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| For hundreds of years, people have maintained "common-place" books, similar to scrapbooks, in which they collected literary passages, quotations, ideas, and observations intended for personal reflection. What follows, in this page and the pages linked to it, is a sort of common-place book devoted to the human ecology of memory. |
From the French, literally, an aid to memory -- not so much a mnemonic device as a more specific retrieval cue. But also a synonym for memorandum, which suggests that memos were originally intended to be incomplete, sketchy, serving as an aid to the writer's and reader's memory, suggesting that there is more to the memory than is represented in the memorandum.
See also Digitization as a Threat to Individual Memory, Library Digitization as a Threat to Collective Memory.
See also Depression, Menopause.
A project of the Library of Congress, "American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning" [from the American Memory website]. Link to the American Memory website, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/about/index.html.
Read "Anniversaries feed the forces of memory" (Jeremy Eichler, reviewing a concert celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Caramoor International Music Festival, New York Times, 06/27/05).
Like classical Greek art, much classical Roman art was devoted to portraiture and the depiction of mythological scenes. But the art of Imperial Rome also departed from its Greek forebears by introducing a narrative tradition that commemorated various historical events -- in this way, contributing to the development of a collective memory among its citizens. The narrative tradition in painting was revived by the Dutch artists of the 17th century, especially in their portrayals of domestic life, and by other artists in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Painting, sculpture, and other fine arts can reflect memory in other ways, as well. One of the most famous paintings of the surrealist Salvador Dali is entitled The Persistence of Memory (1931). Some art is intended to depict the processes involved in memory and forgetting, much as Georges Seurat's pointillist A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886) represents the processes of color vision (the paint is mixed in the eye, not on the palette).
Memory plays an especially important role in the shadowboxes and other constructions of the American surrealist artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1973). Influenced by Victorian mementos, Cornell created small specimen cabinets or memory theaters in which various objects were laid out inside a frame, and covered by glass. As Robert Hughes writes in American Visions: the Epic History of Art in America (Knopf, 1997, p. 499), "To others these deposits might be refuse, but to Cornell they were the strata of repressed memory, a jumble of elements waiting to be grafted and mated to one another". Commenting on the shadow boxes, the art dealer Allan Stone has written: "The thing that struck me most vividly about Cornell's boxes was that they reminded me a lot of his house. There was a kind of timelessness about them; they seemed to be designed as reveries recalling things from long ago, which was very much like the feeling of the rooms in his house" ("A Maker of Tiny Worlds, A Dealer and an odd Meeting" by Rita Reif, New York Times, 10/27/02). See Joseph Cornell by Kynaston McShine, catalog of a retrospective exhibition of the artist's work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1980-1981.
The contemporary American artist Robert Morris (b. 1931) makes explicit use of Bartlett's "method of serial reproduction" in his Memory Drawing series of 1963. In this work, simply Morris writes out a text that he has committed to memory: over the five drawings of the series, the reproduction of the text becomes increasingly full of errors. In another work, Short Splice ( also 1963), Morris recreates from memory a narrative consisting of the sequential instructions for finishing a length of rope. Another work from 1963, Quotations, also concerns memory. See Inability to Endure or Deny the World: Representation and Text in the Work of Robert Morris by Terrie Sultan, catalog of an exhibit of Morris's work at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1990-1991.
Writing specifically of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and the loss of not simply gay artists but also of a gay audience for them, but making a more general point, Herbert Muschamp writes: "An audience retains the memory of a performance. What happens to that memory when the audience is gone. Imagine the World Series without veteran sports fans. You could still fill the stadium. The crowd would still roar. But a certain resonance would have vanished, the vibrations of a social instrument devised for the precise purpose of detecting a historically outstanding performance. How could this instrument function without a database of past scores? ("The Secret History", New York Times, 01/08/06).
Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) contains what my Berkeley colleague John Coolidge has called a "rhapsody on memory", in the words of the novel's heroine, Fanny Price (Chapter 22):
If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so attentive, so serviceable, so obedient -- at others, so bewildered and so weak -- and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! -- We are to be sure a miracle every way -- but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.
Brian Williams, longtime anchor for the NBC
Nightly News, often told a story about how, while covering
the Iraq War in 2003, his helicopter was struck by
rocket-propelled grenade and made a forced landing. In his
newscast of January 30, 2015, he told the story again, this time
on the air, during a tribute to a retiring veteran who had
also been part of the episode. Unfortunately, Williams's
story was not true. It was another helicopter which had
actually been hit, and Williams was in a trailing flight.
The ensuing controversy led to claims of inaccuracy in some of
Williams's other news reports, particularly about Hurricane
Katrina in 2005, where Williams had claimed that he had seen
bodies floating down the street of New Orleans's Latin Quarter
(which, in fact, was not seriously flooded). In the
aftermath, NBC suspended Williams for six months; Williams lost
his reputation as the most trusted television newsman since Tom
Brokaw, maybe even Walter Cronkite; and it was uncertain whether
he would ever return to the anchor desk -- or, indeed, to
journalism at all (in the end, he moved to MSNBC as anchor of a
show that aired at 11PM ET).
It is unclear whether this was a case of
simple self-aggrandizement; a case of stolen valor; a war story
whose embellishment got out of hand, slipping from causal talk
over drinks to late-night television and finally to the Nightly
News itself; or whether it was, as Williams suggested, a false
memory in which he "conflated" (his word) the two
helicopters. See, for example, "Anchors Aweigh" by
Maureen Dowd, New York Times, 02/07/2015; "How Brian
Williams's Iraq Story Changed" by David Carr, New York Times,
02/08/2015; "Was Brian Williams a Victim of False Memory?" by
Tara Parker-Pope, New York Times, 02/09/2015.
Link to documents pertaining to the Bridey Murphy case.
Even
in this digital age, businessmen and women, and other
professionals as well, continue to exchange business
cards. The columnist "Schumpeter", writing in the
Economist ("On the Cards", 03/14/2015) suggests
that part of the perennial appeal of business cards is
that they "act as a physical reminder that you have
actually met someone rather than just Googled
them. Rifling through piles of for frequently
exchange business cards helps to summon up memories of
meetings in ways that simply looking through uniform
electronic lists never would."
UC Berkeley historian Thomas Laqueur has noted that cemeteries -- especially, but not just, "national" cemeteries like those at Gettysburg and Arlington in the United States, or municipal cemeteries like Pere-Lachaise and Montparnasse in Paris -- serve as "monumental memory gardens". "The graveyard -- be it for saints, soldiers, or kings -- emerged, as Lauer puts it, as 'the gold standard' for a place of national memory." (Source: "Grave Matters: Thomas Laqueur Studies the Role of Cemeteries in Civilization" by Frank Browning, California Monthly Fall 2012).
See Currency and Coins as Collective Memory; see also Stamps as Collective Memory.
Link to the "Collective Memory: Definitions" page assembled by Harold Marcuse of UC Santa Barbara: http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/201/CollectiveMemoryDefinitions.htm.
Television Histories as Collective Memory, a course taught by Gary R. Edgerton of the
Department of Communications at Old Dominion University,
focuses on how American's learn about the past from movies
and television ("Syllabus", Chronicle of Higher
Education, (02/27/04). With
Peter C. Rollins, Edgerton has also edited Television
Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age (2001).
Collective memory can
unite a society, but it can also fragment it. In In
Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies
(2017), David Rieff argues that, as in Bosnia, collective
memory can foster hatred, and that memorials and monuments
to the past are not necessarily good things. Commenting
on the controversy which erupted in 2017 over
Confederate war memorials in the American South (and
elsewhere, for that matter, including California),
Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote that:
Last year, the writer David Rieff, in a book titled “In Praise of Forgetting,” warned against what he called “too much remembering”: the inculcation of new collective memories and the creation of new monuments almost inevitably leads to new forms of injury. Rieff wrote, “Far too often collective historical memory as understood and deployed by communities, peoples, and nations . . . has led to war rather than peace, to rancor and ressentiment . . . rather than reconciliation, and to the determination to exact revenge rather than commit to the hard work of forgiveness.” When a Southern city takes down a Confederate monument, it rights an old wrong, and removes the source of an old grievance. But it also risks creating a new grievance, among those who believe their own history has been excised ("Battle Scars", New Yorker, 12/04/2017).
For hundreds of years, people have created "common-place" books, in which they collected literary passages, quotations, ideas, and observations intended for personal reflection. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term first appeared in print in the 16th century. In 1709, the British philosopher John Locke posthumously published a New Method of Making Common-Place Books (sometimes included in editions of Locke's 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding). The common-place book may be the forerunner of the modern scrap-book.
See also:Constitutions are more than documents that express the basic principles around which a state or other social group is organized, and by which conflicts within that group can be resolved. They can also represent the collective memory of that group. Cass Sunstein, a political scientist as the University of Chicago, argues that the best constitutions are "counter-cultural", in that they identify and fix the major problems facing the emerging group. "The Americans were very alert to this. The Bill of Rights is just partly a set of recollections of what went wrong under the British" ("Constitutionally, a Risky Business" by Felicia R. Lee, New York Times, 05/31/03). (To some extent, the original perceptions of these wrongs is enshrined in another document, the Declaration of Independence, with its list of grievances against the King.) Sunstein went on to note that constitutions have to achieve a balance between (in Lee's words), "aspirations driven by recollections of oppression and things that can be enforced by law".
In addition to the American Bill of Rights, Lee offers other examples of constitutionally enshrined national memory:
The reference here, of course, is to the 1994 neighbor-on-neighbor genocide of the Hutu majority against the Tutsi minority (and Hutus who sympathized with the Tutsis). Every year, Rwanda commemorates the episode in a week of mourning, climaxing in a ceremony, at a large soccer stadium, in which the modern history of Rwanda, from the British colonialism through the genocide (and ineffectual United Nations intervention) to its resolution in the defeat of Hutu Power by Paul Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front. Philip Gourevich, writing in the New Yorker, asks "Is it really healing to keep reopening a wound? ("Remembering in Rwanda", 04/21/2014).
A lot of Rwandans will tell you that all through mourning week they are prone to bad and bitter feelings. For those who were there in 1994, during the genocide, memory can feel like an affliction, and the greater imperative has often been to learn how to forget enough for long enough to live in the present for the rest of the year. And for those who were not yet born -- more than half the country today -- what does it mean to be told to remember? Many Rwandan schools have yet to teach the history of the genocide.... So there is memory that we manage, and there is memory that manages us. At the stadium, you had both, and, at times, two decades of aftermath felt equal to the moment between two heartbeats.
Informal observation suggests that many marital disputes, and other disputes between friends and lovers, and for that matter between co-workers, and between faculty and students, are disputes about memory -- individuals' recollections of who did, or said, what, when.
At the societal level, many intergroup disputes are also about memory -- but collective rather than individual memory -- each group has its own collective representation of the past, a subjective history that lies at the root of its identity and serves as a field of engagement with other groups, who have different representations of the same history.
There have been many such
battles. In the United States, perhaps the most
contested memories have been over slavery. The story is
told in detail by David Blight in Race and Reunion: The
Civil War in American Memory, and summarized by Eric
Foner in "The Civil War in 'Postracial' America" (The
Nation, 10/10/2011).
Of course, the Civil War was really fought over slavery. The Confederacy broke away from the Union precisely to protect the "peculiar institution", and the Union would not have been threatened if slavery had not existed in the South. Foner notes that when Ulysses S. Grant, the general most responsible for winning the Civil War, toured Europe after his retirement from the presidency, Otto von Bismarck -- the founding chancellor of an only recently united Germany, congratulated him on his success in preserving the American union, Grant corrected him: he had fought "not only to save the Union, but destroy slavery... a stain to the Union".
But that's not necessarily how Americans remember it. The historical past, like the personal past, is filtered through belief, emotion, and motivation, so that the remembered past may depart from the historical record. And how people remember the past may be as important a feature of group membership as any other.
Reviewing Jill Lapore's book, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History, Gordon Wood meditated on on the relation between history and memory -- critical history attempts to establish the facts of the matter, which may well be different from how those facts are represented in individual and collective memory ("No Thanks for the Memories", New York Review of Books, 01/13/2011). Wood quoted from Bernard Bailyn's comments on the new, quantitative history of the Atlantic slave trade ("Considering the Slave Trade: History and Memory", William & Mary Quarterly, 58(1), 245-252):
Critical history-writing is all head and no heart. Scientific history-writing, Bailyn writes, is always skeptical and problematic; it questions itself constantly and keeps its distance from the past it is trying to recover. By contrast, memory’s
relation to the past is an embrace. It is not a critical, skeptical reconstruction of what happened. It is the spontaneous, unquestioned experience of the past. It is absolute, not tentative or distant, and it is expressed in signs and signals, symbols, images, and mnemonic clues of all sorts. It shapes our awareness whether we know it or not, and it is ultimately emotional, not intellectual.Bailyn made these remarks about history and memory at the conclusion of a 1998 conference on the Atlantic slave trade that had threatened to break apart, as many black scholars and others present emotionally reacted to the presentation of the cold and statistically grounded scholarly papers dealing with the slave trade. With his distinction between history and memory, Bailyn calmed the passions of the conference. He confirmed that the dataset of the Du Bois Institute at Harvard laying out the statistics of the slave trade over three centuries would be "a permanent source for the future enrichment of our critical, contextual understanding" of the Atlantic slave trade. "But the memory of the slave trade," he said,
is not distant; it cannot be reduced to an alien context; and it is not a critical, rational reconstruction. It is for us, in this society, a living and immediate, if vicarious, experience. It is buried in our consciousness and shapes our view of the world. Its sites, its symbols, its clues lie all about us.
See also:
Corridos are, simply, ballads, but they play an extremely important role in Mexican and Mexican-American collective memory. According to Guillermo E. Hernandez, "These tales present the unofficial history of communities and their heroes, celebrating courage and creativity in the face of injustice, oppression, or danger" ("Ballads Without Borders" by Donovan Webster, Smithsonian magazine, 06/02).
The Smithsonian Institution has organized a traveling exhibition on the corrido tradition, Corridos sin Fronteras [Ballads Without Borders]: A New World Ballad Tradition. Link to the exhibition page at the Smithsonian Institution website. Link to the exhibition website (requires Flash plug-in).
Link to another page on corridos, with
translations, from the "Music of the Southwest" website at
the University of Arizona.
It's been said that if you remember Woodstock, the three-day "Aquarian Festival of Music and Art" which drew roughly 400,000 people to Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel, New York, in 1969, then you weren't there. (I wasn't there, but I remember the lines of cars that weekend on Route 17 when I was driving home in upstate New York from a visit to relatives in New York City.) Country Joe McDonald, leader of The Fish, famous for his "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die" Rag, long claimed that, due to the traffic jams, not to mention bad planning on the organizers' parts, he sang on the opening day of the festival, as the second act on stage -- not later, as he was originally scheduled. But the release, on the 50th anniversary of Woodstock in August 2019, of a 38-disk boxed set of "nearly every moment of recorded sound from the festival", shows clearly that he and his band did not play until the second day. See "Surviving Woodstock" by Hua Hsu, New Yorker 08-05-12/2019), from which the quote is taken. Hua notes further that "Music is a great catalyst for memory and nostalgia -- versions of the past that often flatter in a way that history doesn't".
A nation's collective memory is preserved in the currency and coins issued by its government, and used every day by its citizens. Stamps, too, but that's another topic.
In 2004, the Smithsonian Institution closed its Hall of Money and Medals. Lamenting this turn of events, Paul Richard wrote that "Five hundred years ago... humanist historians were as jealously possessive of their medals and their coins as they were of their libraries.... Coins were accessible. And securely datable.... Compared with ancient books, coins were reassuring. Books were iffy, they might be full of fictions. But coins were sold and substantial. They proved the past had happened... ("Losing Change: The Smithsonian is taking the Nation's Coin Collection Out of Circulation", Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 06/14-20/04).
Read "Conversion to the Euro: A Loss of Collective Memory?", an essay prepared on the occasion of the conversion of 12 European currencies to a common currency, the euro, on January 1, 2002.
In regions such as Arizona and New Mexico, where there is a strong presence of Mexican and Mexican-American culture, it is common to see wooden crosses, known as descansos (Spanish for "resting place"), along the roadside (you can also find them in California and even Wisconsin). These crosses, typically white and adorned with artificial flowers, typically mark the location of a road accident in which someone died. The descanso is an invitation for passersby to stop, reflect on the transitory nature of human existence, and pray for the soul of the person who died on that spot. For the family and friends of the victim, the roadside cross is a place of remembrance, enabling the living to continue a relation to the dead.
An exhibit of photographs of descansos in Arizona by Gordon Simmons, Roadside Crosses: Crossroads of Two Worlds, was presented in the gallery of Tohono Chul Park, in Tucson, Arizona, 04/05-00 - 05/29/00. In the brochure accompanying the exhibit, Simmons wrote "these crosses mark the spot where someone has died, often a sudden and violent death, at a time and place not of their own choosing". James S. Griffith, a folklorist at the University of Arizona, notes that descansos serve as a "signal for passersby that at this spot a soul suddenly left its body without the benefit of the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church".
The tradition of roadside crosses is discussed by Griffith in his Beliefs and Holy Places: A Spiritual Geography of the Pimeria Alta (University of Arizona Press, 1992). The quote in the paragraph above is from that book, p. 100). Although descansos are typically erected by family and friends of the deceased, Griffith notes that, for many years, roadside crosses were actually erected by the Arizona Highway Department to mark the sites of fatal accidents. See also Griffith's Southern Arizona Folk Arts (University of Arizona Press, 1988), where he also discusses the related tradition of nichos (niches), memorials made from cement, bricks, or stones.
| For further information, see Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture by Holly Everett (Texas A&M University Press, 2002). |
Link to a video program on the roadside crosses of Sonora and other regions of Mexico by James S. ("Big Jim") Griffith of the University of Arizona (requires Real Player).
Link to photographs of roadside memorials by Don Baccus.
Link to the Roadside Crosses of New Mexico Oral History Project, 1992-1996 at the University of New Mexico. "This oral-history collection documents the reflections and meanings given to roadside crosses, or "descansos" in New Mexico. the interviews within the collection give an abundance of information on traditions, customs, and beliefs in regards to the death of a loved one" (from the UNM Collection Summary abstract).
Link to Reverence of the Descanso, with photographs, by Anna Marie Panlilio.
Link to photographs of roadside memorials by Jerry Whiting, who notes that the creation of descansos and other roadside memorials is encouraged by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD).
See also Ofrendas, R.I.P. Shirts.
Autobiographies, like biographies, ought to be faithful, and even based on, the historical documentary record. Memoirs, by contrast, can contain historical errors, because memory is fallible; but, at least, memoirs should be faithful to the author's memory -- which is why such a fuss occurs when memoirs prove to have been fabricated. Often, when we ask questions about the accuracy of autobiographical memory, we can resort to the individual's diary or journal for an "online" record of what happened on a particular day.
But, of course, that assumes that the diary is accurate as well. And there are reasons to think that diaries, too, can distort the historical record -- even though they're nominally intended to be an accurate record of the writer's thoughts, feelings, and actions. This is clear in The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives, an exhibit of diaries at the Morgan Library and Museum, in New York City, curated by Christine Nelson. The exhibit presented a number of examples, from the Confessions of St. Augustine and Rousseau to the diary of John Newton, the English slave trader whose conversion to abolitionism inspired him to write the hymn "Amazing Grace" (he also wrote "Glorious things of Thee Are Spoken"), to notes scribbled on a memo pad by a police officer at Ground Zero on 9/11 -- with lots of authors and historical figures in between. Reviewing the exhibit, Edward Rothstein noted that "Our own era, of course, has turned spontaneous journalizing into something of a fetish...", but that "the contemporary mix of self-invention, self-promotion and self-revelation is probably not that different from what is on display here". At the same time, "many diaries on display are almost painful in their confrontations with the recalcitrant reality of their authors' lives and characters.". He characterizes the diary not as an on-the-spot record of what happened, but rather as a written representation of "the well-shaped self" ("Tales of Lives Richly Lived, But True?", New York Times, 01/22/2011).
See also Facebook, Tweets, Weblogs (blogs).
In Meso-American culture, the period from October 31 (Halloween) through November 1 (All Saints Day) to November 2 (All Souls Day, or Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead) is marked by a uniquely colorful religious festival that celebrates the cycle of life by simultaneously honoring ancestors (by redecorating grave sites in cemeteries) and mocking death (with toy skeletons and candy skulls). The Day of the Dead has its origins in the ancient civilizations that preceded the Spanish Conquest and the arrival of Christianity. The families of the deceased often construct ofrendas, or offerings, in their homes or the cemetery. Typically decorated with artificial flowers, they also contain photographs of the departed loved one, personal items, and holiday foods (such as pan de muerto, or Day of the Dead bread). Like the memory tables offered by North American funeral parlors, they are opportunities to reminisce about the departed person.
Link to a page on the Day of the Dead.
Link to a website selling books and videos concerning the Day of the Dead.
Each year the Oakland Museum of California hosts a celebration of the Day of the Dead, featuring a wide variety of ofrendas and other installations honoring the dead, both Mesoamerican and worldwide. Information: www.museumca.org.
An April 2008 press release from IBM predicted that "Forgetting will become a distant memory" with the development of "smart appliances" equipped with microphones, digital cameras, and large-capacity storage devices to record, store, and retrieve "all the details of everyday life". This would seem to be one step toward the "great singularity" between man and machine predicted by Raymond Kurzweil (2005). Maybe, with the increasing capacity of "smartphones", we've taken a step toward that step, raising the question of whether the day will come that we will have no need of memory at all -- because all of our experiences, thoughts, and actions will be available digitally.
Carina Chocano writes about the problems of digitization as a substitute for memory in "The Essence of Being Human is Not Remembering but Forgetting" (New York Times Magazine, 01/29/2012).
This is the dilemma of being a cyborg: It’s not just that everything we once committed to memory we now store externally on devices that crash or become obsolete or are rendered temporarily inaccessible due to lack of coverage. And it’s not that we spend a lot of time storing, organizing, pruning and maintaining our access to it all. It’s that we’re collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data.
*****
For everything that’s gained by our ability to store and maintain more information than ever before, something is lost that has to do with texture, context and association. The science journalist Joshua Foer, author of "Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything," said in a lecture to the Royal Society of Arts that people once "invested in their memories, they cultivated them. They studiously furnished their minds. They remembered. Today, of course, we’ve got books and computers and smartphones to hold our memories for us. We’ve outsourced our memories to external devices. The result is that we no longer trust our memories. We see every small, forgotten thing as evidence that they’re failing us altogether." As we store more and more of what makes us us outside of ourselves, he said, "we’ve forgotten how to remember."
When asked by his interviewer if memory isn’t also a form of baggage, a conduit for suffering or a handicap, Foer responded with two stories. The first is about a man who lost his memory and his ability to form new memories, which made him less human in a way, because "to be a person you have to exist in the dimension of time." The second story is about a man who could remember everything but had no way of filtering the information. Foer likened this man to a character in a Borges story that concluded that the "essence of being human is not remembering but forgetting."
See also Aide-Memoire, Library Digitization as a Threat to Collective Memory.
Eyewitness
testimony, based on eyewitness memory, has long been a problem
both for applied psychologists, law-enforcement officers,
officers of the court, judges, and juries. The large
literature of laboratory and field studies on eyewitness
memory is summarized in two landmark volumes:
The Handbook of Eyewitness
Psychology. Vol.
I: Memory for Events, ed. by M.P. Toglia, J.D.
Read, D.F. Ross, & R.C. L. Lindsay. Erlbaum,
2006.
The Handbook of Eyewitness Psychology: Vol. II: Memory for People ed. by R.C. L. Lindsay, D.F. Ross, J.D. Read, & M.P. Toglia. Erlbaum, 2006.
See also Diary, Tweets, Weblogs.
Some widely shared memories
that are, objectively, false.
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a dementing illness, but it hits memory first. In an Op-Ed piece published in the New York Times (05/23/2011), Margaret Morganroth Gulette, argued that our fear of memory loss, which brings some individuals who receive a diagnosis of AD (or who diagnose the symptoms in themselves) to talk of suicide, borders on the irrational. Partly, she argues, our fear of AD leads us (and physicians, and pharmaceutical companies) to magnify the seriousness of the small incidents of forgetting that naturally accompany normal aging. She also argues that the horror of memory loss, itself, has been greatly exaggerated, and endorses the slogan (which she borrows from Anne Basting): 'Forget memory. Try imagination.".
People with cognitive impairments can live happily with their families for a log time. My mother was troubled by her loss of memories, but she discovered an upside to forgetting. She had forgotten old rancors.... The mind is capacious. Much mental and emotional ability can survive mere memory loss, as do other qualities that make us human.
The events of September 11 renewed interest
in the phenomenon of flashbulb memories. In a classic paper,
Brown and Kulik (1977) defined the flashbulb memory as an
vividly detailed memory of the circumstances under which one
first learned of a surprising, consequential, emotionally
involving event. People of a particular age often have
flashbulb memories of the assassination of John F. Kennedy,
or of Martin Luther King, or of Robert F. Kennedy. Other
flashbulb memories that have been studied include the
Challenger Disaster of 1986 and the Loma Prieta earthquake
of 1989. And there have been several studies in progress of
flashbulb memories for the World Trade Center attacks.
Formal Research on
flashbulb memories began with that classic 1977 paper by
Brown and Kulik, but was anticipated, in a sense, by an
unpublished study -- or, better put, the beginnings
of an unpublished study) by Leon Kassman, then a graduate
student at NYU. When President Kennedy was shot,
Kassman distributed 950 copies of a questionnaire, which he
distributed to NYU students as well as individuals selected
at random from the New York City and Dallas telephone
booths. Among other questions, the instrument asked
people to describe where they were, who they were with, what
they did, and how they felt when they heard that the
President had been shot. Kass man collected about 300
returned questionnaires, and lost most of these, but about
100 have been preserved. It would be interesting to
know what the respondents' memories of the event are like
now. For an account of Kassman's archive, see "Time
Stopped" by Ian Parker, New Yorker,
11/24/2013.
It was not until the Challenger Disaster of 1986 that investigators thought to collect information about significant events "online", as it were, to be compared with people's subsequent memories. The general result of these studies is that flashbulb memories are not necessarily accurate representations of what actually happened at the time. But that fact does not necessarily diminish their flashbulb quality.
Click here for a study of people's flashbulb memories for the Challenger Disaster of 1986.
In a survey released on September 5, 2002, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported that 97% of Americans "can remember exactly where they were or what they were doing the moment they heard about the attacks" -- thus fulfilling the primary criterion of a flashbulb memory. Perhaps just as important, 38% of those surveyed cited the 9/11 attacks as "the biggest life event of the past year". Such events are typically idiosyncratic life changes such as births, deaths, marriages, or divorces, health problems, or events having to do with work or school. The fact that so many people cited 9/11 as an event in their personal lives is consistent with Ulric Neisser's suggestion that flashbulb memories are benchmarks where personal and public histories intersect.Garrett Graff has collected people's memories of September 11 in the Only Plane in the Sky (2019), an oral history of that day. Graff notes that Fall 2019 marked "the entrance of the first college class born after the attacks" -- representing a generation that "barely remembers the day itself". Reviewing the book in the Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan notes that Graff's purpose is to offer a new generation of ("Out of the Blue", 09/07/2019) is "to offer these young, unscarred Americans a book that will teach them about what happened on 9/11" -- "poignant, often distressing, vignettes and impressions of the day and its aftermath".
While Graff focuses on individuals' memories, Mitchell Zuckhoff has put together a single narrative which might count as a collective memory of 9/11 in Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11, also reviewed by Varadarajan.
We often think of flashbulb memories as memories for momentous public events, but a little introspection reveals that we also have flashbulb memories for private, personal events. The November 2006 issue of the AARP Magazine (yes, I'm a member!) listed "Five Dates to Remember" (p. 87), broken down into three categories, including personal landmark moments, some of which have real potential for flashbulb memories.
| Historical Dates | You'll think of this... | But this is the one that counts... |
| Battle of Hastings, 1066 | Your first kiss | The day you knew you'd met the most important person in your life. |
| Spanish Armada, 1588 | Your first presidential scandal | The day you realized you helped put the guy into office. |
| Declaration of Independence, 1776 | Your favorite old-time TV show | The day it was interrupted by a world-changing event. |
| ? | Your biggest regret | The day you learned to forgive yourself for it. |
| ? | Your first broken bone | The first time you realized you weren't immortal after all. |
A genealogy, of family tree tracing one's ancestors and other relatives, is a representation of a family's history and heritage. As such, it comprises part of the collective memory of a family. Genealogical information is often collected in interviews, and thus relies on the memories of family members; but sharing a genealogy with others can also be a stimulus for the recollection events within a family, and the sharing of these memories deepens the collective memory of the family still further.
The National Genealogical Society has published a number of guidebooks for developing genealogies and other kinds of family histories (published by Rutledge Hill Press, a division of Thomas Nelson):
Ghost brands, also known as
dead brands, orphan brands, or zombie brands, are brand names
that have disappeared from market shelves -- like Brim coffee
or Eagles snacks. But those same brands have not always
disappeared from memory (a large portion of survey respondents
remembered the slogan, "Fill it to the rim -- with
Brim!". A recent article in the New York Times
Magazine ("Can a Dead Brand Live Again?" by Rob Walker,
05/18/08)discussed a Chicago firm, River West, which is
capitalizing on "brand memory" to revive certain brands in the
marketplace. Thus, Brim might become the brand name of a
new coffee, giving the new product an instant boost in
name-recognition -- and, thus, of sales as well.
In 1975, Paul Fussell
published The Great War and Modern Memory, a book
which precipitated a renaissance in historical and literary
interest in World War II (reviewed by Karl Miller in the New
York Review of Books, 10/16/1975; 25th anniversary
edition reviewed by Leonard V. Smith in History &
Theory, 2001). Before, Fussell, WWI was regarded
mostly as an unfortunate prelude to World War II.
In his book, Fussell shows how the popular memory of WWI was
shaped by the literature that came out of it -- for example,
the war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen -- an
example of the formation of collective memory.
In a later book, Wartime:
Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War
(1989), Fussell argued that it was time for WWII (in which
he himself fought) to be demythologized. And so it
came to pass, in the hands of Elizabeth D. Samet, a
historian at the United States Military Academy at West
Point, no less, in Looking for the Good War: American
Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness
(2021). Samet argues that the war was romanticized and
mythologized by authors such as Steven Ambrose (in Citizen
Soldiers, Band of Brothers, and other books),
Tom Brokaw (in The Greatest Generation), and Steven
Spielberg (in the movie based on Band of
Brothers, starring Tom Hanks): especially for those of
us who did not live through it, these books and films shaped
our collective memory of the war. Carlos Lozada,
reviewing Samet's book in the New Yorker ("The Good
Fight", 11/29/2021), calls it "a cultural and literary
counterpoint to the Ambrose-Brokaw-Spielberg industrial
complex of Second World War remembrance, and something of a
meditation on memory itself".
For the record, Samet
identifies several elements of the mythology surrounding
WWII: (1) the US entry into the war was motivated by a
desire to rid the world of Fascist tyranny; (2) Americans
were united in their commitment to the war; (3) everyone
made sacrifices in the war effort; (4) the US was reluctant
to go to war but, once in the fight, waged the war decently;
(5) that the war was a tragic event with a good
outcome. In fact, Samet draws on sociological studies
(such as Stouffer's The American Soldier) and oral
histories (such as Studs Terkel's "The Good War",
with scare quotes part of the title) that the typical
American soldier was non-ideological in his motivation, and
fought mostly for his own survival and to get the war over
with as soon as possible. Samet notes that the
collective memory of WWII colored attitudes toward "postwar"
military conflicts, especially a complacent and
overconfident "disease of victory" (a term coined by Neil
Sheehan in A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and
America in Vietnam, one of the best histories of the
Vietnam War). Paradoxically, Samet notes, the
collective memory of the "good" WWII was bolstered by the
collective impression of Vietnam as a "bad war", and was
subsequently used to justify America's 21st-century wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. She wonders if, with time, these
"bad" wars, too, will be reshaped in memory as "good" ones
instead.
Some things that happen to us, we
remember. Other things, we only know about, because we
heard about them from others. Eren Orbey writes about
the difference in an article about his father's murder
("Point Blank", New Yorker, 11/27/2023).
One night in August of 1999, on a summer trip back to Ankara, our dad was murdered. G [Orbey's sister] was twelve and I was three. We were both there when it happened, along with our mom, but I was too young to remember.
The Turkish language has a dedicated tense, sometimes called the “heard past,” for events that one has been told about but hasn’t witnessed. It’s formed with the suffix “‑miş,” whose pronunciation rhymes—aptly, I’ve always thought—with the English syllable “-ish.” The heard past turns up in gossip and folklore, and, as the novelist Orhan Pamuk has written, it’s the tense that Turks use to evoke life’s earliest experiences—“our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, all as reported by our parents.” Revisiting these moments can elicit what he calls “a sensation as sweet as seeing ourselves in our dreams.” For me, though, the heard past made literal the distance between my family’s tragedy and my ignorance of it. My dad’s murder was as fundamental and as unknowable as my own birth. My grief had the clumsy fit of a hand-me-down.
As far as I can recall, no one in the family explained his death to me. My mom considered my obliviousness a blessing. “He’s a normal boy,” she’d tell people. From a young age, I tried to assemble the story bit by bit, scrounging for information and writing it down. But G always seemed protective of her recollections from that night and skeptical of my self-appointed role as family scribe. She, too, had written about our dad over the years, and she’d point to the chick story as an early sign of my tendency to cannibalize her experiences. We’d quibble over the specifics—had my writing filched details from hers?—but to me it was an epistemological problem. I wanted what she had, which was firsthand access to the defining tragedy of our lives.
***
Someone had given my mom a copy of “The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook,” which, she explained doubtfully, was supposed to help her turn back into the person she’d been before my dad’s death. I’d seen this person in old photos, a long-haired woman sipping Coke from glass bottles by the Aegean Sea, but she was unfamiliar to me. I remember thinking that I hadn’t been much of anyone before my dad’s death. There was no self to recover, no past to reclaim. My first and only memories of him overlapped with everyone else’s last.
***
In the documentary “Tell Me Who I Am,” from 2019, middle-aged British twins named Alex and Marcus Lewis consider the rift that developed between them after Alex lost his memory in a motorcycle accident at the age of eighteen. For years, as he worked to fill in the “black empty space” of his youth, his brother hid the horrific abuse that they’d both endured as children. The film recounts Alex’s efforts to extract the truth from Marcus, who fears that any disclosures would be unbearable for them both. “We’re linked together,” Alex explains. “Yet we have this unbelievable separation of silence.”
***
G encouraged me to send her my writing, but she bristled at my attempts to narrate our dad’s death. Sometimes her recollections contradicted our mom’s. I’d never rushed to the phone and answered, “Daddy?,” she said. When I imagined our mom “clutching her dying husband,” G told me, “You’re lying about Dad. That’s not how it happened.” I once tried writing a passage from his point of view; G said she found it exploitative. “I so liked the rest of your piece, told from your perspective, since that is genuine and truly your story to tell,” she added. Other details made her feel “mildly plagiarized.”I felt caught in a peculiar quandary. If I repeated details that G had already written down, was I relying on a primary source or appropriating what my peers in creative-writing workshops would call her “lived experience”? The tautology maddened me. I had lived the experience, too, yet I felt like either a mimic, reciting my family’s recollections, or a fabulist, mistaking my imagination for fact. My ignorance isolated me from G and our mom. I had a sense that I was hammering on a bolted door, begging them to admit me to an awful place. And why would I want to get in? Well, because they were there.
***
G encouraged me to send her my writing, but she bristled at my attempts to narrate our dad’s death. Sometimes her recollections contradicted our mom’s. I’d never rushed to the phone and answered, “Daddy?,” she said. When I imagined our mom “clutching her dying husband,” G told me, “You’re lying about Dad. That’s not how it happened.” I once tried writing a passage from his point of view; G said she found it exploitative. “I so liked the rest of your piece, told from your perspective, since that is genuine and truly your story to tell,” she added. Other details made her feel “mildly plagiarized.”I felt caught in a peculiar quandary. If I repeated details that G had already written down, was I relying on a primary source or appropriating what my peers in creative-writing workshops would call her “lived experience”? The tautology maddened me. I had lived the experience, too, yet I felt like either a mimic, reciting my family’s recollections, or a fabulist, mistaking my imagination for fact. My ignorance isolated me from G and our mom. I had a sense that I was hammering on a bolted door, begging them to admit me to an awful place. And why would I want to get in? Well, because they were there.
***
When I told G that I was working on this piece, she surprised me by saying that she sometimes feels I’ve written her out of the story. She mentioned that I’d once described hiding from the killer in the closet, as though I were alone. “I pulled you into the closet,” she said. “To save your life.” For a moment, we seemed to narrow the distance between us.
“Mom always told me not to talk to you about it, because you didn’t remember,” she said.
“Mom always told me not to talk to you about it,” I replied. “Because you did.”
***An odd custom of Turkish law enforcement involves bringing a suspect to the scene of the crime for a reënactment. One newspaper clipping shows V standing on the balcony railing, bracing himself against the side of the building to demonstrate how he’d reached the open window. He is average-looking, with silvery hair and the tanned complexion of many Turks, wearing scuffed shoes and a baggy suit. I have examined his face many times, trying to see him through my family’s eyes. G had advised me that if I managed to meet him he might become violent. “He should rot,” our mom said. He was a thief, a criminal, a killer. Even the newspaper called him “oldukça soğukkanlı”—“rather cold-blooded.” I know the Turkish words now, and at least as much about the murder as my mom and my sister do. Yet I still cannot feel much of what they feel. What I see when I look at him is someone else’s father.
This academic journal, published twice a year, focuses on images of the past in collective memory and written history, with a special interest on representations of the Nazi era and the Holocaust, and their effects on contemporary imagination.
Link to the H&M homepage.
Tony Judt's history of post-war Europe, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005), contains an epilogue on "memory", and includes a Soviet-era joke about a call-in program on "Armenian Radio" (quoted by Anthony Gottlieb in "Picking Up the Pieces", New York Times Book Review, 10/16/05):
"Is it possible, an eager caller asks, to foretell the future? "Yes", comes the weary answer. "No problem. We know exactly what the future will be. Our problem is with the past: that keeps changing."
The themes of remembering, amnesia, reconstruction, and recovered memory, which lend such drama (not to mention controversy) to individual memoirs, also find themselves expressed at the social level, in various aspects of national memory.
See also The Politics of
Memory in Postwar Europe ed. by R.N. Lebow, W.
Kansteiner, & C. Fogu. Duke university Press, 2006.
Collective memory can unite a society, but
it can also fragment it. In In Praise of
Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies
(2017), David Rieff argues that, as in Bosnia, collective
memory can foster hatred, and that memorials and monuments
to the past are not necessarily good things.
The French historian Ernest Renan once
remarked that "The essence of a nation is that all of its
individuals have many things in common, and also that
everyone has forgotten many things". Quoting this
line, Lewis Hyde author of A Primer of Forgetting:
Getting Past the Past (2019), asks:
What must citizens forget before a nation becomes a nation? Ethnic differences, for one thing: "No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgund, an Alain, a Taifala, or a Visigoth," Renan said. Ancient differences as to sect or creed must be left in the past. "Every French citizen has forgotten," Renan claims, "that in the 13th century the pope's armies nearly wiped out the Cathars, a rival Christian sect, and that on St. Bartholomew's Day in the 16th century, Catholic mobs slaughtered thousands of Calvinist Protestants". Happily, by Renan's day, such old conflicts had fallen into time immemorial, and in so doing freed France to become France.
Hyde goes on to discuss various failures of forgetting, beginning with the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, where Bosnian Muslims, Catholic Croats, and Orthodox Serbs had not quite forgotten their religious and ethnic pasts. He also suggests that the controversy over Confederate war memorials has some of the same character: a failure of forgetting that prevents the United States from becoming a nation (see Hyde's Op-Ed piece, "How Nationalism Can Destroy a Nation", New York Times, 08/22/2019).
Even 50 years later, Japan continues to be criticized, especially by China, Korea, and other Asian countries, for its continuing attempt to whitewash its militaristic, imperialistic past, including war crimes in World War II. In 2005, for example, the Japanese Education Ministry approved a new series of textbooks that remove "self-deprecating" discussions of Japan's past, and present Japan's activities in World War II benignly as an effort to save all of Asia from Western domination.
Similarly, the movement among Jews and others to remember the Nazi Holocaust has found a parallel, among Germans of the post-war generations, to remember the suffering and losses that Germans themselves suffered during World War II. A case in point is On the Natural History of Destruction by W.G. Sebald, which was originally published in Germany (1999) as The Air War and Literature. In his book, Sebald (who was born in 1944) asks why such experiences as the firebombing of Dresden and other German cities is not more fully represented in post-war German literature. Mark Anderson writes of this newly emerging literature of national memory ("Crime and Punishment", The Nation, 10/17/05):
[F]or much of the postwar period... Germans grumbled mightily among themselves, but any public airing of their grievances was subject to severe constraints and cold war manipulation. And when the German children born during or shortly after the war came of age in the heady years of the late 1960s, they demanded that Germany view the war through the lens of non-German victims, not that of its own losses. German victimhood became politically incorrect.
But the dead return; unacknowledged suffering claims its due. That seems to be the lesson of the German war memories that have washed over the new Berlin Republic in the past few years.... Interestingly, most of these reflections do not come from conservatives... but from former New Leftists who reshaped the politics of German memory in the late 1960s and early '70s and adamantly opposed... attempts... to compare Hitler's crimes to Stalin's purges and other instances of mass slaughter.
This reversal in the politics of German memory has alarmed many observers, who worry that Germany's current fascination with its own victimhood signals a desire to let the specificity of Nazi crimes fade into a historical continuum of other war crimes. In fact, the recent interest in German suffering represents an extension of Holocaust memory, not its demise.... Precisely because German recognition of the Holocaust is no longer in doubt, a new generation of Germans has come to understand the war in less ideological, less Manichean terms.
Of Sebald's book, Anderson writes:
On the one hand he denounces the Germans for repressing the memory of their own suffering, while on the other he insists on the traumatized victims' "inviolable right" to remain silent.
Writing of another book in this genre, Uwe Timm's In My Brother's Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS, Anderson explicitly turns to the metaphor of recovered memory:
These are the tactile memories of childhood, more Kafkaesque than Proustian, that lie beneath the generational conflict that has etched itself so forcefully into postwar German history. It has taken a long time for the "good Germans" of 1968 to recover them, and to acknowledge the depth of their own familial connection to the horrors of the war. The fact that German memory is now focused on the dead of Dresden and Hamburg, and the raped women of Berlin, won't neutralize Holocaust memory.... The real question is whether the victors of World War II will be willing to examine the historical simplifications that have long provided a consensus about the "good war". If the recent resurgence of war memories in the new Berlin republic has anything to tell us, surely a crucial element is the importance of individual historical experience that resists the either/or logic of victimhood.
Although it has a history long enough for it to be known as the "Battlefield of Europe", the modern state of Belgium was created only in the 19th century. The Congress of Vienna (1814) created, including Belgium and Luxembourg; following a revolution in 1830, both Belgium and Luxembourg split from The Netherlands. However, Belgium itself is composed of two quite different territories, Flanders and Wallonia, which differ from each other in terms of language, culture, and socioeconomic factors (interestingly, French-speaking Brussels, the capital, is located in Dutch-specking Flanders). It turns out that Flemish and Walloon Belgians also have quite different national memories. The causes and effects of these differences in collective memory were explored in a series of papers by Olivier Luminet and his colleagues, and published in Memory Studies in 2011 (Vol. 5, No. 1).
Beginning in 1975, and lasting until an
amnesty was established in 1991, Lebanon suffered a bloody civil
war involving Shiite and Sunni Muslims, Maronite Christians,
Syria, Israel, and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Beit Beirut (The House of Beirut), a "memory museum" focusing on
everyday life in the city, opened in 2017, but the various
parties can't agree on what to put in it ("Empty Halls and Empty
Spaces", The Economist, 08/12/2017). The
re-purposed "Barakat" apartment building in which the
museum is housed served as a sniper's nest during the war, and
still shows extensive signs of war-related damage. The
museum itself has no director or board, no staff, and no
permanent collection, and nobody seems to be able to agree on
what should be displayed there. That seems like some sort
of metaphor.
After the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, and the restoration of democracy under King Juan Carlos, a "memory war" erupted in Spain, reflecting a social "pact of silence" concerning Franco's fascist dictatorship (which began in 1936), his relationships with Hitler and Mussolini, and especially the Civil War itself, should be remembered. Of course, there is a huge civil War memorial outside Madrid, in the "Valley of the Fallen" (Valle de los Caidos), which contains Franco's own burial crypt. But the Valley of the Fallen is a memorial specifically to the Nationalist dead of the Civil War, and essentially ignores those who fell on the Republican side.
Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936 (2013), by Jeremy Treglown, bucks conventional history by casting doubt on the "pact of silence" itself, and claims that the transition period from dictatorship to democracy was characterized by a vigorous debate concerning all things Franco. Treglown has two agendas. First, he tries to make the case that Spanish culture was not stifled during the Franco years (when, for example, artists like Picasso lived in exile). Second, he examines the fate of Spanish collective memory for the Franco era. He contrasts the pacto de olvido ("pact of forgetting" characteristic of the immediate post-Franco years (the dictator died in 1975) with the "Law of Historical Memory" instituted in 2004 by the Socialist government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero (whose grandfather had fought on the Republican side against Franco). This is a genuine "memory war" -- if a nonviolent one. He writes "In trying to identify what's special about Spain, I soon found that much of it is related to a politically manipulated, culturally amnesiac obsession with 'memory'". From a review of Franco's Crypt by Jonathan Blitzer ("Memory Politics", The Nation, 01/20/2014):
On one side is a movement calling for redoubled scrutiny of the past. At its head are descendants of the civil war dead, coupled with activists and anthropologists who together have crisscrossed the country looking for answers to the crimes and atrocities committed by Franco and his forces.... At the other end of the political spectrum is the renewed recalcitrance of Spanish conservatives, who see the activists' fact-finding as a kind of open-ended prosecution. To them, the quest to restore "historical memory" is partisan and opportunistic -- a headlong rush to blame -- or, worse yet, a threat to the social order.See also "The Battle to Remember" by Alex W. Palmer (Smithsonian, 07-08/2018), which focuses on the controversy over the Valley of the Fallen". The subtitle of the article states that "With nationalism surging in Europe, a war over the memory of a dictator and his victims is tearing Spain apart". Palmer writes:
The Valley of the Fallen was the brainchild of Franco himself. He declared his intention to build the site, a towering Catholic basilica and civil war memorial outside Madrid, in 1940, one year after the end of the civil war. The Valley would be a "national act of atonement", Franco said, and a monument to reconciliation. But from the beginning it was clear the Valle would be something else entirely.... Decades after Franco's death, the Valley is Spain's most potent and controversial symbol of the civil war and the dictatorship that followed. For many Spaniards, the site embodies immense loss and unspeakable suffering; for others... it is a fitting tribute to Spain's most controversial leader, and a monument to a persistent strain of Spanish nationalism.... The Spanish government has tried, fitfully and unsuccessfully, to settle the issue of the Valley, or at least to alter the site to make it palatable to all Spaniards.See also "Don't Look Back" by Giles Harvey (New Yorker, 01/13/2020), a profile of Javier Cecas, a Spanish novelist. An early supporter of the "historical memory" backlash to the pact of forgetting, as represented by the disinterment and re-interment of Franco, Cecas has now had second thoughts. The reason is that, just as the "historical memory" movement was a backlash to the "pact of ignorance, now the historical memory movement has led to a resurgence of right-wing pro-Franco activity. For example, he points out that when pro-Franco generals attempted an ultra-right coup against the new democracy in February 1981, Spanish people and institutions didn't really rally to defend their new freedoms: "The whole country stayed at home and waited for the coup to fail. Or to triumph." Moreover, as Harvey notes, elections in 2018 saw the rise of a new ultra-right party seeking a revival of Francoism.
Literally "Black Feet",
these were Europeans who emigrated to Algeria during the
French colonial period, working as farmers and laborers.
After the Algerian revolution in 1962, many fled to France
(where some of them now prefer to be called "French
Algerians"), some were killed by Algerian nationalists, and
others disappeared. Michael Kimmelman notes that the French
colonial experience in Algeria is similar to its Vichy period,
or Spain's civil war -- a period that most French would rather
forget ("In France, a War of Memories Over Memories of War",
New York Times, 03/05/2009). But a number of
museums concerned with the pieds noirs have opened in
France, sparking Algerian threats of an economic boycott, and
a Center for the French Presence in Algeria, documenting the Pied
noir experience, both in Algeria and afterwards, is
scheduled to open in 2009 or 2010 in a former convent in
Perpignan, France.
More than many other countries, France has engaged in what historians have called "memory wars," bitterly debating the events that took place in their country during the years of occupation. De Gaulle's determination to put France back on its feet as rapidly as possible, and to cast its inhabitants not as treacherous collaborators but heroic resisters, effectively helped conceal -- right up until the 1980s -- the guilt of some of the worst offenders.
Another
contested history concerns Nazi death camps located in Poland in
World War II. As part of the mechanism of the Holocaust, Nazi
Germany located a number of such camps in Poland. In 2012,
President Obama inadvertently referred to these as "Polish"
death camps, by which he clearly meant death camps located in
Poland -- he was, after all, speaking while awarding a
posthumous Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, who risked his life
to inform the Allies about those camps and other war crimes
being committed on Polish soil. Nevertheless, the Polish
government protested Obama's use of the phrase, revealing an
internal tension about the relations among the Nazis, gentile
Poles, and Polish and non-Polish Jews during the war -- a
tension founded on differences in historical memory. For an
analysis, see "The Noble and the Base" by John Connelly,
reviewing a number of books on the topic, in the Nation,
12/03/2012.
Another
commentary on the Polish situation comes from Elizabeth
Zerofsky, in an article on the conservative/populist government
of Poland headed by Jaroslaw Kaczinski ("Memory Politics", New
Yorker, 07/30/2018). In 2016, Kaczinski's Law and
Justice Party had introduced a "Polish-death-camps amendment" to
a 1998 law concerning discussion of war crimes committed during
World War II. The amendment essentially banned the phrase
"Polish death camps" from public discourse; the bill was signed
into law in February 2018. At the same time, the Polish
Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a list of "wrong memory
codes" that "falsify the role of Poland during World War
II". Zerofsky quotes Omer Bartov, a history professor at
Brown, that "Memory laws are always about what you should
remember and what you should forget".
Anne Applebaum, reviewing The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov (edited by J. Rubenstein and A. Gribanov; Yale, 2005), writes of Russian memories of the Soviet era (New York Review of Books,10/20/05):
Since becoming president of Russia, Vladimir Putin has worked hard to mold Russian memories of the Soviet Union into something more positive, or anyway more nostalgic, than they had been under his predecessor. His goal, it seems, is to make Russians proud of their country again, to find heroes they can once again worship. Toward this end, he and the bureaucrats who work for him have altered textbooks, closed archives, and brought back Soviet symbols, including the old national anthem. In May 2005, on the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, Putin even presided over an open celebration of Soviet imperialism, complete with Soviet flags, tanks, and presidential justifications of the postwar occupation of the Baltic states.
Over time, this change in tone, a radical shift from that of the late 1980s, could have serious consequences for Russian civil society. With no memory of the arbitrariness of the Soviet legal system, for example, Russians may feel less committed to the rule of law. Without reminders of the behavior of Soviet police in the past, they may find it easier to accept a heavier-handed police state in the present. Without knowing any history of the terror and hardship imposed by the Soviet empire, they may support new attempts to dominate their neighbors. Worst of all, though, by robbing Russians of a clear understanding of their history, President Putin has deprived his countrymen of their rightful heroes [e.g., Sakharov], refusing to teach them about the men and women of whom they could legitimately be proud.
Putin hasn't entirely
succeeded. In 1998 Arseny Roginsky founded the Memorial
Society, a Moscow-based nongovernmental organization, devoted
not just to promoting human rights in post-Soviet Russia but --
as its name implies -- to document the repressions of the Soviet
era as well. Roginsky's work is documented in "The Right
to Memory", a feature film by Ludmila Gordon and released in the
US in 2020 (reviewed in "Profiles in Decency" by Benjamin
Nathans, New York Review of Books, 04/23/2020).
Among the Memorial Society's products is the "Last Address"
project, which places plaques on apartment buildings indicating
the names of former occupants who were arrested, executed, and
dumped in mass graves, or who died in internal exile the Gulag,
during Stalin's "Great Terror" (the dead include Roginsky's
father). It also maintains a database of political
prisoners detained during the post-Soviet era, chiefly by
Putin. In 1976, Roginsky also founded Memory, a samizdat
journal devoted to aspects of Soviet and Russian history that
are not represented in official sources. Accordingly,
Memorial relies on first-person accounts and private
letters. Nathans draws an analogy between Memorial's work
and the "return of the repressed" popularized by Sigmund Freud:
most of the official records relevant to its goals have either
been destroyed or are inaccessible in secret archives. Of
course, Putin will have none of this. Memorial has been
criticized for exhuming and attempting to identify those buried
in mass graves, and it was one of the targets of a 2012 Russian
law requiring all NGOs to renounce foreign funding or register
as foreign agents (meaning, essentially, spies).
Speaking of the former Soviet Union, by extension
the entire former Soviet Bloc of Eastern Europe may be in dire
need of its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission(s).
Timothy Garton Ash, commenting on the rise of oligarchy ("robber
barons") and right-wing populism ("illiberal democracy") in the
countries of Eastern Europe (Hungary, Poland, the former
Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere) who were liberated from Soviet
domination beginning in 1989, writes:
The risk of generation a sense of historical injustice was inherent in the very nature of a velvet revolution, which necessarily involved a morally distasteful compromise with the former powerholders. The social anthropologist Ernest Gellner called this "the price of velvet". That is why I argued at the time that the new democracies of Central Europe should institute a public confrontation with their dark past, perhaps in the form of a truth commission. A truth commission I wrote in an afterword to a second edition of The Magic Lantern, published in 1999, "symbolically draws a line under the past, without calling for forgetting or even, necessarily, forgiving. It is probably the closest a non-revolutionary revolution can come to revolutionary catharsis." I still believe that to be an important lesson for any future velvet revolution in other parts of the world.
Yet one must doubt whether even the most effective truth commission could have assuaged the burning sense of injustice caused by so many collaborators of the old regime becoming economic winners under the new. All current European populisms feed off anger at the way in which liberalism was reduced after 1989 to one rather extreme version of a purely economic liberalism, without the "equal respect and concern" for all citizens that the philosopher Ronald Dworkin identified as essential to a modern liberalism. But the impact of this was particularly acute in post-communist Europe, with its raw advent of capitalism, sense of historic injustice, and societies unused to high levels of visible inequality ("Time for a New Liberation?", New York Review of Books, 10/24/2019).
In the
spring of 1989, peaceful pro-democracy protests broke out in
China, culminating in a massive occupation of Tiananmen Square, in
the heart of Beijing, within a stone's throw (!) of the Great Hall
of the People and the tomb of Mao Tse-Tung. The protest was
vigorously suppressed by the People's Liberation Army on the night
of June 3-4, 1989, complete with live ammunition and columns of
tanks. Hundreds, if not thousands, of protesters were
killed, and the leaders -- as well as officials who were
sympathetic to the protesters -- were arrested, jailed, purged,
and exiled. Ever since then, in a truly Orwellian effort,
the Chinese government has tried to expunge Tiananmen Square from
collective memory. The episode is not mentioned in official
histories; security at the Square itself is intensified around the
anniversary of the event, internet searches for related
information are blocked -- so much so that, according to an
article in The Economist ("Ageing Rebels, Bitter Victims",
05/31/2014), China's internet censors even attempted to block
online references to the Shanghai Stock Exchange when it fell
64.89 points (6-4-89, get it?). In 2014, the 25th
anniversary of the event, Louisa Lim, a correspondent for National
Public Radio, published the fullest account to date of both the
"massacre" and the suppression that followed: The People's
Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. In an
informal experiment, Lim found that only 15 out of 100 Beijing
University students could (or perhaps, under the circumstances, would)
correctly identify the iconic "Man and Tanks" photograph from that
day.
In 2019, on the 30 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square events,
Lim wrote an Op-Ed column for the New York Times in which
she noted that "In the years since I wrote about Beijing's success
in erasing the killings of 1989 from collective memory...
[h]istory has become an ideological tool, with certain episodes
celebrated for showing the party's best version of itself, while
others are rooted out and erased... ("After Tiananmen, China
Conquers History Itself", New York Times,
06/04/2019). All of this is in the ultimate service of
legitimizing the current leadership.... In this
state-approved narrative, there is no place for the People's
Liberation Army's act of opening fire on its own people. And
the battle over the memory of 1989 is now a global one, waged in
classrooms, in print and online. Academic journals and tech
companies have censored June 4-related content.... In some
ways, indoctrinating China's young people with a utilitarian view
of history is an even more powerful tool than censorship
itself. When people accept that history must serve the
interests of the state, they become closed off to the spirit of
academic inquiry or even idle curiosity..... While all
countries construct their own national narratives, few manage to
rival the power of China's deeply emotive patriotic nationalism
and its unquestioned ability to punish those who publicly question
the official version of history. The danger is that these
tactics are so effective that China's history is splitting in two:
the Communist Party's narrative at home, and other, more nuanced
versions overseas. That divide may prove impossible to mend.
The June 1, 2019 edition of the Wall Street Journal carried a series of Op-Ed articles on "30 Years After Tiananmen".
See also The Last Secret: The Final Documents from the June Fourth Crackdown (2019) edited by Bao Yu, which documents a meeting of Chinese Communist Party officials convened to develop a common "party line" endorsing the massacre. See "China's 'Black Week-End'" an extensive review by Ian Johnson, in the New York Review of Books, 06/27/2019.
China's "secret
history" goes way beyond the massacre in Tienanmen Square.
Three was the famine associated with the Great Leap Forward, the
backlash to the Hundred Flowers campaign, and the persecutions
associated with the Cultural Revolution. There is Tibet,
and there are the Uighurs. Because the Chinese government
controls the press, there is little public knowledge, much less
discussion, of these and other topics. A review by Ian
Buruma profiles the "underground historians" who "have fought
the politics of amnesia" (New Yorker, 10/02/2023).
Reviewing Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their
Battle for the Future by Ian Johnson (2023), Buruma
writes:
There are plenty of contemporary problems that one can’t safely discuss in China, especially when they involve important officials. But Johnson’s underground historians are mostly concerned with unearthing and keeping alive forbidden memories of the past. Official Party history, imposed on China’s population, is also a matter of official forgetting. Many people born in China after 1989 have never heard of the Tiananmen massacre. Many of the young people who lived through the Cultural Revolution, in the nineteen-sixties and early seventies, would have had limited knowledge of the Great Leap Forward, in the late fifties and early sixties, when Mao’s crackpot schemes for industrial and agricultural transformation caused tens of millions of deaths from starvation. And many of those who starved may not have been fully aware of the land-reform campaigns of the early fifties, when vast numbers of people were murdered as class enemies, because they owned some land (as Mao’s father did, but that is a fact Party ideologues prefer to keep quiet).
The dissident Fang Lizhi, holed up at the United States Embassy in Beijing, in 1990, to avoid arrest after the Tiananmen crackdown, composed an essay titled “The Chinese Amnesia.” “About once each decade, the true face of history is thoroughly erased from the memory of Chinese society,” he wrote, in lines that Johnson quotes. “This is the objective of the Chinese Communist policy of ‘Forgetting History.’ In an effort to coerce all of society into a continuing forgetfulness, the policy requires that any detail of history that is not in the interests of the Chinese Communists cannot be expressed in any speech, book, document, or other medium.”
***
“Patriotic education,” as the campaign to propagate official history is now called, is a central pillar of Communist rule in China. Ever since Mao laid down the “correct line” in the caves of Yan’an, where the Communist leaders bided their time during the war with the Japanese in the forties, the goal has been to make people believe that everything before the Communist Revolution was decadent, corrupt, and wicked, that the revolution was inevitable, and that only Communist rule would restore the power and the glory of China.***
There are thirty-six thousand revolutionary sites throughout the country, and sixteen hundred of them are memorial halls and museums, all of which serve to indoctrinate an endless stream of schoolchildren and “red tourists.” Popular entertainment on film and TV provides fictional accounts of Communist heroes resisting Japanese imperialists or defeating decadent class enemies left over from the irredeemable past. And a large number of memorials, from the southern province of Guangdong, where the Opium Wars began, to the far northeast, annexed by the Japanese in the thirties, are there to make people aware of earlier humiliations that only the Communist Party can put right.Patriotic education is not unique to the People’s Republic of China. Americans don’t need to be reminded that the teaching of history can become a hotly contested political topic in democracies, too. But using the past to legitimatize political rule has an exceptionally long history in China.
Turkey is a modern nation-state, but it also includes a number of distinct ethnic subgroups -- not the least of whom are the Kurds that populate its border with Iraq. This situation creates a number of interesting dilemmas having to do with inter-ethnic tolerance and strife -- reflecting the pressure to subordinate one's ethnic identity to the abstract idea of being "Turkish" -- not to mention that being "Turkish" also requires one to negotiate dual identities, and dual sets of memories, associated with being both "European" and "Muslim". Steven Kinzer, a former New York Times correspondent in Istanbul, and author of Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds (2001) writes that:
Intolerance is nothing new in Turkey. In Streets of Memory [subtitled Landscape, Tolerance, and National Identity in Istanbul], a recent study of cultural attitudes in an Istanbul neighborhood that was a jumble of nationalities, Amy Mills writes:
The price of belonging, in Turkey, comes at a cost -- the forgetting of particular histories at the expense of the frequent retelling of others and the silencing of particular memories that cannot entirely be repressed.
She finds troubling evidence of "polarization in thinking about national identities and minority histories." People shy away from recalling, for example, the infamous pogrom in 1955 when rioters backed by police attacked homes and businesses owned by Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. But she also notes "an increasing curiosity and desire among Turkish citizens to learn more about places and pasts in Turkey" [from "Triumphant Turkey?", New York Review of Books, 08/18/2011].
"To remember" in Quechua, a
language of the indigenous people of Peru, and the name of an
exhibition mounted after a 2003 "Truth and Reconciliation
Commission" to inquire into the violent clash, between 1980 and
2000, between the Maoist "Shining Path" insurgents and the armed
forces. In 2009, the German government offered to build a
"museum of memory" to display the exhibit, but the government
turned it down. As Peruvian president Alan Garcia said,
"Memory doesn't belong to a particular group", and any such
museum should "take all perspectives into account" (Garcia had
also also been president during some of the period in question,
1985-1990). On the other hand, Mario Vargas Llosa, the
Peruvian novelist, replied that "We need a museum of memory to
fight the intolerant, blind and obtuse attitudes which unleash
political violence" ("Don't Look Back: History in Peru", The
Economist, 03/14/2009).
The common view of India is
that it is a Hindu nation, but in fact it has long been a blend
of Hindu and Muslim cultures. Hinduism arose out of the
ancient Vedic Civilization, beginning in the 2nd millennium BCE,
leading to the "Golden Age" of "Classical India", c. 320-650
CE. India's medieval period (650-1646 CE) was
characterized by a blend of Hindu and Muslim cultures, with the
Muslim Delhi Sultanate dominating the northern part of the
subcontinent (1206–1526) and the
Hindu Vijayanagara Empire (1336–1646) in the
south. Modern India began with the (Muslim) Mughal Dynasty
1526–1707 and the (Hindu) Maratha Empire (1674-1818).
From the middle of the 18th century onward, India was
governed by the British East India Company, followed by formal
incorporation of India into the British Empire in 1858. The
move for independence included both Hindus, like Mohandas
(Mahatma) Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and Muslims, like Muhammad
Ali Jinnah. The Hindus and Muslims couldn't keep it
together, though, and when independence from Britain neared,
Jinnah propounded his "two nations" theory. With the
Partition of 1947, the subcontinent was divided into
Hindu-dominant India and Muslim-dominant Pakistan.
This is not the place to give a definitive history
of India. The point is that until Partition, Hindus and
Muslims lived together, albeit sometimes uneasily, and Muslim
influence on Indian culture was palpable. For example, the
Taj Mahal, perhaps India's premiere tourist site, was built by a Mughal
emperor, Shah Jahan, in 1632. But in the 21st century,
the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) began
to institute a new elementary and secondary school curriculum
that highlights Vedic and medieval Hindu society, and Hindutva
("Hinduness") generally, and downplays the contributions of the
Mughals and other Muslims. The situation, as reviewed by
Alex Traub ("India's Dangerous New Curriculum, New York
Review of Books, 12/06/2018). Textbooks shape as
well as preserve collective memory, and Traub warns that the
current policies emphasize "Hindu triumphalism and
Islamophobia". Of course, Traub notes, prior to the
ascendancy the ruling Congress party cast the Mughal era in a
positive light, in an attempt to help "each of India's ethnic
and religious groups to feel they shard a claim to a common
national identity". And, further, he notes that when government
control changes between parties, as when BJP lost to Congress in
2004, the textbooks changed again. Now (2018), with BJP
back in power, they're changing back.
See also The Memory Hole and The Memory Police.
The literature of the Nazi holocaust is focused almost entirely on memory. In The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (Verso, 2000), Norman G. Finkelstein, himself the child of Holocaust survivors, notes that American Jewish elites "forgot" the holocaust until the 1960s, out of fear of being accused of "dual loyalty" in a time of McCarthyism. Then, they "remembered" the holocaust, once the United States had established a strategic alliance with Israel. At that point, in Finkelstein's view, The Holocaust, thus capitalized, became an ideological tool. A similar point is made, less provocatively, by Peter Novick in The Holocaust in American Life (2000). In any event, the motto of Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 19 (the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1942) is "Never Forget". As the last Holocaust survivors (like the last combat veterans of World War II) die, issues of memory persist, albeit in collective rather than individual form. As Melvin Jules Bukiet noted ("In the Beginning Was Auschwitz", Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/9/02),
"Memory" is the mantra of all the institutions that reckon with the Holocaust, but memory is an inaccurate term. For anyone who wasn't there, on either side of the barbed wire, Jew or German, thinking about the Holocaust is really an act of the imagination. All we know is how little we know.
The lack of a certain amount and kind of written documentation has made it possible for some people to deny the Holocaust even occurred, or that Hitler had any role in it. This was an issue in the libel suit brought by David Irving, author of Hitler's War, against Deborah Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Irving lost his suit, but the case was not frivolous: it raised an important question that goes to the heart of the relationship between memory and history, and one that is critical for the field of oral history: in knowing the past, how much weight should we give to documents, and how much to eyewitness testimony? The Irving-Lipstadt case is documented by D.D. Guttenplan, London correspondent for The Nation, in the Holocaust on Trial (Norton, 2002)
In a discussion of "Breakthrough Books" on collective memory published in Lingua Franca (March/April 1996), Michael Schudson, author of Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (Basic, 1992), stated that "There are two kinds of studies of collective memory -- those that examine the Holocaust, and all the others. Even people whose own work lies in that second group find Holocaust studies inescapably important, capable of illuminating every corner of the general topic with intellectual clarity and urgency".
James Young has provided
highly regarded analyses of collective memories of the Holocaust
in:
A study of Jewish collective
memory is found in Zakhor by Yosef Hayim Yerushalami
(1982), who notes that the command zakhor "to
remember", occurs frequently in the Hebrew Bible. Dana Horn
comments:
"Commanded by God dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible to remember their past, Jews historically obeyed not by recording events but by ritually re-enacting them, by understanding the present through the lens of the past" ("Articles of Faith" by Dara Horn, New York times Book Review, 09/01/2013).
Hypnosis is often employed as a technique for the self-regulation of memory. In posthypnotic amnesia, people cannot remember events and experiences that transpired during hypnosis. In hypnotic agnosia, they cannot access generic, impersonal knowledge of a "semantic" or "procedural" sort. Posthypnotic amnesia has been studied experimentally for more than half a century, but hypnotic agnosia is relatively unknown. Claims have also been made that suggestions for hypermnesia and age regression can refresh people's recollection of forgotten events, and have been used in both forensic and clinical situations, but the validity of memories "recovered" through these techniques has been hotly debated. Claims that hypnosis can enhance the learning process have generally not been confirmed by experimental research.
Read "Hypnosis, Memory, and Amnesia", a brief summary of the literature on hypnosis and memory based on a paper originally presented at a symposium at the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease, on Memory and Memory Disorders", New York, December 1995, and subsequently published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences as part of a special issue, Biological and Psychological Perspectives on Memory and Memory Disorders, edited by L.R. Squire and D.L. Schacter (372, 1727-1732, 1997).
Read "Altering States of Consciousness" by J.F. Kihlstrom and E. Eich. This article is a chapter in Learning, Remembering, Believing: Enhancing Human Performance, edited by D. Druckman and R.A. Bjork (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 1994, pp. 207-248), which was a report of the Committee on the Enhancement of Human Performance of the National Research Council, the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences. The report was one of several commissioned by the United States Army to evaluate psychosocial techniques for enhancing individual and team performance, especially under conditions of stress. The chapter contains a brief review of the use of hypnosis to enhance learning, memory, and other aspects of human performance. Requires Adobe Acrobat reader.
Read "Hypnosis and Memory" by J.F. Kihlstrom. This is an article in Learning and Memory, 2nd ed., ed. by J.F. Byrne (Farmington Hills, Mi: Macmillan Reference, 2003, pp. 240-242). This article covers all the effects of hypnosis on memory, including posthypnotic amnesia, agnosia, hypermnesia, and age regression, with comments on the use of hypnosis for the recovery of memory in clinical and forensic situations.
In the Indian Rope Trick, a fakir tosses a ball of twine into the air; a small boy climbs the extended rope, and then disappears into thin air. The first report of the trick, by John Elbert Wilkie (then a journalist writing for the Chicago Tribune, later the head of the US Secret Service) in 1890, is now known to be a hoax (not least because Wilkie confessed his prank). The trick has never been performed, and it was never witnessed. Nevertheless, a number of people claimed to have witnessed it. Peter Lamont, in The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2005), speculates that "the true secret of the Indian rope Trick is the way the supple human memory combines events we've really seen with legends we've only heard, and shapes them into the best possible story to tell our grandchildren" (quotation from "The Grift of the Magi" by Teller, himself a magician, reviewing the book in the New York Times Book Review, 02/13/05). Lamont's book even offers an instance of a false "recovered memory". Again quoting Teller: "In 1925, the aptly named Lady Waghorn suddenly remembered witnessing the trick in Madras in 1891, although for 34 years she had somehow thought 'nothing about it'." The memory is recovered, because she had not been conscious of it for years; it is false, because -- to repeat -- Wilkie's 1890 report was a hoax, and the Rope Trick has never been performed, before or since.
In sociology, an institution may be defined as "(1) a set of mores or formal rules, or both, which can be fulfilled only by (2) people acting collectively, in established complementary capacities or offices" (Everett C. Hughes, "Institutions", in R.E. Park (ed.), An Outline of the Principles of Sociology, p. 297). Hughes further noted that "Institutions exist in the integrated and standardized behavior of individuals" (p. 319). Talcott Parsons argued that institutions were systems of norms that "regulate the relations of individuals to each other" and specify "what the relations of individuals ought to be" (The Structure of Social Action, 1934/1990, p. 327).
Emile Durkheim, the pioneering French sociologist, defined human institutions as symbolic systems, entailing collective representations and beliefs.
These systems, although a product of human interaction, are experienced by individuals as objective. Although subjectively formed, they become "crystallized." They are, in Durkheim's (1901/1950) terms, "social facts": phenomena perceived by the individual as being both "external" (to that person) and "coercive" (backed by sanctions). And, as is the case with religious systems, ritual and ceremonies play a vital role in expressing and reinforcing belief.... These symbolic systems -- systems of knowledge, belief, and "moral authority" -- are for Durkheim social institutions (Scott, 1995, p. 10).
Scott (p. 10) further quotes Jeffrey C. Alexander on Durkheim:
Institutions, Durkheim writes, are a product of joint activity and association, the effect of which is to "fix," to "institute" outside us certain initially subjective and individual ways of acting and judging. Institutions, then, are the "crystallizations" of Durkheim's earlier writing (Theoretical Logic in Sociology: The Antinomies of Classical Thought: Marx and Durkheim, 1983, Vol. 2, p. 259).
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Max Weber on the Definition of Social Science Another pioneering sociologist, Max Weber, defined the social sciences as those in which both the investigator and the subject attach meaning to events. The human ecology of memory is a social-scientific approach to memory is primarily concerned with what people remember, individually and collectively, and how individuals and groups give meaning to the past. In this respect, it complements the natural-scientific that characterizes so much of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, which is primarily concerned with how people remember, in the abstract. |
For introductions to the sociology of
institutions and organizations (none of which make any
particular mention of institutional memory), see:
John McPhee, in an autobiographical essay, has this advice for budding journalists and nonfiction writers:
Whatever you do, don't rely on memory. don't even imagine that you will be able to remember verbatim in the evening what people said during the day.... From the start, make clear what you are doing and who will publish what you write. Display your notebook as if it were a fishing license.
Writing of 2 Columbus Circle, the controversial postmodern New York City skyscraper designed by Edward Durrell Stone in "Venetian Gothic" style, but also of the late, lamented, Pennsylvania Station in the same city, Herbert Muschamp writes: "A building does not have to be an important work of architecture to become a first-rate landmark. Landmarks are not created by architects. They are fashioned by those who encounter them after they are built. The essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but the place it holds in a city's memory. Compared to the place it occupies in social history, a landmark's artistic qualities are incidental" ("The Secret History", New York Times, 01/08/06).
Digitization of books and journals, however much it may be a boon to scholarship, creates a risk that other sorts of artifacts, which cannot be digitized, will be lost to collective memory. So argues Katie Hafner in "History, Digitized (and Abridged)" (New York Times, 03/11/07). She writes: "As more museums and archives become digital domains, and as electronic resources become the main tool for gathering information, items left behind in non-digital form... are in danger of disappearing from the collective cultural memory, potentially leaving our historical fabric riddled with holes". Hafner quotes Edward L. Ayers, a historian at the University of Virginia: "Material that is not digitized risks being neglected as it would not have been in the past, virtually lost to the great majority of potential users".
See also Aide-Memoire, Digitization as a Threat to Individual Memory.
Mnemosyne was not only the goddess of memory; she was also the mother of the Muses, the goddesses of the various arts. Thus, there is a link between memory and literature (including history, whose Muse was Clio) and the other arts. Two particularly good sources on the relationship between memory and literature, and the literature of memory beyond psychology and the other cognitive sciences, are:
The Anatomy of Memory: An Anthology, edited by James McConkey (Oxford University Press, 1996). Originally conceived as the "Oxford Companion to Memory", part of the famous Oxford series, this anthology is "an engrossing treasury of commentaries on memory as the necessary condition of individual and cultural identity, and as the provider of the materials and themes of our philosophies, religions, and literary creations" (M.H. Abrams, from the book jacket).
I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory, by Patricia Hampl (Norton, 1999). A shorter book that "looks so deeply into the relation between memory and imagination as to become a guide, for both writers and readers, to what Virginia Woolf called 'life writing'" (Mark Doty, from the book jacket).
The literature of memory encompasses as literature of forgetting as well as a literature of remembering. For examples of the former, see:
The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory Loss, edited by Jonathan Lethem (Vintage Books, 2000). Part of the 'Black Lizard" crime series, this book does "nothing less than define a new genre of literature -- the amnesia story" (from the book description on www. amazon.com). As Lethem noted (in an interview with Kevin Canfield of the Hartford Courant, 2001), amnesia "isolates the basic question people are asking all the time -- even if they're not aware they're asking it -- which is, 'Who am I?' and 'Where do I come from?' The function of amnesia is that it helps make that question super-literal, super-explicit."
A Primer of Forgetting by Lewis Hyde (2019), another sort of commonplace book, reviewed by Christian Wyman in the Wall Street Journal ("The Past Need Not Be Prologue", 06/22/2019). According to Wyman, Hyde argues that "forgetting is as important to one's vitality and sanity as memory.... 'In forgetting lies the liquefaction of time,' Mr. Hyde writes. Bad remembering causes time to clot. Bad remembering can be an error of content (we remember the wrong things) or an error of action (we remember for the wrong reasons). Time is, or ought to be, fluid, and to be fluent within time, we must let a lot of life drop away. Thus, as he puts it, 'every act of memory is also an act of forgetting'."
Link to comments on the role that memory plays in literature.
Referring to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Lawrence M. Small, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, identifies the lunch box is "that metal madeleine with the power to turn purposeful grownups into carefree kids again" ("Cartwheels at 50", Smithsonian magazine, 04/02). The Smithsonian has organized a traveling exhibition, Lunchbox Memories, which traces the cultural evolution of both lunch and the lunchbox. In the introduction to the exhibition, the curators note that "Like an old song, a metal lunch box takes us back in time, recalling school days or workdays, favorite foods, a certain lunch table, a friend, a quiet moment". Link to the exhibition website.
Malcolm C. Dizer
(1886-1978) was a British-American philatelist who assembled a
number of specialized postage stamp albums under the general
topic of "History in Philately".
The albums constitute an excellent example of the use of
postage stamps to preserve collective memory.
In 2004, Martha Stewart (the domestic diva, the doyenne of domesticity) went on trial on charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice arising from an apparent incident of insider trading involving ImClone, a pharmaceutical company. (Samuel D. Waksal, the CEO of ImClone and one of Stewart's close friends, sold a large amount of ImClone stock before the Food & drug administration announced that it would not approve a new ImClone drug for sale; so did Ms. Stewart). At Ms. Stewart's trial, Marianna Pasternak, described in one news account as Ms. Stewart's former best friend, testified for the prosecution that, when discussing her stock sale, "Isn't it nice to have brokers who tell you those things?". Under cross examination by the defense, however, Ms. Pasternak admitted that Ms. Stewart might not have said this. According to the New York Times
"I do not know whether that statement was made by Martha or was thought in my mind," she told the court. She described the memory as "a string of words that I recall." Later, however when questioned further by a prosecutor, she said she believed "that Martha said it" ("Damming Words in Stewart Case, or Maybe Not" by Constance L. Hays, 02/21/04).
In another Times article, Ms. Pasternak is further quoted as saying "I do not know if Martha said that, or it's me who thought those words" ("On the Witness Stand, Friendships Can Also Face a Trial" by Leslie Eaton, 02/21/04).
The episode may illustrate certain vicissitudes of eyewitness memory, including imagination inflation and source amnesia. If Pasternak had the thought herself, but attributed it to Ms. Stewart, it is an interesting reversal of cryptomnesia, or "unconscious plagiarism".
The biologist Richard Dawkins has defined memes as individual units of information, analogous to genes, that proliferate through a culture based on Darwinian principles of variation, selection, and retention (see The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, 1976). For Dawkins, memes are selected in the "marketplace of ideas" in a manner to the selection of bodily and behavioral traits in biological evolution. In Dawkins' view, memes are the cognitive basis of culture, and they have much in common with collective memory.
Memes include any pieces of
information that are widely shared within a culture.
Deutsch is interested in neo-Darwinian accounts of the evolution of culture. Such accounts treat cultural items — languages, religions, values, ideas, traditions — in much the way that Darwinian theories of biological evolution treat genes. They are called "memes," and are treated as evolving, just as genes do, by mutation and selection, with the most successful memes being those that are the most faithfully replicated. Deutsch writes with enormous clarity and insight about how the mechanisms of mutation and transmission and selection of memes are going to have to differ, in all sorts of ways, from those of genes.
He also provides an elegant analysis of two particular strategies for meme-replication, one he calls "rational" and the other he calls "anti-rational." Rational memes — the sort that Deutsch imagines will replicate themselves well in post-Enlightenment societies — are simply good ideas: the kind that will survive rigorous scientific scrutiny, the kind that will somehow make life easier or safer or more rewarding because they tell us something useful about how the world actually works. Irrational memes — which are more interesting, and more diabolical, and which Deutsch thinks of as summing up the essential character of pre-Enlightenment societies — reproduce themselves by disabling the capacities of their hosts (by means of fear, or an anxiety to conform, or the appearance of naturalness and inevitability, or in any number of other ways) to evaluate or invent new ideas. And one particular subcategory of memes — about which Deutsch has very clever things to say — succeeds precisely by pretending not to tell the truth. So, for example: "Children who asked why they were required to enact onerous behaviors that did not seem functional would be told ‘because I say so,’ and in due course they would give their children the same reply to the same question, never realizing that they were giving the full explanation. (This is a curious type of meme whose explicit content is true even though its holders do not believe it.)"
For sympathetic analyses of the "meme" concept,
see
While autobiographies make use of documentary records, memoirs are, almost by definition, literary representations of memory. And so, like memories, they may be inaccurate or willfully distorted. Memoirs are representations of memory, not of history.
The biographer Dorothy Gallagher notes that "Writing is problem solving; whether in fiction, biography, or memoir, certain basic questions have to be resolved". She continues:
In biography, at least, a writer leans heavily on materials gathered in research. Working with a trove of documents is constraining, but also in some ways liberating, as working a puzzle is liberating. The clues are in your files, and if you've done your job as a researcher, you have the tools to solve the puzzle. But when I turned to memoir -- the shamelessly naked core of a writer's necessary material -- I found myself traveling as light as any writer of fiction.
I have never written fiction, and this memoir [How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories] may be as close as I ever get to it. No more than a biography or a novel is memoir true to life. because, truly, life is just one damn thing after another. The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve her story.... A reporter of fact is in service to the facts..., but a writer serves the story without apology to competing claims....
Now you may ask: Just what is the relation of your memoir to the truth?
It is as close as it can be....
The moment you put pen to paper and begin to shape a story, the essential nature of life -- that one damn thing after another -- is lost. No matter how ambiguous you try to make a story, no matter how many ends you leave hanging, it's a package made to travel.
Everything that happened is not in my stories; how could it be? Memory is selective, storytelling insists on itself. But there is nothing in my stories that did not happen. In their essence they are true.
Or a shade of true... ("Recognizing the Book that Needs to be Written", New York Times, 06/17/02).
Similarly, Lisa Knopp has written in the Nature of Home: A Lexicon and Essays (University of Nebraska Press, 2002) that
The act of making something from what is already there always involves a simultaneous creation and destruction.... Even what seems like the purest, most self-contained type of creativity -- turning the events, images, and ideas of one's life into a written story --is a destroyer. Writing about one's memories, trimming, padding, moving them around, reshaping them until they fit a readable or "tell-able" form, changes these memories in great or small ways. What the writer remembers after her act of creation is not her memory of the event that is the subject of her essay or story, but the written account of her memory (as quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 09/27/02).
Publishing a memoir, as with giving an oral history, is an exercise in both remembering and performing. Bernard Cooper, writing in Baxter's The Business of Memory (1999), notes that "The process of writing a memoir is insular, ruminative, a mining of privacies; once published, however, the book becomes an act of extroversion..., a performance of self rather than its articulation. The gap between these two experiences -- the creation of a memoir and the ramifications of having written one -- is wide enough, it seems to me, to bewilder even the most poised and gregarious among us".
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Memoir! A sweet word that, year after year, liberates writers caught between genres. Tell the story of your own life and you get some of the liberty of fiction and all the authority of nonfiction. Virginia Heffernan
New York Times Book Review,
07/14/02
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Link to a page on memoir.
Link to a page on memory in literature.
Many people save items from
travel or special occasions -- matchbooks and shampoo bottles
from restaurants and hotels, orchids from the senior prom,
pressed in a favorite book. These mementos are literally
retrieval cues, prompts that help us to remember some
event. Debra A. Klein has written of her own
collection: "When I can't get away, I can still retreat
to these places. They are preserved forever, or at least
for decades, not just in a corner of my mind but also in a
corner of my room. With bags of memories to sift
through, I will always be able to relive my journeys, even
after I reach the point in life when I'm not going anywhere"
(Those Tiny Soaps? Memories, My Dear", New York
Times Travel Section, 06/09/02; also Letters on Travel,
06/30/02).
Souvenirs are retrieval
cues, helping us remember the places we've been and the things
we've done there. But they serve a variety of other
functions, as noted by Rolf Potts in his book, Souvenir
(2018), who notes that souvenirs fall into several different
categories, and perform several different functions (see
"Souvenirs 101" by Stephanie Rosenbloom, New York Times,
04/15/2018). Rosenbloom notes that buying a souvenir
might satisfy a gift-giving custom, like the exchange-of-gifts
ritual in Japan; or it may comfort a traveler who performs a
familiar activity (shopping) in an unfamiliar place, reminding
the traveler of the people back home for whom the souvenir is
being bought, or to whom it will be displayed. It may
effectively slow down time in an ephemeral experience.
It can advertise worldliness ("Look where I've been!").
Souvenirs can symbolize the traveler's aspirations for more
travel, and escape. And they can become part of what I
have called "the material culture of the self"
(this is my term). Rosenbloom writes:
Indeed, in the end, Souvenir suggests that the meaning of a keepsake is not fixed (its importance to the owner can change over time), and that its significance is bound up in the traveler's identity. "When we collect souvenirs," Mr. Potts writes, "we do so not to evaluate the world, but to narrate the self."
The story begins the moment we take a trinket off a shelf, buy it and walk out of the store. The object can then become part of our personal history, "a way of mythologizing our own lives," Mr. Potts says. And ever more so in an age of Instagram, he told me recently, when conspicuous consumption plays out in real time, making the objects we choose to keep seem even more personal. He himself has had plenty of keepsakes displayed around his home... -- things that remind him not merely of the places he's been and the people he's encountered, but of former life phases.
"Try as I might to articulate to other people the meanings and back stories of these objects," he writes, "they ultimately exist as a kind of private sign language that only I can understand."
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"Constructing Memory", the Rosie the Riveter Memorial in Richmond, California, honoring American women's labor during World War II. Design by Susan Schwartzenberg and Cheryl Barton. Dedicated October 2000. Selected through a 1998 competition open to West Coast artists, the design is described by the artists as a "construction metaphor exploring the symbolic connection between building ships and the reconstructive processes of human memory" (from the Rosie the Riveter website). |
Art of Memorial? The Forgotten History of Canada's War Art by Laura Brandon "explores the role of art in the shaping of Canadian memories of wartime" (Nina C. Ayoub, "New Scholarly Books", Chronicle of Higher Education, 07/28/07).
See also:
Writing in Smithsonian magazine, Elliot Ackerman notes that "most of our national memorials are dedicated to our wars" ("War and Remembrance", 01-02/2019). By that he means specific wars, which had an end -- something like "V-E Day" or "V-J Day" (neither any longer celebrated) or even April 30, 1975 -- the day that Saigon fell, ending the Vietnam War. The immediate stimulus for Ackerman's article, however, was the Global War on Terror, begun in the wake of September 11, 2001. Of course, there are memorials to the events of September 11, and the people who died in them, and many individual communities have erected their own GWOT memorials (a particularly moving one, discussed by Ackerman, is at Boston's Old North Church). But the memorial he is interested in would be on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. -- where the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is sited; and there is a legal prohibition on erecting war memorials on the Mall until at least 10 years after the war's conclusion. As Ackerman puts it, "How do we pay tribute to the fallen in a conflict that might never end?". In fact, Congress passed an exception for the GWOT memorial, and a design competition, like the one that yielded the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, will be held sometime in the future (this entry is written in 2019). Ackerman's own idea for the design (he himself is a SWOT veteran, having served with the Special Forces in Iraq) is simply stunning, and well worth searching out the article to read his description and rationale.The site contains more contradictions, unresolved and perhaps unresolvable, than any other eight acres in Manhattan. A celebration of liberty tightly policed; a cemetery that cowers in the shadow of commerce; an insistence that we are her to remember and an ambition to let us tell you what to recall; the boast that we have completely started over and the promise that we will never forget -- visitors experience these things with a free-floating unease.
The 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first African slaves in what was to become the United States provided an opportunity for Americans to reflect on the role of slavery in the nation's history, and of course in the Civil War. So how should Americans remember slavery? In Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019), Susan Neiman draws inspiration from the way that Germans handled the memory of the Holocaust (see "Slavery and the Holocaust: How Americans and Germans Cope with Past Evils", a review of the book by Deborah Lipstadt, an historian of the Holocaust, in the Wall Street Journal, 09/07/2019; also "A Heritage of Evil" by Michael Garra, New York Review of Books, 11/07/2019). In the years immediately following World War II, Germans practiced a kind of "moral myopia": the communist government in East Germany claimed that all the Nazis were in the West, while the democratic government in West Germany claimed that only the Nazi leadership knew about the mass murder of Jews and others, and even appointed former Nazis to high government positions (the United States, for its part, got Werner von Braun and his colleagues to lead its rocket program, conveniently forgetting that all of them had worked on the German rocket program in the War). Stimulated by the televised trials of Adolph Eichmann and other Nazi war criminals, the children and grandchildren of the Nazis sought a more honest account of their recent history. In America, similarly, Northerners viewed slavery as an institution of the South, while Southerners blamed slavery on Africans who sold the slaves to Northern ship captains involved in the triangular trade of slaves from Africa to the Americas, raw materials from the Americas to Europe, and manufactured goods from Europe to Africa. Southerners also perpetuated a sentimental view of the "noble lost cause" of states rights, and of slavery itself as a mostly benign institution. Neiman points out that some Germans, like some Southerners, construed themselves as victims of World War II -- "We suffered too, ...we too were victims", and occasionally you can find in Germany memorials to the suffering of the German people -- e.g., a memorial in Landshut to the millions of German-speakers (Volksdeutsche) who were expelled from various European countries after the war ended. Still, contemporary German culture is characterized by widespread acceptance of German wartime evils. Neiman points out, for example, that while there are memorials to the Volksdeutsche, there are no "Hans Wehrmacht" equivalent to "Johnny Reb" statues, nor any statues to Nazi generals. Rather, most German war memorials engage in what the Germans call Vergangenheitausfarbeitung or Vergangenheitsbewaltigung -- two of those amazing German words that translate roughly as "working through the past" or "mastering the past". The story of how the Germans did it -- how they are still doing it -- holds lessons for us here in America. Throughout, Neiman explores the difference between "historical scholarship and ordinary public memory".
See a series of articles that appeared in 2017, as the "monuments debate" was heating up:
- "In Monument Debate, Calls for an Overdue Reckoning on Race and Southern Identity" by Campbell Robertson, Alan Blinder, and Richard Fausset, NYT 08/18/2017;
- "In Charlottesville, Some Say Statue Debate Obscures a Deep Racial Split" by John Eligon, NYT, 08/19/2017);
- "Confederate Leaders' Descendants Say Statues Can Come Down" by Maggie Astor and Nicholas Fandos, NYT, 08/20/2017);
- 'The Lees Are Complex': Descendants Grapple with Rebel General's Legacy" by Simon Romero, NYT, 08/23/2017).
- "Historians Question Trump's Comments on Confederate Monuments" by Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times, 08/16/2017;
- "Why Confederate Monuments Must Fall" by Karen L. Cox, a historian at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NYT, 08/16/2017;
- "Charlottesville Violence Spurs New Resistance to Confederate Symbols" by Nicholas Fandos, Richard Fausset, & Alan Blinder, NYT, 08/17/2017;
- "Trump Aside, Artists and Preservationists Debate the Rush to Topple Statues" by Robin Pogrebin and Sopan Deb, NYT, 08/19/2017);
- "Confederate Statues and 'Our' History" by Eric Foner, NYT, 08/21/2017);
- "Why Lee Should Go, and Washington Should Stay" by Jon Meacham, NYT, 08/22/2017).
Postscript: In June 2020, Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia, ordered that a massive statue of Robert E. Lee, which had dominated the main square of Richmond (formerly the capital of the Confederacy) to be removed. A (white) woman interviewed on CNN objected, on the grounds that the statue represented not just history, which would be a reasonable argument for its preservation but "the history of white people" -- which really gave the game away, didn't it?
For a photo essay on Confederate memorials, see "Reclaiming History", text by Phillip Morris and photographs by Kris Graves, in National Geographic, 02/2021.
The year 2007 saw the 10th annual USA Memory Championships, in which competitors memorized long lists of names and faces, strings of numbers, decks of cards, and poems. The winner of the championship, founded by Tony Dottino, a former executive at IBM, will then compete in the World Memory Championships. An article on the American series indicates that most of the competitors relied on various mnemonic strategies to perform their feats. For example, one competitor memorized a deck of cards by assigning each card a letter -- A for Ace, B for deuce, and so on, and then naming each card for a celebrity (so that, for example, the ace of spades became Arnold Schwarzenegger). How this is supposed to help isn't clear, as assigning letters to each card, and then relating each named card to a celebrity, should only increase the load on memory. But this just increases the mystery associated with high-levels of mnemonic skill. (See 'It Was a Day to Remember for America's Mental Athletes" by Joanne Kaufman, Wall Street Journal, 03/15/07.)
The contemporary American artist Robert Morris (b. 1931) makes explicit use of Bartlett's "method of serial reproduction" in his Memory Drawing series of 1963. In this work, simply Morris writes out a text that he has committed to memory: over the five drawings of the series, the reproduction of the text becomes increasingly full of errors. Here is the entire series, reproduced here by courtesy of the Leo Castelli Gallery (thanks to Robert Morris and Ricky Manne for arranging this).
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See Inability to Endure or Deny the World: Representation and Text in the Work of Robert Morris by Terrie Sultan, catalog of an exhibit of Morris's work at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1990-1991.
'He who controls the past, controls the future: so wrote George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty Four (written 1948; published 1949). the novel tells the story of Winston Smith, a clerk in the Ministry of Truth, who alters newspapers and other documents in accordance with the pronouncements of Big Brother and the Party, and destroys the old versions by dropping them down the "memory hole". In Orwell's vision, political control is exercised through the control of information, including the control of memory: "Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past."
Interestingly, Orwell wasn't above using the memory hole himself. Bernard Crick, author of the authorized biography of Orwell, found it difficult to corroborate some of the incidents reported in Orwell's autobiography, and in his personal essays. Louis Menand notes one instance, from one of the "London Letters" Orwell wrote for Partisan Review during World War II, ("Honest, Decent, Wrong", New Yorker, 01/27/03). Orwell had reported that park railings were being dismantled for use as scrap metal, but only in working-class neighborhoods, not upper-class ones. "When a friend pointed out that [the story] was untrue, "Orwell is supposed to have replied that it didn't matter, 'it was essentially true'".
Orwell's point about the control of information is illustrated by many totalitarian regimes, and their fates. To take one example, the Christmas 1989 revolution against the Ceausescu regime in Romania did not begin in Bucharest, the country's capital, but in the provincial city of Timisoara. Why there? Ceausescu and his family and cronies exercised total control of state media, and there were few if any independent media outlets available, Timisoara was within range of radio and television stations in Italy, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, so the people there had access to the news that the Communist countries of eastern Europe were coming apart at the seams. For a dramatic account of the Christmas revolution, see Andrei Codrescu, The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile's Story of Return and Revolution (Morrow, 1991).
The memory hole is not just
a technique of totalitarian regimes. The temptation to
wipe out bad collective memories is present even in the most
open, democratic societies, like the United States.
"The Memory Hole" (www.thememoryhole.org), a website maintained by Russ Kick, is dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of material, especially government files and corporate memos, "that exposes things that we're not supposed to know (or that we're supposed to forget)". See "Peeking Behind the Curtain of Secrecy" by Tom McNichol, New York Times, 11/13/03.
See also National Memory and The Memory Police.
The Fall 2022 issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom, an online publication of the American Association of University Professors, is devoted to the topic of "Memory Laws or Gag Laws? Disinformation Meets Academic Freedom." According to the editors, the
call for papers was inspired by last year’s onslaught of partisan legislation that targeted teaching about race and racism in K–12 schools and, in many states, at public colleges and universities. The onslaught continues this year as new bills make their way through state legislatures and as politicians stoke fears that learning about the history and legacies of genocide, slavery, and systemic racism will make white students uncomfortable. While such external interference poses immediate threats to the academic freedom of many US educators, we encourage prospective authors to consider these threats in a broader, international context—where we see precedents for crossing the line between memory laws that aim to prevent disinformation and gag laws that promote disinformation.
The editors' examples of "memory laws", and "gag laws"
generally, included
- Book and idea bans, educational gag order bills, and other forms of censorship.
- The 1619 Project versus the 1776 Project, and the academic profession.
- Doublespeak in educational policy, including the use of free speech rhetoric to suppress education about racial, gender, and LGBTQ+ inequalities.
- Strategies for truthful pedagogies and content on racism, racial inequality, and oppression.
- Features of recent Republican “memory laws” or case studies of legislation in specific states such as Florida or Texas.
- Attacks on Black history, critical race theory, and ethnic, Indigenous, and gender studies.
- Indigenous peoples’ history and decolonization struggles.
- Comparative approaches to memory laws, history, and academic freedom.
A theatrical genre related to the literary memoir, a memory play is one in which the narrator, usually an adult, reflects on an earlier time when he or she underwent a life-changing experience. The classic example is Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie and Suddenly, Last Summer (the latter based on events in the life of Williams' beloved sister, Rose).
The narrator in The Glass Menagerie, Tom Wingfield, defines the concept: "The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimply lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic; in memory everything seems to happen to music".
Other salient examples:
What is a Memory Play?In its 2022-2023 season, the Arizona Theater Company
accompanied its production of The Glass Menagerie
with a helpful essay on the idea of a "memory play":
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George Orwell had his memory hole. Ray Bradbury, in Fahrenheit
451, had "firemen" who burned books. In both cases,
people had to rely on memory to preserve history and
culture. But what if there was no memory, as well as no
newspapers or books? That's the premise of The Memory
Police, a novel b Yoko Ogawa, first published in Japanese in
1994 and translated into English by Stephen Snyder in 2019 (see
"Daring to Remember", a review of the book by Anna Mundaw, in the
Wall Street Journal, 08/24/2019; also "'Read Receipts' On:
Two Dystopian Novels Predict the Surveillance State" by Julian
Lucas, New York Times 09/08/2019 -- the title refers to a
feature in Microsoft Outlook by which the sender of a message can
determine whether it's been opened by the recipient). The
novel is set on an island where people and things have been
disappearing, and the memories of them disappearing too. The
protagonist is a mother (her young daughter is one of the few
inhabitants who is immune to whatever is causing the
disappearances (and the amnesia). Those people who can
remember are identified and rounded up by the Memory Police, and
promptly disappear. As the Memory Police pursue the
daughter, who has become a writer, she and her editor take refuge
in the house of an old man. At one point the narrator asks
"How does it feel to remember everything? To have everything
that the rest of us have lost saved up in your heart?"
Memory Studies is a scientific journal devoted to the interdisciplinary study of memory, including the social sciences, humanities, and arts, as well as the usual psychology and cognitive science. Established in 2008, its founding editors were Amanda Barnier, Andrew Hoskins, Wulf Kansteiner, and John Sutton.
According to its statement of aims, Memory Studies "examines the social, cultural, cognitive, political and technological shifts affecting how, what and why individuals, groups and societies remember, and forget. The journal responds to and seeks to shape public and academic discourses on the nature, manipulation, and contestation of memory in the contemporary era.... Areas of dialogue and debate will include: Everyday remembering; Collective, public, social and shared memory; Biography and history; Schema and narrative; The ethics of remembering and forgetting; Commemoration and remembrance; Organic and artificial memory; Media and mechanisms; Documentation and archive; Holocaust memory; Cosmopolitanism and globalization; Cultural memory and heritage; Catastrophe and trauma; Nation and nostalgia; Oral history and the culture of the witness; Memory and the politics of identity."
See Scholarly Journals for a list of -- what else? -- other scholarly journals devoted to memory.
Memory tables, typically containing pictures and other mementos of the deceased, are often featured at funeral homes during visitation sessions, funerals, or memorial ceremonies. They similar to the ofrendas which figure in the celebration of El Dia de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead) in Meso-American cultures.
Link to an advertisement for a wrought-iron memory table designed and made by Kendall LeCompte, and available for sail by Iron Station, a store specializing in iron crafts.
Forgetfulness figures prominently in the complaints associated with menopause, just as they do in other aspects of normal aging. However, memory function in menopause has rarely been studied with rigorous laboratory method. A longitudinal study of women by P.B. Meyer et al. (Neurology, 2003), surprisingly, found that memory functions actually improved as women aged, even for those who had entered (or continued through) menopause. Meyer et al. offer a number of interesting hypotheses to explain this surprising result, but it may be that their experimental techniques, involving "short-term" memory functions tested by the digit-span and digit-symbol tests, were simply not representative of the everyday circumstances in which these women experienced forgetfulness. Alternatively, the memory complaints may have been related to menopause-related depressive mood, as opposed to menopause itself. Research on menopause and memory should take care to use ecologically valid memory tests, and also distinguish between the effects of menopause per se, the reaction to menopause, and normal aging.
See also Aging, Depression.
Hollywood (and Tasmanian) legend has it that Merle Oberon, the actress, was born and raised in Tasmania (as was Errol Flynn, another famous actor). However, in 1978, visiting Tasmania with her fourth husband, Oberon let slip at an official banquet that she had actually been born in Mumbai (Bombay), India. Nevertheless, "She was surrounded by Tasmanians who vividly recalled her and assured her that they knew both her parents well. 'In Tasmania, we tell stories to reassure ourselves we have not slipped unnoticed over the rim of the world', a Tasmanian historian wrote of the Oberon affair" (William Grimes, reviewing In Tasmania by Nicholas Shakespeare in the New York Times, reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, 06/06/06 -- Shakespeare gives a full account of the episode).
Mnemonic devices help us to remember lists of things, like the notes of the treble clef ("FACE", "Every Good Boy Deserves Favor"), the lengths of the months ("Thirty days hath November...."), or the 12 cranial nerves "On Old Olympus' Towering Tops a Foolish Austrian Grew Vines and Hops"). Cullen Murphy has suggested that mnemonic devices should be added to UNESCO's list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity ("Immaterial Civilization", Atlantic Monthly, 9/01).
It's clear why mnemonic techniques were popular in ancient Greece and Rome, where literacy was rare, paper was expensive, and printing virtually nonexistent. But why should mnemonics have persisted into the Renaissance, even after the invention of movable type? Anthony Grafton, reviewing Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic by Ingrid Rowland, suggests an answer ("'But They Burned Giordano Bruno'", New York Review of Books, 11/20/2008, pp. 76-77):
To readers who spend their days in front of computer screens, the art of memory sounds not just archaic, but antediluvian -- the kind of thing that might be used in carnival performances, rather than a feat to astonish the learned. In Bruno's world, however, memory mattered. Rowland suggests that it offered a way to impose order on the growing masses of files produced by the diplomats and bureaucrats of the time, some of whom complained that they were drowning in seas of paper.
This seems unlikely: clerks and lawyers all over Renaissance Europe were already devising new filing systems, which eventually grew into archives designed to handle exactly this problem. Rather, as Ann Blair, Noel Malcolm, and others have taught us, it was readers at every level, from kings to clerics, who needed help. Scholars had to master the classics so they could quote and imitate them, as Bruno himself regularly did; statesmen and merchants wanted tools with which to control, master, and evaluate the flood of texts that poured from Europe's printing presses, offering information about lands that might be conquered, converted, or at least traded with. Readers of many kinds worked pen in hand, decorating the margins of their books with content summaries; often they copied out excerpts and stored them under topical headings in notebooks (card systems wee developed in the seventeenth century). As shelves groaned and notebooks swelled to bursting, memory remained the only thread that could lead one back through paper labyrinths to the facts and data that mattered.
One would think that, in this age of paper and
pencil, not to mention hand-held devices with voice-to-text
capacity, mnemonic devices would have outlived their
usefulness. But they still have their uses.
Consider the case of Tony Judt, the political historian who
was struck by an aggressive variant of amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis ("Lou Gherig's Disease"), which -- within about a
year of diagnosis -- rendered him quadriplegic, paralyzed from
the waist down, and requiring an assistive breathing device.
By last February, Judt could no longer move his hands. "I thought it would be catastrophic,", he recalls matter-of-factly. How would he write? He discovered that a lifetime of lecturing -- often without notes and in complete sentences and full paragraphs -- had trained him to think out loud. He can now, "with a bit of mental preparation," dictate "an essay or an intellectually thoughtful e-mail." Unable to jot down ideas on a yellow pad, Judt has taught himself elaborate memorization schemes of the sort described by the Yale historian Jonathan D. Spence in his 1984 book, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. Like Ricci, a 16-th century Jesuit missionary to China, Judt imagines structures in his head where he can store his thoughts and ideas. The basic principle: Picture entering a large house; turn left and there is a room with shelves and tables; leave a memory on each surface until the [room] fills. Now head down the hall into another room. To retrieve your memories, to reconstruct a lecture or recall the content and structure of an article, you re-enter the building and follow the same path, which should trigger the ideas you left behind.
"It works," Judt says. In fact, he tells me, his mental acuity has grown stronger over the past year. He compares his situation to that of a blind person with uniquely sensitive ears, or of a deaf person with extraordinary eyesight. "I knew it to be theoretically true that when you are deprived of everything else, the thing you are not deprived of gets better," he says. "But it has been very odd to experience that in practice." After a moment, he goes on: "I'm a 61-year-old guy, I'm not as sharp as I was when I was 51. But the things I could do last year I can do better this year." ("The Trials of Tony Judt", by E.R. Goldstein, Chronicle of Higher Education, 01/15/2010).
Judt also described his technique in another interview:
