Collective Memory and the Historical Past
Collective Memory and the Historical Past

Author: Jeffrey Andrew Barash

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-11-29

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 022675846X

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There is one critical way we honor great tragedies: by never forgetting. Collective remembrance is as old as human society itself, serving as an important source of social cohesion, yet as Jeffrey Andrew Barash shows in this book, it has served novel roles in a modern era otherwise characterized by discontinuity and dislocation. Drawing on recent theoretical explorations of collective memory, he elaborates an important new philosophical basis for it, one that unveils profound limitations to its scope in relation to the historical past. Crucial to Barash’s analysis is a look at the radical transformations that symbolic configurations of collective memory have undergone with the rise of new technologies of mass communication. He provocatively demonstrates how such technologies’ capacity to simulate direct experience—especially via the image—actually makes more palpable collective memory’s limitations and the opacity of the historical past, which always lies beyond the reach of living memory. Thwarting skepticism, however, he eventually looks to literature—specifically writers such as Walter Scott, Marcel Proust, and W. G. Sebald—to uncover subtle nuances of temporality that might offer inconspicuous emblems of a past historical reality.

Collective Memory and the Historical Past
Collective Memory and the Historical Past

Author: Jeffrey Andrew Barash

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-11-25

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 022639915X

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In Collective Memory and the Historical Past intellectual historian Jeffrey Andrew Barash elaborates a philosophical basis for the concept of collective memory and delimits the specific scope of this concept in relation to the historical past. Barash begins with the concept of memory and the principal significations it has been accorded by different traditions of Western thought. He argues that the predominant philosophical arguments in given historical periods regarding the significance and scope of memory are more than abstract speculations, for they owe their persuasive force to the fundamental convictions they convey concerning the sense of human existence and of human interaction in the socio-political sphere. Barash argues that the paradox of collective memory requires an account of the multiple functions of the imagination which, far from limited to the production of fantasy or fiction, configures the patterns of symbolic interaction through which remembered experience is made communicable among vast groups. Using vivid examples drawn from recent history, literature, and art, this learned yet accessible work interjects clarity and originality into the hitherto vexed and confused theory of collective memory.

Time Maps
Time Maps

Author: Eviatar Zerubavel

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-06-12

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0226924904

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The pioneering sociologist and author of The Seven Day Circle continues his analysis of time with this fascinating look at history as social construct. Who were the first people to inhabit North America? Does the West Bank belong to the Arabs or the Jews? Why are racists so obsessed with origins? Is a seventh cousin still a cousin? Why do some societies name their children after dead ancestors? As Eviatar Zerubavel demonstrates in Time Maps, we cannot answer burning questions such as these without a deeper understanding of how we envision the past. In a pioneering attempt to map the structure of collective memory, Zerubavel considers the cognitive patterns we use to organize the past and the social grammar of conflicting interpretations of history. Drawing on fascinating examples that range from Hiroshima to the Holocaust, and from ancient Egypt to the former Yugoslavia, Zerubavel shows how we construct historical origins; how we tie discontinuous events together into stories; how we link families and entire nations through genealogies; and how we separate distinct historical periods from one another through watersheds, such as the invention of fire or the fall of the Berlin Wall. "Time Maps extends beyond all of the old clichés about linear, circular, and spiral patterns of historical process and provides us with models of the actual legends used to map history…brilliant and elegant."-Hayden White, University of California, Santa Cruz

History and Collective Memory from the Margins
History and Collective Memory from the Margins

Author: Sahana Mukherjee

Publisher: Nova Science Publishers

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 9781536161656

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"This edited volume brings together interdisciplinary research from diverse fields such as psychology, history, education, and cultural studies to examine the interconnections between collective memory, history, and identity. With research and theoretical examples from around the world, this volume presents both majority and minority, powerful and marginalized perspectives on national representations of history and their various identity-relevant antecedents, meanings, and consequences. Several contributions in this volume highlight the tension between engaging conflicted and negative histories with understanding the nation and the self in the present while other contributions extend this conversation to consider the impact of conflicted histories on future generations. The volume is organized into four parts. Part I highlights emerging theoretical discussions of remembering the past from social identity, intergroup emotion, and sociocultural perspectives. Parts II and III both highlight the bi-directional relationship between how people from various dominant and marginalized groups represent the nation and the consequences for contemporary intergroup relations. These sections highlight how national narratives shape our ideas of who we are, collectively, and how motivations and contemporary identity concerns shape how people engage with the past. To conclude, the book wraps up by discussing intergenerational patterns of collective memory in Part IV. Together, the contributions offer insight into how and why historical events can influence our identity, emotions, relationships, and our motivations to engage with the past"--

On Collective Memory
On Collective Memory

Author: Maurice Halbwachs

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1992-09

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780226115962

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How do we use our mental images of the present to reconstruct our past? This volume, the first comprehensive English language translation of Maurice Halbwach's writings on the social construction of memory, fills a major gap in the literature on the sociology of knowledge.

History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000
History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000

Author: Sumit Guha

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2019-11-04

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0295746238

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In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational system and mass production of textbooks that led to unification of historical discourses under colonial auspices; and the divergence of these discourses in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism and decolonization. Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes to debates beyond the field of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.

Collective Remembering
Collective Remembering

Author: Ludmila Isurin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-06-06

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1107175852

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Isurin presents a case study of Russian collective memory as it is constructed by producers and consumed by people.

The Politics of Regret
The Politics of Regret

Author: Jeffrey K. Olick

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-31

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1135909814

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In the past decade, Jeffrey Olick has established himself as one of the world’s pre-eminent sociologists of memory (and, related to this, both cultural sociology and social theory). His recent book on memory in postwar Germany, In the House of the Hangman (University of Chicago Press, 2005) has garnered a great deal of acclaim. This book collects his best essays on a range of memory related issues and adds a couple of new ones. It is more conceptually expansive than his other work and will serve as a great introduction to this important theorist. In the past quarter century, the issue of memory has not only become an increasingly important analytical category for historians, sociologists and cultural theorists, it has become pervasive in popular culture as well. Part of this is a function of the enhanced role of both narrative and representation – the building blocks of memory, so to speak – across the social sciences and humanities. Just as importantly, though, there has also been an increasing acceptance of the notion that the past is no longer the province of professional historians alone. Additionally, acknowledging the importance of social memory has not only provided agency to ordinary people when it comes to understanding the past, it has made conflicting interpretations of the meaning of the past more fraught, particularly in light of the terrible events of the twentieth century. Olick looks at how catastrophic, terrible pasts – Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa – are remembered, but he is particularly concerned with the role that memory plays in social structures. Memory can foster any number of things – social solidarity, nostalgia, civil war – but it always depends on both the nature of the past and the cultures doing the remembering. Prior to his studies of individual episodes, he fully develops his theory of memory and society, working through Bergson, Halbwachs, Elias, Bakhtin, and Bourdieu.

Generations and Collective Memory
Generations and Collective Memory

Author: Amy Corning

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-08-31

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 022628283X

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When discussing large social trends or experiences, we tend to group people into generations. But what does it mean to be part of a generation, and what gives that group meaning and coherence? It's collective memory, say Amy Corning and Howard Schuman, and in Generations and Collective Memory, they draw on an impressive range of research to show how generations share memories of formative experiences, and how understanding the way those memories form and change can help us understand society and history. Their key finding—built on historical research and interviews in the United States and seven other countries (including China, Japan, Germany, Lithuania, Russia, Israel, and Ukraine)—is that our most powerful generational memories are of shared experiences in adolescence and early adulthood, like the 1963 Kennedy assassination for those born in the 1950s or the fall of the Berlin Wall for young people in 1989. But there are exceptions to that rule, and they're significant: Corning and Schuman find that epochal events in a country, like revolutions, override the expected effects of age, affecting citizens of all ages with a similar power and lasting intensity. The picture Corning and Schuman paint of collective memory and its formation is fascinating on its face, but it also offers intriguing new ways to think about the rise and fall of historical reputations and attitudes toward political issues.

The City of Collective Memory
The City of Collective Memory

Author: M. Christine Boyer

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 9780262522113

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Describes the visual and mental models by which urban environment has been recognized, depicted and planned. This analysis draws from geography, critical theory, architecture, literature and painting to identify these maps of the city - as a work of art, as panorama and as spectacle.