Abstract
Connections between culture and memory have been actively explored by historians, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and literary theorists for a better part of the past century, most intensively since 1925 when Maurice Halbwachs published Social Framing of Memory
Throughout, the book painstakingly dissociates itself from the understanding of memory as an archive and insists on treating it as a process or “activity of using the past to meet current needs for action” (p. 5). Introducing the collection, the editor outlines a cluster of theoretical propositions that guide the volume. Memory and remembering are taken to be constructed and therefore prone to inaccuracies, thus necessarily amenable; intersubjective and as such relying on social frameworks rather than on individual idiosyncratic patterns of dealing with the past; contextual in its reliance not only on multiple people but also on multiple objects, spaces, and practices (and in this sense, also distributed); and mediated by numerous devices such as books, maps, calendars, pictures, language, and the like.
Recognizing culture as “a medium of experience” (p. 3), the introductory remarks encourage students of memory to move beyond laboratory experiments with their search for causal relationships among variables and to work, instead, with “meaningful material embedded in particular social contexts with other people and objects” (p. 4). When viewed through the lens of culture, experiments and laboratory settings constitute just another cultural context and should not be privileged as a site to observe myriad socioculturally informed mnemonic practices. Relatedly, memory’s complexity calls for a variety of methods to tease out its dynamics in various contexts and to identify the cultural resources that sustain or constrain it.
The 13 subsequent chapters are organized in four sections and move through mnemonic practices in different contexts to the idea of de-territorialized transcultural dynamics of remembering that is outlined in the closing chapter. Part 1, “Concepts and History of Memory,” provides background to the conversation about the interaction of memory and culture, including the evolution of memory in human groups (chapter 1), the debunking of the assumption that memory is an individual affair (chapter 2), and an argument for memory’s rootedness in group history (chapter 3). Importantly, chapter 1 highlights the materiality of mnemonic practices and the role of objects in memory construction when it argues for tool mastery (rather than language) as a driving force of early evolution of mind and memory. Moreover, chapter 3 points out memories’ fluidity and their constant “rewrites” both on individual and collective levels that also entail the “rewrites” of identities (p. 65). It follows then that social groups and larger societies inclined to control collective memory would be suspicious of such identity updates prompted by the revisions of historical accounts.
Contributions to Part 2, “Cultural Contexts of Remembering,” discuss the dynamics of memory processes in four contexts: the family as “society’s most important memory community” (p. 85; chapter 4), a public commemorative event (chapter 5), a court of law (chapter 6), and autobiographic memory of sexual abuse (chapter 7). Surveying mnemonic practices in their respective situations, each chapter reveals a number of social factors that influence remembering. For instance, chapter 4 addresses the issue of class via phenomena such as family leisure time and purchasing power which affect a range of “anchors” for memory and identity formation. Chapter 6 draws the readers’ attention to multiple restrictions placed on the recalls of past experiences in court testimonies (no freedom to choose the events to explain; adherence to the verbal style deemed acceptable by the legal system, and the like). Here, one also finds a brief discussion of the impact of power relations on the quality of the remembered event and a mention of false confessions and fake remembering produced under a particular configuration of power. Exploring autobiographic memory as a work of culture, chapter 7 is concerned with the effect of continuity of self that emerges to span diverse and discrete events and notably remarks that the view on memory as distributed among multiple actors raises a serious ethical question about our mutual memorial responsibilities to one another.
Part 3, “Memory through the Life Course,” adds a developmental perspective to the discussion and explores remembering at three life stages: early childhood (chapter 8), adolescence (chapter 9), and old age (chapter 10)—to underline the instrumental use of memories as a tool to assist with changes, transitions, and challenges in life.
Finally, Part 4, “Memory, History and Identity,” takes up memory and memorialization at a large group level, specifically, national memory and narratives of historical events mediated through film, literature, and digital media. Chapter 11 examines national memory as a key ingredient in national identity projects and warns about “dangerous implications” of some such projects (p. 278). Chapter 12 reasons that when organized into national history, the national collective memory is developed “in order to be taught” and to be “used to make people into national citizens” (p. 286). It also considers the material component of national memory formation since national master narratives are often perpetuated in public spaces “in monuments, rituals, museums, films and other media” (p. 292). Last, chapter 13 introduces the idea of transcultural media dynamics of memory in which memory processes get de-territorialized and in which media consumers are encouraged to “take on” memories of other social groups (Landsberg, 2004).
Having demonstrated the potential of its approach to culture, Wagoner’s collection invites further inquiries into how different social groups deploy both material (spaces, objects, and landscapes) and nonmaterial (stories, prototypes, scripts, plots, etc.) cultural resources. Also promising are the explorations of mnemonic practices beyond remembering which the volume did not find space to address, for instance, recalling, reminiscing, regretting, and the like.
Engaging with this collection of essays, readers interested in the deployment of different linguistic forms in memory processes are bound to generate numerous questions to take the work started by the volume a step further. Striving to demonstrate that cultural resources may assist or obstruct memory formation, maintenance, and control, the volume does not document or classify those resources and here opens an enormous area for further explorations, identifying exactly what cultural resources are used when individuals and groups turn to their past to bolster their present (and future) actions. For instance, if culture is indeed a resource to draw upon when “writing” and “rewriting” one’s memories and identities, how do those resources get managed in diverse societies or by the individuals who are members of culturally diverse groups (e.g., by bilinguals or by transnational populations)? If narrative is a primary form found at the intersection of culture and memory, what genres, plots, and characters are common across social settings and which ones are culture-specific, and what can the distributions of those genres and linguistic forms teach us about the diversity of human experience?
Additional knots for future research to untangle involve the definitions and typologies of memories. Individual chapters in this collection reference a taxonomy of memory common in the field of psychology as they differentiate between episodic and semantic subtypes of declarative memory and distinguish the latter from procedural memory. Yet several chapters discuss autobiographical memory without linking it to declarative memory and leave visual memory and nonverbal cognitions out of the discussion. Moreover, different contributors to the volume entertain divergent notions of cultural memory, collective memory, public memory, and national memory without stating how they differ and where they might overlap. While the contributors might not agree with Jan Assmann’s (2008) three-prong typology of individual, communicative, and cultural memory, the burden of mapping out the notions and specifying the definitions to which the studies subscribe still rests with scholars and should not be shifted onto readers.
While cross-cultural comparisons of mnemonic practices appear to be an easy route to travel in order to advance the approach to culture and memory adopted by this volume, one theme that it briefly touched upon is poised for a boom theoretically as well as practically. Assistive technology and self-tracking digital devices generate a wealth of information about individuals, their practices, preferences, social relations, and patterns of daily life that augment (if not altogether alter) one’s view of oneself and one’s lifestyle. Calendars, pop-up reminders, and to-do lists synchronized across multiple devices seem to have replaced sticky-notes and notepads as basic tools for organizing our short-term memory. Their proliferation rapidly expands the realm of cultural objects to consider and indicates that the question of culture, memory, and power is far from being settled.
