue of Popular Music and Society.