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.

A theoretically grounded interdisciplinary study of "cultural memory" in sites ranging from Chile, Bolivia, and South Africa to Germany and the US.

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.

This collection of essays brings together two major new developments in cultural memory studies: firstly, the shift away from static models of cultural memory, where the emphasis lies on cultural products, in the direction of more dynamic models where the emphasis lies instead on the cultural and social processes involved in the ongoing production of shared views of the past; and secondly, the growing interest in the role of the media, and their role beyond that of mere storage, within these dynamics. 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? The essays of this collection focus on social, historical, religious, and artistic media-memories. The authors analyze the memory-making impact of news media, the mediation and remediation of lieux de mémoire, the medial representation of colonial and postcolonial, of Holocaust and Second World War memories, and finally the problematization of these very processes in artistic media forms, such as novels and movies.

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.

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.

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?

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.”