Social Memory

In Social Memory and History, a group of anthropologists, sociologists, social linguists, gerontologists, and historians explore the ways in which memory reconstructs the past and constructs the present. A substantial introduction by the editors outlines the key issues in the understanding of social memory: its nature and process, its personal and political implications, the crisis in memory, and the relationship between social and individual memory. Ten cross-cultural case studies—groups ranging from Kiowa songsters, Burgundian farmers, elderly Phildelaphia whites, Chilean political activists, American immigrants to Israel, and Irish working class women—then explore how social memory transmits culture or contests it at the individual, community, and national levels in both tangible and symbolic spheres.

In an age of information and new media the relationships between remembering and forgetting have changed. This volume addresses the tension between loud and often spectacular histories and those forgotten pasts we strain to hear. Employing social and cultural analysis, the essays within examine mnemonic technologies both new and old, and cover subjects as diverse as U.S. internment camps for Japanese Americans in WWII, the Canadian Indian Residential School system, Israeli memorial videos, and the desaparecidos in Argentina. Through these cases, the contributors argue for a re-interpretation of Guy Debord's notion of the spectacle as a conceptual apparatus through which to examine the contemporary landscape of social memory, arguing that the concept of spectacle might be developed in an age seen as dissatisfied with the present, nervous about the future, and obsessed with the past. Perhaps now "spectacle" can be thought of not as a tool of distraction employed solely by hegemonic powers, but instead as a device used to answer Walter Benjamin's plea to "explode the continuum of history" and bring our attention to now-time.

How do we use our mental images of the present to reconstruct our past? Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) addressed this question for the first time in his work on collective memory, which established him as a major figure in the history of sociology. This volume, the first comprehensive English-language translation of Halbwach's writings on the social construction of memory, fills a major gap in the literature on the sociology of knowledge. Halbwachs' primary thesis is that human memory can only function within a collective context. Collective memory, Halbwachs asserts, is always selective; various groups of people have different collective memories, which in turn give rise to different modes of behavior. Halbwachs shows, for example, how pilgrims to the Holy Land over the centuries evoked very different images of the events of Jesus' life; how wealthy old families in France have a memory of the past that diverges sharply from that of the nouveaux riches; and how working class construction of reality differ from those of their middle-class counterparts. With a detailed introduction by Lewis A. Coser, this translation will be an indispensable source for new research in historical sociology and cultural memory. Lewis A. Coser is Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the State University of New York and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Boston College.

This book is grounded in psychosocial research that explores the complex intergenerational transmission of memories within families and the transgenerational social issues that form a part of those memories. The author demonstrates that the organising framework of moving back and forth between inter- and transgenerational processes is key to mapping those relationships leading to the ideas of generational companionship, a multigenerational self and intergenerational mentalisation. Drawing on sociological and psychoanalytic approaches, it provides a framework for thinking about continuity and discontinuity in the lives of individuals and in the longer sweep of the generations. The role and potential for a psychosocial approach in deep-level problem solving is addressed through chapters on psychotherapy and on psychosocial interventions. Social imagination in personal and social healing is a core theme, as is the study of the relationship between creative and destructive forces that play out in human life. The book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of psychosocial research and psychotherapy as well as in memory studies, history, genealogy and social theory.

Memory is a fundamental aspect of being and becoming, intimately entwined with space, time, place, landscape, emotion, imagination and identity. Memory studies is a burgeoning field of enquiry drawing from a range of social science, arts and humanities disciplines including human geography, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, heritage and museum studies, psychology and history. This book is a critically theorised practical exposition of how media and technology are used to make memories for museums, archives, social movements and community projects, looking at specific cases in the UK and Brazil where the authors have put these theories into practice. The authors define the protocol they present as social memory technology. Critically, this book is about learning to deal with our pasts and learning new methods of connecting our pasts across cultures toward a shared understanding and application of memory technologies.

A thought-provoking book on the archaeology of power, knowledge, social memory, and the emergence of classical tradition in early China.

Social media platforms hold vast amounts of data about our lives. Content from the past is increasingly being presented in the form of ‘memories’. Critically exploring this new form of memory making, this unique book asks how social media are beginning to change the way we remember.