The first volume devoted solely to autobiographical memory retrieval, The Act of Remembering serves as a primer of ideas, methodology, and central topics, and lays the groundwork for future research in the field. Contains new, forward-looking theories from leading international scholars Answers questions such as: Do we retrieve memories according to when and where we need them? How much conscious control do we have over what we remember? Why are some people more likely than others to have intrusive ‘flashbacks’ following a stressful event? Pays particular attention to voluntary and involuntary recall
We remember in social contexts. We reminisce about the past together, collaborate to remember shared experiences, and remember in the context of our communities and cultures. This book explores the topic of collaborative remembering across a wide range of fields, including developmental, cognitive, and social psychology.
“brilliant… an impressive tour de force” Network *Why does collective memory matter? *How is social memory generated, maintained and reproduced? *How do we explain changes in the content and role of collective memory? Through a synthesis of old and new theories of social remembering, this book provides the first comprehensive overview of the sociology of memory. This rapidly expanding field explores how representations of the past are generated, maintained and reproduced through texts, images, sites, rituals and experiences. The main aim of the book is to show to what extent the investigation of memory challenges sociological understandings of the formation of social identities and conflicts. It illustrates the new status of memory in contemporary societies by examining the complex relationships between memory and commemoration, memory and identity, memory and trauma, and memory and justice. The book consists of six chapters, with the first three devoted to conceptualising the process of remembering by analyzing memory's function, status and history, as well as by locating the study of memory in a broader field of social science. The second part of the book directly explores and discusses theories and studies of social remembering. After a short conclusion, which argues that study of collective memory is an important part of any examination of contemporary society, the glossary offers a concise and up to date overview of the development of relevant theoretical concepts. The result is an essential text for undergraduate courses in social theory, the sociology of memory and a wider audience in cultural studies, history and politics.
An intriguing analysis of how place constructs memory and how memory constructs place, Remembering the Holocaust shows how visiting sites such as Auschwitz shapes the transfer of Holocaust memory from one generation to the next. Through the discussion of a range of memoirs and novels, including Landscapes of Memory by Ruth Kluger, Too Many Men by Lily Brett, The War After by Anne Karpf and Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, Remembering the Holocaust reveals the pivotal yet complicated role of place in each generation's writing about the Holocaust. This book provides an insightful and nuanced investigation of the effect of the Holocaust upon families, from survivors of the genocide to members of the second and even third generations of families involved. By deploying an innovative combination of generational and literary study of Holocaust survivor families focussed on place, Remembering the Holocaust makes an important contribution to the field of Holocaust Studies that will be of interest to scholars and anyone interested in Holocaust remembrance.
Social memory studies offer an under-utilised lens through which to approach the texts of the Hebrew Bible. In this volume, the range of associations and symbolic values evoked by twenty-one characters representing ancestors and founders, kings, female characters, and prophets are explored by a group of international scholars. The presumed social settings when most of the books comprising the TANAK had come into existence and were being read together as an emerging authoritative corpus are the late Persian and early Hellenistic periods. It is in this context then that we can profitably explore the symbolic values and networks of meanings that biblical figures encoded for the religious community of Israel in these eras, drawing on our limited knowledge of issues and life in Yehud and Judean diasporic communities in these periods. This is the first period when scholars can plausibly try to understand the mnemonic effects of these texts, which were understood to encode the collective experience members of the community, providing them with a common identity by offering a sense of shared past while defining aspirations for the future. The introduction and the concluding essay focus on theoretical and methodological issues that arise from analysing the Hebrew Bible in the framework of memory studies. The individual character studies, as a group, provide a kaleidoscopic view of the potentialities of using a social memory approach in Biblical Studies, with the essay on Cyrus written by a classicist, in order to provide an enriching perspective on how one biblical figure was construed in Greek social memory, for comparative purposes.
Remembering Social Movements offers a comparative historical examination of the relations between social movements and collective memory. A detailed historiographical and theoretical review of the field introduces the reader to five key concepts to help guide analysis: repertoires of contention, historical events, generations, collective identities, and emotions. The book examines how social movements act to shape public memory as well as how memory plays an important role within social movements through 15 historical case studies, spanning labour, feminist, peace, anti-nuclear, and urban movements, as well as specific examples of ‘memory activism’ from the 19th century to the 21st century. These include transnational and explicitly comparative case studies, in addition to cases rooted in German, Australian, Indian, and American history, ensuring that the reader gains a real insight into the remembrance of social activism across the globe and in different contexts. The book concludes with an epilogue from a prominent Memory Studies scholar. Bringing together the previously disparate fields of Memory Studies and Social Movement Studies, this book systematically scrutinises the two-way relationship between memory and activism and uses case studies to ground students while offering analytical tools for the reader.
In her research studies, Elifcan Karacan shows the relation between trauma, violence and memory with a specific focus on the events considering the 1980 Military Coup d‘État in Turkey. Based on collective memory theories and cultural trauma theories, the author focuses on the reconstruction of the past in present times and memory practices, such as commemorations, anniversaries, construction of memory-places (museums). This book seeks for an understanding of collective memory within individual narrations and mnemonic practices by using narrative interviews and biographical case reconstruction methods.
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.
Memory is typically thought of as a set of neural representations - 'memory traces' - that must be found and reactivated in order to be experienced. It is often suggested that 'memory traces' are represented by a hierarchically organized system of analyzers, modified, sharpened and differentiated by encounters with successive events. Remembering: An Activity of Mind and Brain is the magnum opus of one of the leading figures in the psychology of memory. It sets out Fergus Craik's current view of human memory as a dynamic activity of mind and brain. The author argues that remembering should be understood as a system of active cognitive processes, similar to (perhaps identical to) the processes underlying attending, perceiving and thinking. Thus, encoding processes are essentially viewed as the mental activities involved in perceiving and understanding, and retrieval is described as the partial reactivation of these same processes. This account proposes that episodic and semantic memory should be thought of as levels in a continuum of specificity rather than as separate systems of memory. In addition, the book presents Craik's views on working memory and on age-related memory impairments. In the latter case the losses are attributed largely to a difficulty with the self-initiation of appropriate encoding and retrieval operations compensated, when needed, by support from the external environment. The development of these ideas is discussed throughout the book and illustrated substantially by experiments from the author's lab, but also by empirical and theoretical contributions from other researchers. A broad account of current ideas and findings in contemporary memory research, but viewed from the author's personal theoretical standpoint, Remembering: An Activity of Mind and Brain will be essential for researchers, graduate and postdoctoral students working in the field of human memory.
