Abstract
This article analyzes the processes of remembering and identity formation in a present-day mnemonic community consisting of former inmates of a total government institution for abandoned juveniles in Brazil’s countryside during the Dictatorship Regime. Through the sharing of their remembrances, they mutually shaped their life’s stories in narratives of triumph. For dealing with the empirical data, we acknowledged that memory is a complex phenomenon which must be approached in an interdisciplinary way, considering concepts draw from Cognitive Sciences to Sociology. First, we have collected their remembrances on Social Media, in-depth interviews, and fieldwork over 4 years. Second, we analyzed the dynamics of validation; the network of authorities; and the emotional regimes among the former inmates that determined what is selected and interpreted as collective understandings of the past. We took a relational and processual sociological approach for analyzing how collaborative identity-mnemonic processes are also triggered, supported, and built by the material and cultural surrounding within mnemonic communities. For that, we assume a "distributed memory", and "distributed self" conceptions. Finally, we show how divergent understandings of their past are not validated within their community and consequently dismissed from their narratives of triumph.
Keywords
Introduction
This paper aims to analyze the processes of memory and identity formation of former inmates of a governmental institution for abandoned minors in Brazil’s countryside. Today, they are adults and elders, who reunited and established a community to weave together stories about their past. Their reunion happened through social media networking and annual face-to-face gatherings where they interact, share pictures, and tell stories to make sense of their tough childhoods filled with experiences of rural life, institutionalized coercion, discipline, uncertain futures, forced labor, and male socialization in a disciplinary “total institution” (Goffman, 1986). We examine how these former inmates interact with each other and engage with artifacts (such as photos, videos, documents and objects) during these gatherings and through Social Media. We also analyze what they remember and how they build stories about their past collaboratively in an identity-mnemonic dynamic. The complex and multilayered process for understanding how these former inmates confront their pasts and their identities required a meso-social approach to the phenomena of memory and identity, alternatively to both macro and micro approaches within the field of Memory Studies.
Cognitive Sciences and (some) Psychology studies (Harris et. al., 2008, 2012, 2014; Stone et al., 2010, 2013) are generally conducted in controlled environments where one can stimulate people to remember a vast array of things. However, these studies consider the remembering process and its related phenomena as placed potentially into a “social vacuum” (Zerubavel, 1997). In other words, the social environment would not play any role in shaping the interpretation of experienced events. From an ontogenetic analysis, these studies typically touch on one whole narrative to understand how past events played out, and the spontaneous and subjective meanings are attributed by the individual. The main limitation of this individually based micro-level approach is the inability to explain shared memories as something different from a coincidence. In this case, memory would be an epiphenomenal process regarding the social world. Conversely, Cultural Studies often understand memory as “cultural memory” or “social memory,” that is, as a hypostatized entity by analyzing media, memory places, commemorations, and cultural artifacts.
The material culture often a role in stimulating people to remember. However, such macro approaches undermine the cognitive dimension of memory and hypostasize it as a purely collective phenomenon, which mischaracterizes it entirely.
We assume here that memory is remembering, once it is inevitably processual. Memory relies on the temporal flow by being often reinterpreted over time because the same event can mean very different things for the same person at different points in time (Josselson, 2009 apud McAdams, 2018: 365). Although it is a mental process, memory is also relational because it depends on and it is buttressed by the interaction with others. Others 1 trigger, change, influence, and validate our memories, and vice-versa. For this reason, we undertake a processual analysis (Abbot, 2016) on how these individuals create, produce, solve, shape, and reshape remembrances over time, and then adjust them to the collective and social reconstruction of the past.
Instead of verifying how accurate something is recalled or which part of the brain activates during the remembering process, a relational and processual is concerned with understanding the social influences and consequences of the remembering process. It takes into account the public means of remembrances’ conveyance, such as oral narratives, written stories, drawings, among other sorts of social representations within a social milieu, community, group, or network of people. This because the act of telling autobiographical memories not only “may promote social relationships” (McAdams, 2018: 364), but it is also the outcome of social relationships. We understand that the social milieu is crucial for the remembering process because the surrounding material culture and the social relationships directly affect how we interpret our past (Halbwachs, 1994[1925], 1997[1950]). Among relatives, for instance, remembrances are often shared, photographs of past events are preserved, narratives about childhood are told, and material culture shapes the surrounding environment. Even when we do not clearly remember or understand things that have happened to us during our early childhood, our relatives might remember them. In this case, the family assures the link between the "present I” to the "past I,” because it creates a network of memories, stories, and shared material culture that supports one’s memory and identity.
Since Locke (1996 [1689]), philosophers began to consider “the evidence of memory” as an essential piece of how the self identifies itself over time. In other words, a person in the present recognizes herself in the past whenever she remembers enough of her own past life. Thus, remembering is a fundamental step of maintaining the temporal self, which emerges from the re-identification of ourselves over time. The concept of the temporal self is manifested in the following stories among the former inmates: In the military barracks they used to call me “Lieutenant Chagas”; when I became a lawyer, in the Judiciary, they used to call me “Dr. Chagas”; but in the Institute and still nowadays in our gatherings, my fellows call me “Chicao.” I am proud of all these names. There are several names, but the man is only one (Facebook post by Chacha, former inmate, May 2016). The humble house where I grew up has never went out of me. The institute that I remember is still towered in my heart. I am the same I used to be (Facebook post by Luma, former inmate, 2017).
The self-identification process does not imply that the various moments we recognize our past selves are bound to a unique or chronological string. Instead, it entails a complex interlocking among self, identity, memory and narratives. The most complete definition for handling these aforementioned phenomena is McAdams’ and McLeans narrative identity (2013, 2018). Narrative identity “concerns the extent to which the self (the I) sees itself (the Me) as the same thing across different situations and continuous over time” (McAdams, 2013: 284). The “autobiographical I” (2013) builds a life story with a coherent arch based on an interpretation of past events (remembrances). “In constructing a narrative identity, the “authorial I” does more than merely assemble and juxtapose episodes from the past, must also interpret the meaning of specific episodes” (McAdams, 2013: 285). This story arch provides us a cohesive understanding that allows us to present ourselves to others and to ourselves.
Building a story arch is not an action taken for granted, but it is processual, crafted among interpersonal relationships while engaging with artifacts. What would happen to someone’s memory who grew up detached from her family and secluded from society? Without narratives, photos, and information about one’s self? Do these conditions bear on one’s sense of self? Does it impact on how one remembers her own life? If the premises of the founding father of Sociology of Memory, Maurice Halbwachs, are correct, the remembrances would fade away and become both unclear and fragmented. Moreover, if Locke is right, the consequence would be the estrangement of the present-self concerning the past-self. After encountering this point, we adopted a concept of “mind” oriented toward “others” in order to understand the remembering process. Most of the Cognitive Sciences 2 and Cultural Studies 3 works do not disregard the importance of the mind and society. They even acknowledge that although operated by the mind, the “individual memory” would be a misnomer since memory is the outcome of our interplay with others (McAdams, 2001). However, these studies have their own concerns, focuses, and methods that do not couple a relational-processual approach with organically generated data.
Considering the processual aspect of remembering, identity formation, and life story construction, we have undertaken qualitative research following this network of former inmates for 5 years. The collected data was organically produced by the former inmates in their daily virtual interactions and annual gatherings. From the processual standpoint, it was crucial to collect data in a considerable chunk of time; thus, we could understand how the interactions impacted on their remembering, identity, and life story formations. Besides, social life in contemporaneity is enmeshed both in virtual and non-virtual domains. In this regard, we also collected and analyzed posts and comments in Facebook communities (groups and pages) created by them for the purpose of remembering their pasts. As Cordeiro and Neri state (2019), Any SNS [Social Network Service] restores a sense of community and the possibility to tell about our lives. They have the following elements [. . .] : a.) a bilateral or reciprocal relationship that defines a friendship; b.) groups that have their own pages, where members get together around a topic or shared pasts; c.) comment functions over mnemonic artifacts or others’ posts; d.) a storage system that comprises a timeline (where someone can post his thoughts), pictures and videos; and e.) algorithms that select and bring to the fore specific contents providing cues that may trigger remembrances unwittingly (232-3).
Over the internet data, we followed a netnography analysis (Kozinets, 2015) to observe, find, and analyze the emotional stories that participants built collaboratively throughout their interactions on Facebook. We have tracked all public posts, comments, replies to these comments, and pictures from their Facebook community starting in 2014 to the present day.
As a traditional ethnographical work (Malinowski, 1922), we have traveled to the participants’ annual gatherings, and followed closely their weekends of commemoration. As a complementary material, we have conducted in-depth interviews with eight former inmates to reconstruct their life stories. This was a strategy integrated with the processual approach in order to figure out how these individual autobiographies are entwined with the flow of interactions on Facebook and their gatherings over the years.
We have undertaken a hermeneutic method by trying to interpret all the interactions and social practices as texts or narratives (Geertz, 2017 [1973]). Hermeneutics is the work of interpretation, whose goal is to clarify the meanings, to make sense of what is said and done (Denzin, 2009). Therefore, to look at the remembering processes from an interpretative (hermeneutic) standpoint is to understand that the individual that is recalling the past is picking some significant memories, organizing them in a meaningful way, and interpreting them. However, based on a Sociology of Understanding (Glaeser, 2011), we focus here on the social dynamics and processes involved in the piecing together the past through the mutual validations within the network of former inmates.
Where does this past take place? an overview of Brazilian government institutions for minors
In 1927, the first Brazilian Legal Code for Minors was enacted, setting the criminal responsibility at 18 years old. In the case of delinquency, adolescents under this age should be sent to Disciplinary Institutes. Children under 14 years old should either return to their families or, in the absence of family, be sent to Disciplinary Institutes (Alvarez, 1989). During the 1930s and 1940s in the State of São Paulo, different kinds of Disciplinary Institutes were established, including the “Agricultural Institutes.” The inmates of these Agricultural Institutes had a rural lifestyle based on farm work and primary education. The former inmates of this research were raised in an Institute located at the city of Batatais, State of São Paulo’s countryside, established in 1946. This Institute alone could shelter 440 male children and adolescents ranging from the ages of seven to eighteen.
After 18 years of Democracy (1946-1964), Brazil went through a new dictatorship under the right-wing Military Regime (1964-1985). Unlike the other regimes, the military dictatorship was deeply interested with the “minors’ issue.” In the first year of the administration, the militaries set up the National Foundation for the Well-Being of Minors (FUNABEM) for deploying the National Policy on the Welfare of Minors. Similarly, to what happened during Getúlio Vargas’ Dictatorship (1937-1945), the militaries had an ideological agenda for the nation, that included the fight against the “communist threat.” They believed that the young and low-income population would be vulnerable to communist ideas. FUNABEM’s policy undermined the low-income families’ “capacity to raise their children, once they were seen as a locus for perpetuating marginality and deviance” (Rodrigues, 2001). Instead of trying to reunite abandoned or wandering children with their families, FUNABEM’s policy collected all the street kids and stimulated low-income families through television propaganda for sending their children to Disciplinary Institutes.
The propaganda showed the Disciplinary Institute as a place where “the children could find the five elements for having a promising future and becoming physicians, lawyers, and engineers: faith, education, good manner, hope, and moral” (Federal Administration’s television propaganda in the 1970s). Between 1967 and 1972, circa fifty-three thousand children would have been collected and imprisoned all over Brazil (Rizzini, 2004) under the praise of the military dictators: “This morning I see a miracle. I see the miracle of the transmutation of a “branch of hell,” a “school of crime”, a“factory of moral monsters,” into an educational center dedicated to the integral development of the minor” (Speech of President General Emílio Médici in 1970, Funabem, 1973: xxv–xxix). As told by Aldo in an in-depth interview, “My father could not take care of us. One day, someone told us about the propaganda, and my father searched for a social worker to take care of my path” (Interview with Aldo 4 , former inmate, October 2016).
Years after its establishment, the image of the Disciplinary Institutes became progressively stigmatized because of its bloodshed rebellions and harmful conditions. The stigma of being raised in a Disciplinary Institute without a family followed many of the former inmates’ life. Most of them left the institute without having any emotional or economic support. Lacking family ties, many adolescents sought jobs related to the abilities acquired in the agricultural or technical workshops provided by the Institute.
Around 2012, some former inmates of Batatais Agricultural Institute started to establish a network by finding and connecting each other after more than 30 years. As they were forced to leave the Institute when they turned 18 years old, only in the 2010s, with the emergence of the SNS (such as Facebook), they could establish a network among them. Regarding this “reconnecting process,” they told: I have memorized their names for 30 years, and I have always searched for them on the internet. I have searched hard, and one day I finally found a page on Facebook (Interview with Aldo, October 2016). The time has passed, and I had a weight on my memory and my soul to know where the boys who grew up with me in the past were living (Interview with Papa, June 2017). It has passed 33 years that I haven’t seen them anyone. I searched for them in Google because I desperately wanted to find someone (Interview with Som, April 2016).
The lack of information about their past, and the willingness to reconstruct the community fostered the creation of Facebook pages and groups among them. Slowly the former inmates found each other and recreated their network of relationships.
How is this past remembered? The interplay among individuals, artifacts, and narratives
Usually, family plays the most crucial role in remembering our past since among our first interactions are with relatives, whom we have the most lasting social ties (Halbwachs, 1994 [1925]). However, the former inmates grew up detached from their families, secluded in the Institute. Consequently, any record about their past, such as family video recordings, photos, or other objects related to family, did not follow them throughout their lives. In this social void, the effort to recall their lives leads them to the uncertainty of one’s mind. Relationships that they once held have faded over time, leaving gaps in their memories and life stories. However, the necessity for preserving the temporal self fostered them to restore social relations and to recover artifacts related to their past. In this case, as Zerubavel (1997) argues, we must be enmesh in (what he generally calls as) “mnemonic communities” to remember our past in a persistence, coherent and confident fashion.
One’s social environment plays an important role in building memory and the development of self. An important position from social epistemology is that “the self as experienced is, in some sense, ‘socially constructed’ or narrativized, based on external facts and incorporating external facts, rather than being a product and expression of purely internal processes” (Turner, 2018: 151). Turner (2018) poses four aspects of the self: (a) self is something which we experienced, not something we own or grasp; (b) self is not a purely subjective phenomenon; (c) self is socially constructed, and (d) self is narrativized. Let us understand all these steps.
Firstly, we shall argue for a self which is not only “other-oriented,” but mainly "other-supported". We must pay attention to "relationships" instead of focusing on the “I” or on “culture/society” (the “far-other”). We must consider equally society and mind. The hypothesis of the extended mind (Clark and Chalmers, 1998) brings an interesting view to a social approach to memory without ignoring the presence of a mind. The core argument is that others’ minds and artifacts enhance and enable our own cognitive processes. This way, we do not hold all of our mental capacities in a closed biological structure, rather either is impacted by and created through the interaction with the environment. Sutton and Michaelian (2013) have further built upon the extended mind hypothesis to explain how the remembering process operates distributively. In other words, another’s memories expressed either in talks and narratives, and through the engagement with artifacts (i.e., recorded videos, photographs, or evocative objects) can interact, collaborate, and support our remembering process. “Artifacts but also other people often afford continuity for our identity by providing a stable ecology of memory cues in our environment. Who we are as persons or selves thus depends on and is partly constituted by a distributed network of environmental structures” (Heersmink, 2017: 2).
The virtual “ecology” was certainly rich for the enhancement of their interactions, because it allowed daily interactions even though the geographical distance. Facebook has not only connected the former inmates, but also allowed them to convey mnemonic narratives, to post photos and videos regarding their past, and to discuss what happened in that Disciplinary Institution. “Every day in our Facebook group, we post something about our past stories; thus, we have created a great identification with each other” (Interview with Zefa, former inmate, June 2017). In this case, Facebook does not work only as a storage of information, such as the “E-memory” concept (Clowes, 2013) because it was not a source of records and photos for the former inmates. Instead, Facebook has boosted and facilitated their interaction, enabling the distributed remembering, “Dear friends, so good you have uploaded these pictures because now, seeing them, I can remember how the Institute was and how I lived with my colleagues there” (Facebook’s post by Leno, April 2016). Photo sharing supported the collaboratively remembering process. In the Facebook conversations below, we can observe that:
I moved to the house 4 of the Institute in 1982. Then, I moved to the house 9 and then 11. I went out the Institute in 1988. I don’t remember the name of the house’s care giver. Who remembers him?
I fairly remember you. I do not know if we have lived together. Do you remember me? I’ve lived most of the time in house 4. The care giver used to call me “lizeuzinho.”
Who was your care giver? Mr. Ivo or Mr. Camargo?
I don’t remember his name. I remember that he ordered me to brush the floor with stones. He also used to bring us to the church every Sunday.
I also used to brush the floor! A lot of steps too. I think it was Mr. Ivo! He used to bring candies to us.
It was him! You are right, he used to do that!
(Facebook post by Crisza and Elimes, May 2016).
Not all the remembrances were relevant to self-identification and life story construction. However, remembrances are always mixed with self-occurring past experiences, and other’s past experiences (which connect to our own life), and general knowledge (which frames our personal experiences). Using the classical definition of Tulving (1972; 2002), we have declarative episodic memories for naming self-experienced events in time (usually with an emotional charge) and declarative semantic memories for naming general knowledge (facts, meanings, concepts) about the external world. The latter refers to general factual knowledge shared with others among people. It is independent of personal experience and the spatial-temporal context in which it was acquired.
Also, sometimes other’s memories can become our own memory even though we still did not experience the event itself. This type of memory was defined as quasi- memories (or simply, q-memories) by Shoemaker (1970). Q-memories are also episodic memories; however, they are not self-referent. In other words, the memories are familiar to us, but ultimately were experienced and eventually told by others. All three types of memory refer to the different cognitive processes that are performed in different parts of the brain. Although remembering episodic memories concerns to a different process from memorizing semantic memories, they are organically intermingled.
Another day, I asked for my Disciplinary Institute’s colleagues the phone number of our old teacher Neide. I would like to ask her about how I use the gerund in the Portuguese language. I learned it in the fifth grade. You try to remember, you search in your mind, but it is hard to do it alone. Someone can tell how we have learned? (Interview with Tom, former inmate, September 2017).
At once, Tom remembered the experience of being in a classroom with teacher Neide learning about gerund—this scence is an episodic memory—and he tried to recall the uses of the gerund—a factual knowledge which is a semantic memory. As he cannot store all the information inside his brain, he relies on the external world, either a book, internet, or even his colleagues’ memory. As this piece of information was closely related to a meaningful experience he had in his childhood, Tom needs to resort to his colleagues to better remember what happened, it is likely a q-memory.
Remembering our own experience is to weave all these kinds of memories together. That is what we generally call autobiographical memory. In this spirit, autobiographical memory is a tissue of memories related to us. However, this is not a result of an individual and subjective endeavor, it is the result of minds and artifacts working together for knitting this tissue of remembrances. This tissue can be weaved more or less tightly, in any variation of style, shape, or color. Meaning that the expression of these memories may be more or less coherent; it may engulf many kinds of self-conceptions; and it may convey many meanings. A perfect and finished quilt of memories is what we call life story (or autobiographical narrative). It is a high level of self-conception that presupposes a unified social representation of our past. It provides us a sense of self and identity. Resuming McAdams’ concept, it is a narrative identity. “Autobiographical memory and narrative understanding have now developed to the level whereby they can be called into service in the making of identity” (McAdams, 2001: 106). Life story assigns an identity to the self by integrating the elements in a synchronic and a diachronic sense (McAdams, 2001). The role of building stories is so important that it has already been extrapolated from the self formation to reasoning as a whole. For instance, Roger Schank advocates that not only “human memory is story based,” (Schank, 1990: 12) and further, that “understanding and storytelling is functionally the same thing” (p. 24). A high level of self expression through a life story/autobiographical narrative is drawn from the interplay of our remembrances and understandings with others. So, although a life story is a finished version of a set of memories, it is not static, it is not immovable. The “stitches” may be undone and redone across time according to the present interests and interactions.
Crafting an autobiographical narrative is more than the coming together of loose memories; it encompasses remembrances, emotions, and understandings related to the past under a coherent and teleological plot socially shaped and adjusted. This whole dynamic serves to “preserve a sense of being a coherent person over time, to strengthen social bonds by sharing personal memories, and to use the experience to construct models to understand inner worlds of self and others” (Van Dijck, 2007: 3). This way, others’ stories reflect in our own story and vice versa.
My story is exactly what my fellow Papa wrote in his book (Interview with Tom, former inmate, May 2017). My story is their stories. There are some exceptions, of course. Sometimes there is a frivolous mother, an alcoholic father, but the core is the same (Interview with Zefa, former inmate, June 2017). When I heard Arnaldo’s life story, it reminded me of my own. His father also lied to him a lot (Interview with Davi, former inmate, April 2014).
In this sense, understanding our own and other’s stories is crucial to explore the past. As Turner (2018: 166) says, “a feature of the notion of the self is in the category of what we might call hermeneutic: we, in our Verstehen bubble, are both self-interpreting and interpreting the selves of others.” Nevertheless, this relational dynamic is not neutral from the standpoint of power and authority. Every person has a social and symbolic position. By this reason, not everyone impacts our own memories, sense of self, or life story. A mnemonic community, such as the former inmates are a part of, inevitably creates a network of authorities (Glaeser, 2011) in the sense that some people have more authority than others, depending on the occasion. The network of authorities regulates interactions by promoting dynamics of validation of our understandings of the world.
There are, first, our interactions with other human beings in which we check their understandings against ours. Not everybody’s approval or disapproval, belief, knowledge, or sense of reality matter to us. Instead, we make a number of distinctions about whom we are taking seriously in what way and in which context. This is to say that we are enmeshed in highly differentiated networks of authority relations with other human beings whose performance of their own understanding or direct verbal validation of ours we endow with validating force (Glaeser, 2011: 24).
Within this network, we check our understandings “to give us confidence in our ways of ordering the world” (Glaeser, 2011: 25). And, “the understandings are not necessarily separated from self-making” (Glaeser, 2011: 221). For the former inmates, the effort of understanding their memories through the interaction with other colleagues implied in reinforcing some remembrances and silencing others.
What is remembered from this past? Making sense of past life
The former inmates saught for each other to start this movements of reconstructing their past because did not have socially expected trajectory. They were abandoned or torn away from their families, in some cases not knowing their biological origins. They grew up secluded from society and were forced to follow a new path alone after turning eighteen years old. From this age on, most of them faced prejudice, stigma, and helplessness along a winding and harsh life path. Therefore, the eagerness of narrating their stories was manifested in social media by sharing their memories, in the writing of autobiographical books and in conceiving narrative interviews. At a first sight, these scaterred narratives scaterred seemed to be coherent among them and coherent with their experiences. However, as we have followed them over time, we observed that the meanings attributed to their past are dependent on a dynamic of validation. Initially, when the network was being set up, some former inmates offered negative aspects of their life inside the Institute. Still, often these negative understandings of the past were not validated by the other former inmates when they interact virtually or in-person: Leno commented on Luma’s Facebook post: This story you are telling is a fairy tale. At the Institute, I was grounded many times, and I had to dig in countless ‘trash holes.’ They sent me to the solitary confinement. [I’ve been through] many punishments: endlessly brushing the floor, kneeling on the corn. . . many employees also hit us hard. Com’on brothers let’s speak the truth, we should not sugar-coating it! The employee Mr. Til from ‘house 1’, overly beat us (Facebook post by Leno, June 2016). Luma replied: You say that I am telling just a fairy tale, but I have many colleagues who also would say that you are wrong. You are bringing’ up the wrong things (Facebook post by Luma, June 2016).
Over time, only positive understandings on what they have experienced have been validated. Denouncements of violence, such as Leno brought, were undermined. The publishing of an autobiographical book by Papa, an old and respected former inmate, worked as a legit kind of validation, a “recognition” in Glaeser’s parlance (2011). As Papa has a kind of authority among the former inmates (because he started the network among them and is in charge of the presential gatherings), his book is a reference of life story. In there, there is no memory of institutional violence. During the gatherings, Tom brought many time memories such as: “I am afraid I have to disagree with you all. There was sexual abuse inside the Institute. The emploees were not prepared to deal with us. So, there was pedophilia and abuse of authority, but anyone wants to remember this part of our stories” (Annual gathering in Batatais, April 2017). This kind of remembrance does not "resonate" (Glaeser, 2011) among the former inmated. Instead, the narratives usually conceal grim events by understanding past events only through “good lens”: “I had entered in the Institute with two pockets, one had a hole, and the other was good. When I departed, the bad things dropped through the hole, and the good things were kept inside the good pocket” (Interview with Aldo, former inmate, October 2016). The former inmates draw new meanings by dismissing their distasteful perceptions of the past. When disturbing accounts of the past come into play, the former inmates usually conceive them as something should be silenced or dismissed. They tended to understand resented remembrances differently. Some expressed that “holding resentments is like taking poison, we have to transform them into tools to drive us in rebuilding life and being successful in the present” (Papa’s book, former inmate, 2017: 40). The autobiographical book published by the former inmate Papa is the best exemplar of how their life stories are organized in a coherent narrative that underscores their successful trajectories. Under the title “Memories of a Former Inmate: An Incredible Overcoming Story,” Papa tells a meaningful and believable story validated by others former inmates—even though it is still based on his own memories: My story is what Papa wrote in his book. That’s it (Interview with Tom, former inmate, May 2017). What Papa wrote is also our story. Our story follows his story. Except for the fact that his father was an alcoholic, our story is the same (Interview with Zefa, former inmate, June 2017).
Papa’s book has interlocked elements that pervade most of other former inmates’ narratives, a story of triumph despite experiencing abandonment and other unimaginable circumstances. However, institutional violence does not fit in this narrative, because something or someone should appear as the beacon of a new path. The plot begins with abandonment with a dead-end path; it reaches its climax with the Institute as the “ beacon” that sheds light on a new path successfully pursued by them; it ends with a happy outcome in which a hopeless boy turns into an honest father and husband. The stories are followed by a parallel subplot that questions the impact of stigma in their lives by conjecturing how bad it would be to be raised outside the Institute wihou or even with a "bad" family..
The three "negative" elements appear in their narratives as positively interpreted: parental abandonment as an act of altruism, institutional violence as legit, and child labor as an uplifting activity. The pervasiveness of such elements can be noticed in their naturalized discourses. Most of the narratives justify abandonment as something inevitable, given that the parents were (supposedly) vulnerable and incapable of taking care of their children. In their narratives, some parents are represented as wretched, mean and negligible people who were just careless. However, the forgiveness offered to the parents vary from narrative to narrative, so many former inamtes understand the parents altruist people who chose a better life by offering them to the Institute: I have pity of my father. My progenitor lacks emotional structure; he was very fragile (Papa’s book, former inmate, 2017: 35). Even though my mother did that (abandonment) with me, I believe that it was a desperate act. I do not guilt her (Interview with Dado, former inmate, April 2017). I can say that I was not an abandoned boy; the point is that nobody could take care of me (Interview with Dado, former inmate, June 2017).
In this sense, the Institute worked as both shelter and family for them. They depict the Institute as a paradise paradoxically, even though many violent occurrences took place there. Violent behavior from Institute’s employees were interpreted as instances of necessary disciplinary action that instilled a resilient character and helped them to overcome all the hurdles they would encounter later in their lives. Although they remember the violence, it never appears at a first sight. The life stories do not encompass distasteful events, they only appear when the former inmates are directly asked about it. Otherwise, they shy away from mentioning negative aspects of the Institute: Researcher: Did you suffer in the Institute? Dado: I wouldn’t say that I suffered violence, but. . . hmm, they used to call me as “small foot,” or even “hobble” or “limper,” I had many derogative nicknames because of physical disability. I think I did not deserve to get beaten. I did not have the skill to weed the grass, so I think that I got beaten because of this, because I was not doing my work well due to my disability (Interview with Dado, former inmate, April 2017).
In their narratives, institutional violence is legitimized as a reaction to the supposed bad behavior or incapacity of the inmates. Violence is understood as a token of “parents’ care” (represented by the Institute’s employees), as an act to instill discipline. Discipline, violence, fear, and ethics are deeply entwined in their narratives. “The watchword was discipline. The best house father of the Institute was Mr. Zezé. He was very stringent; everybody had a fear of him. It was just about doing the right thing. If you did the wrong thing, you would be severely punished” (Interview with Dado, former inmate, April 2016). Bringing to the fore the fact that they grew up at the peak of the Dictatorship Regime, Papa tells in his book: “It was 1968; thus, the Disciplinary Institute was very rigid, of course. However, we could be very happy in that place” (2017: 4). The mitigation of violence against children—partly due to the Brazilian Statue of Children and Adolescent of 1990—pushes them to praise the kind of treatment they received, such as is told by Zefa, “Nowadays the children do not praise anything. I said to my granddaughter that I grew up in a Disciplinary Institute, where we had discipline. Sometimes they beat us, but they taught us about the wrong things of life” (Interview with Zefa, former inmate, December 2016).
The former inmates had to labor in order to maintain the Institute by cleaning the areas, cropping vegetables and fruits, and cooking. The Institute was founded and maintained mostly by the work of the inmates. Most of the employees’ role was to oversee the completion of the work. Not working meant either physical punishment or food restriction for the young inmates. This way, they manifest an ambivalent relationship with their agricultural work because they could not eat what they have harvested. When it happened, it was an exception seen as a token of benignity.
Unfortunately, while the employee did not allow us to eat what we have harvested, nobody could touch it. Otherwise, one could be severely punished. However, I remember an excellent employee, Mr. Sala. He was relentless, even though he used to allow us to eat some fruits (Facebook post by Luma, former inmate, July 2017).
Over the years, the Disciplinary Institutes in Brazil become popularly deemed as a “school of crime,” where devil-like boys committed all sorts of crimes. Society have watched for years on the news images of bloody rebellions taking place in some specific Disciplinary Institutes. Although most inmates have never partaken in a rebellion, the stigma followed in their lives clinging to them a "dark shadow". Thus, the former inmates excuse some contradictory notions regarding their life trajectories; the most noticeable one is the social understanding that the Disciplinary Institute was stigmatized and their own understanding that they grew up in an extraordinary good place. Firstly, in most of the narratives, they usually call the Disciplinary Institute a “boarding school” by presenting it as a place where one got everything, such as meals, religion, school, etc. In sum, everything that a home could offer to a child. “You should be polite and demonstrate all the required criteria to deserve what the Institute had to offer to you” (Interview with Papa, June 2017). They demonstrate high esteem for the upbringing they had at the Institute, acknowledging that it was an essential factor for the success they had later in life. The narratives tell stories about boys who complied with Institute’s rules, and because of that could achieve the success of becoming a family’s man with a dignified job.
I am proud of having grown up in the Institute because they taught me how to become a man and to build my own family (Papa’s book, former inmate, 2017: 85). I grew up during the Military Dictatorship; it was hard, even so, it made me a man, a family man. Many kids on the streets who did not pass through discipline, who were not indoctrinated, are not ‘real men’ (Interview with Aldo, former inmate, October 2016).
As “careful parents,” the employees, known as “house fathers,” are deemed as heroes who gave their lives to raise the abandoned boys in a better way than their own families could have done, “what the Institute provided me, my real father could never do” (Interview with Aldo, former inmate, October 2016). The Institute was a savior, a lifetime opportunity that was seized by some and dismissed by others. The former inmates who had their lives shattered are deemed as “black sheep” who could not follow the guidance of the “dedicated parents” of the Institute. In this sense, among this mnemonic community, narratives were crafted and validated to convey unpleasant experiences of violence, arbitrariness, excess of discipline, and the lack of emotional care as necessary steps to uplift someone in life. Certainly, this narrative movement has a psychological intent: Redemption sequence marks a transition in a life narrative account from an emotionally negative scene to a positive outcome or attribution about the self [. . .] narrators who find redemptive meanings in suffering and adversity, and who construct life stories that feature themes of personal agency and exploration, tend to enjoy higher levels of mental health, well-being, and maturity (McAdams, 2013: 233).
In this case, however, the dynamic of validation emphazied triumph narratives that created real emotional regimes (Reedy, 2001). An emotional regime is an intentional shaping of emotions, which are nothing but cognitive habits. This cognitive effort of understanding emotions in a particular manner is usually driven by the attempt to fulfill specific goals that are collaboratively built among individuals (Reedy, 2001). By doing so, they collaboratively perceive their past in a positive way. In convergence, they can present themselves to society (and narrowly to their wives and children) as people with special trajectories.
Non-validated narratives which did come forward in the collective understanding and emotional regime have been excluded from their network over the years. That is the case of Asdrubal, a former inmate also from Batatais Disciplinary Institute, who took part of the Dictatorship Truth Commission (Comissão da Verdade) at the State Legislature of São Paulo State. His narrative understands the institutional discipline as a torture device. The solitary confinement (also mentioned by others as a reaction against their bad behavior) is denounced by Asdrubal as a mechanism of torture. Differently from other inmates, Asdrubal names the “houses” of the Institute as “pavilions,” which is the official terminology employed for the blocks in the Brazilian prisional system. In his testimony for the Truth Commission, he said that the school activities were jeopardized in favor of rural forced labor, “if we did not go farming, we would not have food in exchange” (Asdrubal Serrano, State Legislature of São Paulo State [ALESP], 2013).
While the former inmates had integrated discipline, labor, and punishment in a positive narrative, Asdrubal interpreted the Institute as a direct deployment of the Dictatorship’s ideal of man and society through order and discipline that did not lead the inmates to salvation but the castration of their creativity. As a reaction, he became a playwright and has never joined the network of former inmates.
Conclusion
The effort taken to understand their past through a common lens helped them make sense of their past positively and keep a coherent temporal self. The former inmates argue that the detachment from their families, the institutional coercion, and multiple violence produced a sort of indispensable suffering for building a successful life story. The Institute instilled in them the values promoted by the Dictatorship Regime, especially an individual character developed by exposing young children to a strict set of rules and a disciplinary code. The contrast between the narrative by Asdrubal with the other former inmates’ narratives emphasizes the existence of multiple interpretations regarding same experiences. The apparent cohesion among former inmates’ narratives is the outcome of the dynamics of validation over time. The overarching narrative points to the idea that upbringing in the Institute saved them and made them “family men." This narrative was crafted and validated over time by resonance of positive understandings among many colleagues; the recognition of their past through a story published in a book by someone important for them; and corroboration of what they experienced through selected photos, documents, and videos (Glaeser, 2011). In this sense, some interpretations prevailed over others. Dissident narratives within the network were reframed and Asdrubal’s narrative is entirely kept outside this network of former inmates. The processual analysis of the dynamic of validation shows why not all the versions of shared past experiences will be supported within a community. The possibility of remembering a past scene is the starting point to draw meanings on what happened, but the relationships within a community will beacon the interpretation direction. That is not to say that a non-validated memory will fall into oblivion. Instead, it may exist in a more or less latent state or it will be reframed.
The collaboratively remembering process of the former inmates makes clear that how there is no universal memory of an institution or an entire group. It also shows how we need others to set the conditions for remembering and validating understandings of the past. Also, we observed that most of the validated meanings work in favor to build teleological narratives. In this case, a narrative of triumph. Abandonment was forgiven; the Institute appeared as the only possible mean to a successful life; and their desire to lead a dignified life overcame the stigma of belonging to a Disciplinary Institute. While the claim for holding the self coherent over time is a mental tendency, the way we do that through life stories lie on social dynamics of particular social milieu, which usually convey common interests and praise particular authorities.
Observing both the search for a coherent self and the dynamic of validation also allowed us to understand the effects the public image of a stigmatized institution had on the former inmates and how it impacted the creation of a mutual adjusted narrative over time. As exemplified in this paper, a relational-processual approach does not chase a final version of a finished mnemonic narrative of a group/community/network because relations are always dynamic, and authorities are contextual. By focusing on the processes and relations, we puzzled over social life dynamics and phenomenon classicaly demmed as mental -such as memory and self integration. More than that, focusing on processes is a way of unraveling meanings people attributed to their lives and, actions.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank Andreas Glaeser (University of Chicago), Marcos César Alvarez (University of Sao Paulo), Andrew Abbot (University of Chicago), and Richard Heersmink (La Trobe University) for clearing up some issues about their works which underlie the arguments of this paper. I also thank the blind reviewers who contributed with valuable comments.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was fully funded by the Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP).
