Abstract
Over the past three decades, Howard Schuman and several collaborators—including Barry Schwartz, Philip Converse, and Amy Corning—have vigorously investigated the linkage between generations and collective memory, subjecting Karl Mannheim’s ([1928] 1952) provocative reflections on the sociological significance of generational experience to rigorous scrutiny using multi-method approaches and cross-national comparisons. In Generations and Collective Memory, Corning and Schuman synthesize their findings to date, breaking fresh ground in theorizing the relationship between memory and generation as well as the broad significance of generations as a sociological variable.
The book is organized in three sections; while each could stand on its own in illuminating a specific feature of the memory-generation nexus, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A broad introductory chapter concisely situates the project in its theoretical context, drawing from interdisciplinary literature on collective memory—especially the work of Maurice Halbwachs, Barry Schwartz, James E. Young, and David Blight—to define and motivate the book’s key concepts. Collective memory, for Corning and Schuman, refers to both cultural representations and to ordinary people’s interpretations of, and knowledge about, the past; and, indeed, the authors pay careful attention to the relationship between these two dimensions. “Generation” has two meanings as well. Most simply, it refers to a “location in time” (pp. 15–16)—that is to say, one’s birth cohort. But, crucially, “generation” also refers to the social and cultural characteristics—most importantly, shared memories—that result from each birth cohort’s specific experiences.
With this backdrop in mind, Part I focuses on the intersection between generation and historical reputation. How have cultural representations of three celebrated American heroes—Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln—changed over time? And how do cultural representations compare with ordinary Americans’ knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about these figures? Juxtaposing evidence from encyclopedia entries, history textbooks, literature, film, television, and news media outlets with surveys of the general public, Corning and Schuman illuminate the interplay between “cultural resources and individuals’ beliefs” (p.73). In general, survey data reveal remarkable stability at the level of popular memory even in the face of vigorous critique among elites: most Americans still think of Christopher Columbus as the man who “discovered” America, though recent data suggest that new cohorts may be taking on more critical views; in a similar vein, as of 2009, only one out of ten Americans was aware of the alleged relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and among them, not all believed the report to be factual. In presenting their findings, Corning and Schuman also attend carefully to the ways in which social structural factors such as gender, race, and education provide what Halbwachs termed “social frameworks of memory,” producing important variations in Americans’ images of their shared past.
Part II is the heart of the book. Here, Corning and Schuman cogently synthesize a wealth of survey data as they test their “critical years” hypothesis. Inspired by Mannheim’s claim that we invest particular importance in large-scale events that occur in late adolescence and early adulthood—during the life stage where people tend to develop a robust sense of participation in larger social and political collectives—Corning and Schuman hypothesize that “individuals who were in their critical years when an event occurred are more likely to remember the event as important than are those from earlier or later birth cohorts” (p.80). Expanding Mannheim’s original age span of 17 to 25 to define the critical period as encompassing ages 10 to 30, Corning and Schuman find considerable support for theirhypothesis, which they have carefully tested through both replication studies andcross-national comparisons in seven countries—China, Germany, Israel, Japan, Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine. “Failures” of the hypothesis are treated as opportunities for theoretical reflection and, ultimately, specification.
Most importantly, the nature of an event influences its subjective importance in patterned ways. In the United States, individuals who were significantly younger than 10 at the time of the John F. Kennedy assassination nevertheless highlighted the event as important, suggesting the particularly powerful effects associated with a sudden media event that interrupts the flow of everyday life—even for children who are too young to grasp the event’s political intricacies. In Lithuania, respondents who were well past their critical years in 1990 and 1991 nevertheless cited Lithuanian independence, suggesting that while “sudden and dramatic” events (p.115)—the sort that produce “flashbulb memories”—have the greatest impact on those in the critical period, wholesale social and political transformations may exhibit a “lifetime effect,” taking on a sense of centrality for anyone who experiences them personally. Finally, the significance that young Israelis attach to the Holocaust suggests that state-sponsored commemorations may override critical-years effects, keeping a specific past alive among new cohorts.
Part III pushes beyond the critical-years hypothesis in several fresh directions. Particularly notable are a chapter comparing collective and autobiographical memory and a chapter on the relationship between commemorative activity and individual recollections. The former examines the parallels between the critical-years effect and the “reminiscence bump” that psychologists have observed, which indicates that our most salient personal memories tend to derive from roughly the same period as our most salient political memories. In the process, Corning and Schuman create the foundations for a more robust dialogue between sociologists and psychologists of memory. The latter chapter uses survey data from 9/11 anniversaries in the United States to demonstrate that commemorative activity can increase both knowledge about an event and the importance that ordinary people attach to it, providing a crucial complement to the ever-growing body of literature analyzing commemorative symbolism itself. Commemoration, the authors convincingly show, does in fact matter; and, moreover, it provides meaningful opportunities for “individuals not merely to respond emotionally or psychologically but to become active participants in collective memory” (p.208). With these insights, the authors return once again to their core interest in the continuous interplay between cultural representations and individual interpretations.
Among memory scholars—both within sociology and beyond—Generations and Collective Memory is a model for interdisciplinary engagement and methodological pluralism. In sociology, it deserves a wide readership, for it redeems Mannheim’s insight that generation should stand alongside the standard variables of gender, race, and education, guiding us to a more comprehensive understanding of the social forces that structure our worlds.