Collective Memory Meeting
Sydney, Friday July 14th, 2006
Recommended reading (suggestions from the participants):
Charlan Nemeth, “Minority Dissent as
a Stimulant to
Group Performance”, in Stephen
Worchel, Wendy
Wood, and Jeffry
Simpson,
eds., Group Process and Productivity.
M.A. Cohn, M.R.
Mehl, & D. Pennebaker (2004). Linguistic markers
of
psychological change surrounding September 11, 2001.
Psychological
Science, 15, 687 – 693. ('this article may
be taken as reflecting the encoding phase of the
9/11collective memory'.)
P. Uimonen
(1996). Responses to revolutionary change: A study of
social memory in a Khmer village.
Folk, 38,
31-51.
F.
Gabbert, A.Memon, & K. Allan (2003). Memory conformity: Can
eyewitnesses influence each other's memories for an event?
Applied Cognitive
Psychology, 17, 533-543.
H. L. Roediger
III, M. L. Meade, & E. T. Bergman (2001). Social contagion
of
memory.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8(2), 365-371.
R.Fivush, J. Bohanek, R. Robertson, & M. Duke (2004). Family
narratives and the development of
children’s
emotional well-being.
In M. W. Pratt & B. E. Fiese (Eds.), Family
stories and the lifecourse: Across
time and generations.
'The coolest paper I've read by someone else that is on point for our
purposes is Kaz Mori's 2003 paper, which I see he has made
available to everyone on the website.'
K. Nelson, (2003). Self
and social functions: Individual autobiographical memory and collective
narrative. Memory, 11,
125-136.
Ed Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild
(MIT, 1996).
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge,
1989).
R. Fivush, & C.A. Haden
(eds) (2005) Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a
Narrative Self:
Developmental and
Cultural Perspectives. Mahwah,
New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
A. Margalit, (2002)
The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
E. Zerubavel (2006).
The elephant in the room: Silence and denial in everyday
life. NY: Oxford University Press.
Jeffrey K. Olick, 'Collective
Memory: the two cultures', Sociological
Theory 17 (1999),
333-348
Schudson, M. (1995).
Dynamics of distortion in collective memory.
In D. L. Schacter (Ed.), Memory distortions: How minds,
brains and
societies reconstruct the past. (pp. 346 -
364).
Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt
in
Western Monotheism (Harvard UP, 1997)
W. James Booth, Communities of Memory: On
Witness, Identity and
Justice (Cornell UP, 2006)
Paul DAVID,
‘Clio and the Econmomics of QWERTY’, American
Economic Review, 75 no. 2 (1985)
(on the typewriter keyboard as an exogram, although he does
not present it as such).
Willem A. Wagenaar,
"My memory: a study of autobiographical memory over six years", Cognitive
Psychology, 18 (1986), 225-252.
And some critiques of collective memory studies:
Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam, 'Collective Memory - what is it?', History and Memory 8 (1996), 30-50
Wulf Kansteiner,
'Finding Meaning in Memory: a methodological critique of collective
memory studies',
History and Theory 41 (2002),
179-197
Kerwin Lee Klein, 'On the Emergence of Memory in Historical
Discourse', Representations 69 (2000): 127-150
Suggested
Viewing
Harris, A & Ophüls, M. (1969) Le
Chagrin et la pitié (The
Sorrow and the Pity).
Burning Questions (suggestions from the participants):
- What is
“collective memory”? (I’m sure we all have some idea of
what it is, but is there a collective idea, and if yes, what is it?)
- What role do intra-individual variables (e.g.,
emotion,
suggestibility) play?
- How can clinical psychology profit from insights /
methods from
the collective memory area?
- How can we arrange structures, cultures,
practices, and other
institutions so that collectives work efficiently and effectively in
relation
to memory? (i.e. how can
we use collective resources
to improve our ability to remember accurately and in ways relevant to
current interests?)
- How can we link
research on collective memory to clinical phenomenology, eg intrusive
and distressing memories?
-
Is it possible to investigate collective
memory qualitatively/experimentally?
(I ask this because most papers
seem to deal with the discourse and processes of collective memory.)
-
Is the distinction between flash-bulb
memory and collective memory simply a case of personal vs
collective?
Do flash-bulb memories become
collectivised over time?
- What social and
personal factors lead people's memories to be more or less influenced
by what other people tell them?
- We know people discuss events together and people's memories can be
affected by discussion. Can we make changes to the justice system
that will address the potential problems of
discussion - is there anything we actually do about it?
- Is it possible to use co-witness information to change a
person’s memory for an event in which they actively participated rather
than
passively observed?
- How is it possible to obtain the potential psychological and
operational benefits of post-incident debriefings without the negative
consequences
to memory?
- We know that at some point in development, individuals learn to tell
their families’ stories, as well as stories of personally experienced
past events. My hunch is that this transition is
occurring in middle childhood, yet there’s very little research on
autobiographical memory
in middle childhood. The appropriation of family
stories hasn’t yet happened in early childhood, but by adolescence,
most individuals seem
to have a store of family memories that they can
report. So my question is: how and when are children appropriating
family stories of events
that occurred before they were born? And how might
individual differences in taking on family stories influence children’s
self concept and
their well-being in adolescence?
-
In order to
extend the research on memory socialization into middle childhood, we
need new methods of assessing family storytelling. Fivush
et
al.’s (2004) mealtime conversations seem like a promising direction,
but it’s very time-intensive to transcribe and code these
conversations.
Is there
an age-appropriate semi-structured memory task that could be used to
assess socialization of family stories in middle childhood,
similar to
the semi-structured task used in early childhood? Or should we be going
in completely the opposite direction first in order to tap
naturally
occurring family stories?
- Let me think about
my burning question.
- In what ways are psychological capacities, such as memory capacities,
viewed as prior to or more basic than social phenomena in the cognitive
and social sciences, and how are such views
manifested in contemporary explanatory practices in those sciences?
- When is autobiographical memory collective, and when is collective
memory autobiographical?
- Social or collective memory often seems to be discussed in terms of
sharing of propositional knowledge. Is social memory embodied? Can we
think of memory as distributed across social actors
and the environment? Can social memory be a form of knowing-how rather
than (or in a
ddition to) knowing-that?
- What can contemporary memory researchers learn from historical
studies of memory (and vice versa)?
- How does cultural communication affect group memory? How has collective
memory changed as
society has moved from gathering information
from traditional media sources
(e.g. newspapers, national radio, history textbooks) to contemporary
media
sources (e.g. blogging, email, fragmented
istories)? On the one hand
newspapers offer a limited perspective on global events, but on the
other hand,
they are written by culturally authorized
voices (e.g. journalists). Authorization
through education ensures a
level of analysis and moral responsibility over and above the writing
standards
needed for internet publication, yet it is precisely
the lack of authorization
for internet publishing that enables the expression of diversity and
dissent.
The dominant voices on the internet depend
not on education, but on financial capital and technological competence. I hypothesize a number of
consequences on our
collective memories: 1) the fragmentation of shared histories 2) the
reduction
of the epistemological currency of testimony
3) the increase in individual
participation in cultural narratives 4) the increase of conflict
between
sub-cultures and specific identities.
-What normative ethical issues exist for collective memory: histories
and propaganda? E.g. What can we
learn from the obliteration
of Cambodia’s
cultural heritage? Was
Charles De Gaulle
unethical to repress the truth of the Vichy
government?
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- What exactly do we mean by collective memory?
- Is the study of
collective memory more than simply the examination of social influence on memory?
And if so, how?
- How can psychology,
with its focus on the individual, contribute the to burgeoning literature in
the social sciences on collective memory?
- What is the
relation between collective memory and autobiographical memory?
- How does collective
memories contribute to collective identities?
- How might
collective memory concepts be relevant to the impact of large-scale
events (e.g., terrorism)? How does collective memory have an impact
on the development of psychopathology/ symptoms
following such events?
- Can people have collective memories for events they did not
personally experience and how are these collective memories formed?
- How is collective memory a cultural and political force –
and are there ways of challenging collective memories that contribute
to
conflict?
- What is the
point of a concept of collective memory?
- What is the
relationship between collective memory and history?
- What is
the normative content of memory?
- Can a history of
notebooks tell us something about the changing concepts of
memory/externalised memory?
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John Sutton,
Philosophy Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.
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Last updated 13 July 2006.