Social Theory: Collective Memory

Bin Xu

Assistant Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies

Florida International University

Cultural Memory (Aleida and Jan Assmann)

Communicative Memory

Cultural Memory

Content Historical experiences within the framework of individual biographies

Mythical past/ancient history, events from an absolute past

Forms Informal, loosely shaped, natural, created through interaction and everyday experience

Consciously established, highly formalized, ceremonial communication, festival

Media Living memory in individual minds, experience, hearsay

Established objectivations, traditional symbolic encoding/staging in word, image, dance, etc (cultural objects)

Temporal Structure

80-100 years, 3 or 4 generations

Absolute past of a mythical ancient time

Carriers Non-specific, eyewitness within a memory community

Specialized carriers of tradition

Characteristics of Cultural Memory

• Concretion of identity

• Capacity of reconstruct the past

• Formation/formality

• Organization

• Obligation

• Reflexivity

Implications from the Cultural Memory Approach

• The distinction between communicative and cultural memory (better than other distinctions)

• Study of the relationship between communicative and cultural memory

• Compatible with cultural object approach

Erll’s Semiotic Theory of Memory

• What is semiotics? The study of signs

• Semantics: the relationship of signs to what they stand for

• Syntactics: the formal or structural relations between signs

• Pragmatics: the relation of signs to interpreters

Memory as metonymy and metaphor

Three Dimensions of Cultural Memory

Systems and Modes of Cultural Memory

Critiques

• Lots of concepts but few arguments

• Not sure about uses of the Cultural Memory theories except for a few obvious ones (media; cultural objects)

Olick’s Dialogical Memory

• Historical sociology of memory has to be historical. (Elias)

• Sociology of mnemonic practice. (Bourdieu)

• Memory as dialogue. (Bakhtin)

Olick’s Dialogical Memory

• Article “Genre Memories and Memory Genres”

• Dialog: utterances take place within historical contexts and contain memory traces of earlier usages.

• Memory: 1) history of memory; 2) memory of memory/commemorations.

• Case: German commemoration of August 8.

Critiques

• Sociology of mnemonic practices: ironically, focused on utterances and discourses instead of actions.

• Olick’s use of Bourdieu’s practice: Where are class and habitus?