Social and Cultural Memory

This paper’s aim is to establish an explanation for the separation of Northern minds, by examining the influence of a variety of factors on the shaping of people’s sense of identity at the time. Near the end of the 16th century the Groningers had proven to be a people with a mind of their own—impetuous, unruly and, in the end, unwilling to join the Republic in its efforts to liberate itself from its oppressive Spanish overlord. One by one the Dutch (...) cities had joined the revolution, but the city of Groningen refused. The ‘Ommelanden’—the city’s surrounding territory—however, did not—laying bare a critical disagreement between two ‘classes’: the Saxon city elite and the predominantly Frisian countryside nobles (Dutch plural: landjonkers/jonkheren). (shrink)

Many have argued that certain statues or monuments are objectionable, and thus ought to be removed. Even if their arguments are compelling, a major obstacle is the apparent historical value of those commemorations. Preservation in some form seems to be the best way to respect the value of commemorations as connections to the past or opportunities to learn important historical lessons. Against this, I argue that we have exaggerated the historical value of objectionable commemorations. Sometimes commemorations connect to biased or (...) distorted versions of history, if not mere myths. We can also learn historical lessons through what I call repudiatory honouring: the honouring of certain victims or resistors that can only make sense if the oppressor(s) or target(s) of resistance are deemed unjust, where no part of the original objectionable commemorations is preserved. This type of commemorative practice can even help to overcome some of the obstacles objectionable commemorations pose against properly connecting to the past. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary volume connects the philosophy of history to moral philosophy with a unique focus on time. Taking in a range of intellectual traditions, cultural, and geographical contexts, the volume provides a rich tapestry of approaches to time, morality, culture, and history. -/- By extending the philosophical discussion on the ethical importance of temporality, the editors disentangle some of the disciplinary tensions between analytical and hermeneutic philosophy of history, cultural theory, meta-ethical theory, and normative ethics. The ethical and existential character (...) of temporality reveals itself within a collection that resists the methodological underpinnings of any one philosophical school. The book's distinctive cross-cultural approach ensures a wide range of perspectives with contributions on life and death in Japanese philosophy, ethics and time in Maori philosophy, non-traditional temporalities and philosophical anthropology, as well as global approaches to ethics. -/- These new directions of study highlight the importance of the ethical in the temporal, inviting further points of departure in this burgeoning field. (shrink)

Die Begriffe "kollektive Amnesie" und "organisiertes Vergessen" werden oft verwendet, um Fälle zu beschreiben, in denen historisches Wissen, das im gesellschaftlichen, kollektiven Gedächtnis verfügbar sein sollte – weil es sich beispielsweise um gerechtigkeitsrelevantes Wissen handelt – aus unterschiedlichen, meist politisch problematischen Gründen nicht verfügbar ist. Beispielsweise, weil es gegebene Herrschaftsverhältnisse bedrohen würde. In diesem Beitrag soll gezeigt werden, weshalb diese Begriffe gerade in solchen Fällen irreführend sind. Insbesondere nationale Erinnerungspolitik kann oftmals aus Erkenntnispraktiken bestehen oder befördern, die nicht primär Vergessen (...) herbeiführen, sondern in der Gesellschaft verfügbares Wissen über bestimmte Themen verschleiern, verzerren und dadurch die gesellschaftliche Verständigung darüber erschweren oder sogar riskant macht; was vor allem in Fällen offensichtlich wird, in denen koloniale und genozidale Vergangenheiten systematisch geleugnet werden. So kann staatlich geförderte, systematische Genozidleugnung zwar durchaus selektiv zu „vergessen“ oder Wissensverlust führen. Doch viel problematischer aus ethischer und epistemischer Sicht ist, dass dadurch existierendes Wissen und Erinnerungen an die Verbrechen fortlaufend diskreditiert und unterdrückt werden. Genauer werden durch institutionelle und soziale Prozesse und Praktiken historische Fakten und andere Beweise, auf denen Erinnerung basiert, nicht nur ignoriert oder vernachlässigt, sondern vorsätzlich verschleiert, verzerrt und fehlinterpretiert. Es wird dadurch schädliches Unwissen und Unverständnis über die historischen Tatsachen und deren normative Bewertung generiert. Dadurch schafft Genozidleugnung nicht nur Wissenssubjekte, die nichts über den Genozid wissen – denn ein bloßer Wissensmangel könnte durch Bereitstellung des nötigen Wissens behoben werden – sondern das Thema verkennen, aktiv Tatsachen leugnen und dadurch die gesellschaftliche Verständigung über das Thema erschweren oder verunmöglichen. Um also besser zu verstehen, welche ethischen und epistemischen Konsequenzen systematische Genozidleugnung für Überlebende und Nachfahren, wie auch die Gesellschaft insgesamt mit sich bringt, schlage ich vor, systematische Genozidleugnung vielmehr als substanzielle Erkenntnispraxis und somit als Fall vorsätzlichen Unwissens zu verstehen. Wie ich am Beispiel der türkischen Leugnung des Genozids an den Armenier:innen illustrieren werde, wird der Genozid nicht vergessen, sondern erinnert und zugleich verkannt, mit der Absicht, Herrschaftsverhältnisse zu konsolidieren. Dadurch wird epistemische Ungerechtigkeit gefördert und aufrechterhalten. (shrink)

We apply a familiar distinction from philosophy of language to a class of material artifacts that are sometimes said to “speak”: statues. By distinguishing how statues speak at the locutionary level versus at the illocutionary level, or what they say versus what they do, we obtain the resource for addressing two topics. First, we can explain what makes statues distinct from street art. Second, we can explain why it is mistaken to criticize—or to defend—the continuing presence of statues based only (...) on what they represent. Both explanations are driven by the same core idea: the significance of statues arises primarily from what they do, and not what they say. (shrink)

This essay outlines one way to conceptualise the relation between cultural identity, collective memory, and artifacts. It starts by characterising the notion of cultural identity as our membership to cultural groups and briefly explores the relation between cultural and narrative identity (section 2). Next, it presents how human memory is conceptualised on an individual and collective level (section 3) and then distinguishes between small-scale and large-scale collective memory (section 4). Having described cultural identity and collective memory, it argues that cultural (...) identity is materialised in the environment when we retrieve and construct collective memories by integrating information from our biological memory with information in artifacts or in other people’s embodied brains (section 5). This essay ends with analysing how materialised cultural identities are constructed by using a niche construction approach from evolutionary biology (section 6). (shrink)

Memory is everywhere in Blade Runner 2049. From the dead tree that serves as a memorial and a site of remembrance (“Who keeps a dead tree?”), to the ‘flashbulb’ memories individuals hold about the moment of the ‘blackout’, when all the electronic stores of data were irretrievably erased (“everyone remembers where they were at the blackout”). Indeed, the data wiped out in the blackout itself involves a loss of memory (“all our memory bearings from the time, they were all damaged (...) in the blackout”). Memory, and lack of it, permeates place, where from the post-blackout Las Vegas Deckard remembers it as somewhere you could “forget your troubles.” Memory is a commodity, called upon and consumed by the Wallace Corporation, purchased from the memory-maker, Dr Ana Stelline, who constructs and implants “the best memories” in replicants so as to instil in them real human responses. Memory is ubiquitous in Blade Runner 2049, involving humans, replicants, objects, and machines. Even “God,” we are told, “remembered Rachael.” Nowhere, though, is the depiction of memory more important than in the attempt to solve a question of identity. Officer K has a memory of his past. Even though he knows it is an implant, it is a memory he is emotionally attached to, frequently narrating it to Joi, his digital girlfriend. But it is a memory that starts to puzzle and trouble him. When K discovers the remains of a dead replicant, a female NEXUS-7, he uncovers a secret—this replicant was pregnant and died during childbirth, a discovery that could “break the world.” K is charged with hunting down the child and making the problem disappear. Yet as K starts seeking answers to the question of the child’s identity he gets inextricably caught up in the mystery. Is he merely Officer K, or is he Joe, the miracle child of Rachael and Deckard? The answer to this question hinges on K’s memory. But is the memory genuine? Is the memory his? Blade Runner 2049 encourages us to think deeply about the nature of memory, identity, and the relation between them. Indeed, the film does not just serve as a starting point for thinking about philosophical issues related to memory and identity. Rather, as we show in this chapter, the film seems to offer a view on these philosophical issues. Blade Runner 2049 offers us a view of memory as spread out over people, objects, and the environment, and it shows us that memory’s role in questions of identity goes beyond merely accurately recalling one’s past. Identity depends not on memory per se, but partly on what we use memory for. (shrink)

Bringing research on collective memory together with research on episodic future thought, Szpunar and Szpunar :376–389, 2016) have recently developed the concept of collective future thought. Individual memory and individual future thought are increasingly seen as two forms of individual mental time travel, and it is natural to see collective memory and collective future thought as forms of collective mental time travel. But how seriously should the notion of collective mental time travel be taken? This article argues that, while collective (...) mental time travel is disanalogous in important respects to individual mental time travel, the concept of collective mental time travel nevertheless provides a useful means of organizing existing findings, while also suggesting promising directions for future research. (shrink)

In this paper we present a introduction to the volume on philosophy of memory.

The notion of epistemic responsibility applied to memory has been in general examined in the framework of the responsibilities that a collective holds for past injustices, but it has never been the object of an analysis of its own. In this article, I propose to isolate and explore it in detail. For this purpose, I start by conceptualizing the epistemic responsibility applied to individual memories. I conclude that an epistemic responsible individual rememberer is a vigilant agent who knows when to (...) engage in different kinds of mental and non-mental actions in order to monitor and update her memories, and who develops and nurture different kinds of virtuous attitudes that guide those actions. These (epistemic) virtuous attitudes are oriented not only towards herself but also towards others. Whereas this conception of epistemic responsibility does not pose a problem to understand shared memories of family members and friends, it may seem suspicious when applied to large-scale collective memories. These memories, which I name historical memories, are memories of events that have a traumatic impact for the community, are permeated by unequal relations of power, keep a complex relationship with historical science, and present other characteristics that distinguish them from individual memories. But despite these differences, the analysis undertaken in this work shows that the general principles that govern the epistemic responsibility of individual and (large-scale) collective rememberers are similar, and are based on similar grounds: pragmatic considerations about the consequences of misremembering or forgetting and a feeling of care. The similarities at the individual and collective scale of the epistemic vigilant attitude that is and should be taken toward our significant past may partially justify the use of the same epithet—“memory”—to refer to these different kinds of representations. (shrink)

Статтю присвячено проблемі конструювання суб’єкта в ліриці Мар’яни Савки з погляду взаємодії Я/Іншого, що є однією з найбільш характерних рис поетики дев’яностників. Суб’єкт лірики в поезії дев’яностників мовить із перспективи приватного досвіду, оскільки саме приватне є точкою відліку в осмисленні колективного культурно-історичного досвіду. Інтермедіальні сюжети в ліриці Савки дають можливість суб’єкту лірики побачити й пізнати себе крізь проекцію мистецького твору. Тілесний, приватний досвід суб’єкта є рамкою осмислення досвіду Іншого – саме так конструюється комунікативна пам’ять у ліриці Мар’яни Савки.

This paper examines the concepts of borderlands, borderscapes, and bordermemories as cultural discursive practices that have been extensively presented and analyzed in an increasing number of theoretical works in Border Studies. Contemporary American Ukrainian writers have made attempts to introduce their hybrid experience and include it into American culture. One of them is Alexander J. Motyl, whose novel Fall River (2014) is analyzed as an example of border writing. The novel is based on the author’s narrative memory, rooted in his (...) mother’s stories about Ukraine and their family members’ crossings of borders in the interwar period and belonging to two cultures, Ukrainian and American, that shaped their identities. (shrink)

Considering the value of archives for dealing with the past processes, especially for the establishment of collective memory and identity, this paper discusses the role of archives in situations of conflicting memories such as in the case of the official Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide. A crucial problem of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation are the divergent perceptions of what to consider as proper ‘evidence’, i.e. as objective, reliable, impartial or trustworthy sources of knowledge in order to prove the Armenian genocide. The (...) aim of this paper is to show how in a general atmosphere of distrust or prejudiced credibility judgments, even technically reliable archival records will be perceived as unreliable and biased, lacking any evidentiary status to factually prove a genocide which is categorically denied. Therefore, this working paper discusses how claims to reliability, objectivity and other similar scientifically and epistemically relevant attributes are understood in archival science as well as memory studies, and emphasizes the problems related to their instrumentalization by political actors within the context of genocide denialism. The Turkish-Armenian context promises many important empirical as well as theoretical insights on the uses and misuses of these attributes, suggesting that measures ought to be taken beforehand to decrease intergroup prejudice and distrust toward the ‘other’, so that archives can be effective in the truth-finding process. (shrink)

Memorialization in the form of the architectural statue can suggest that our stance towards the past is concrete while memorials in the form of repeated social activity represent reconciliation with the past as a continual process. Enacted memorials suggest that reconciliation with the past is not itself a thing of the past. Each generation must grapple with its inherited memories, guilt, and grief and self-consciously take its own stance towards that which came before it. This article considers Dominik Smole’s post (...) World War II rewrite of Antigona as an enacted memorial within the context of socialist Yugoslavia. The practice of restaging Antigona in Slovenia may be seen as the practice of meta-memorialization, which routinely returns to the past while openly weighing the dangers of awakening the unburied dead against the dangers of letting the unaddressed conflicts of the past sleep. (shrink)

In recent years, campaigns across the globe have called for the removal of objects symbolic of white supremacy. This paper examines the ethics of altering or removing such objects. Do these strategies sanitize history, destroy heritage and suppress freedom of speech? Or are they important steps towards justice? Does removing monuments and renaming schools reflect a lack of parity and unfairly erase local identities? Or can it sometimes be morally required, as an expression of respect for the memories of people (...) who endured past injustices; a recognition of this history's ongoing legacies; and a repudiation of unjust social hierarchies? (shrink)

This chapter steps back from the important psychological work on collaborative remembering at the heart of the present volume to take up some broader questions about the place of memory in Western cultural thought, both historically and in contemporary society, offering the kind of integrative and reflective perspective for which philosophy is often known. In particular, the text aims to shed some light on the relationship between collaborative memory and the other two topics in this title—group-level cognizing and individuals—beginning with (...) the relationship between collective intentionality and collaborative remembering, and concluding with some brief comments on the politics of collaborative remembering by drawing on recent work that has been undertaken with eugenics survivors in Canada. (shrink)

The situated potentials for action between material things in the world and the interactional processes thereby afforded need to be seen as not only constituting the possibility of agency, but thereby also comprising it. Eo ipso, agency must be de-fused from any local, "contained" subject and be understood as a situational property in which subjects and objects can both participate. Any technological artifact should thus be understood as a complex of agential capacities that function relative to any number of social (...) and material factors. Keeping in mind that we are co-constituted by webs of relations involving increasingly complex collections of artefacts, networks, niches, and communities of practice, our investigation will be guided by interrogating the functional potential of a thing that in the last fifteen years has seamlessly worked its way into the everyday life of millions of human agents. This "thing," the smartphone, is merely a nodal point in a highly complex network. Recognizing this massive "collective," we nevertheless want to show some of the ways in which something as seemingly mundane as a smartphone can reflexively alter the range of actions available to a cognitive agent (Latour 1994). Specifically, we hope to shed light on some of the social-cognitive consequences of technological mediation by looking at the complementary, if not mutually implied, domains of memory and knowledge. (shrink)

Proceedings of the annual congress of the Finnish Philosophical Association in 2013. Theme: memory.

We often remember in the company of others. In particular, we routinely collaborate with friends, family, or colleagues to remember shared experiences. But surprisingly, in the experimental collaborative recall paradigm, collaborative groups remember less than their potential, an effect termed collaborative inhibition. Rajaram and Pereira-Pasarin (2010) argued that the effects of collaboration on recall are determined by “pre-collaborative” factors. We studied the role of 2 pre-collaborative factors—shared encoding and group relationship—in determining the costs and benefits of collaborative recall. In Experiment (...) 1, we compared groups of strangers who encoded alone versus together, before collaborating to recall. In Experiment 2, we compared groups of friends who encoded alone versus together, before collaborating to recall. We found that shared encoding abolished collaborative inhibition in both Experiments 1 and 2. But prior relationship did not influence collaborative inhibition over and above the effects of shared encoding. Regardless of encoding condition, collaborative group recall contained fewer intrusions than nominal group recall, and these benefits continued in subsequent individual recall. Our findings demonstrate that pre-collaborative factors—specifically shared encoding—have flow-on benefits for group and individual recall amount, but not recall accuracy. We discuss these findings in terms of self- and cross-cuing in collaborative recall. (shrink)

Conversations about the past can involve voicing and silencing; processes of validation and invalidation that shape recall. In this experiment we examined the products and processes of remembering a significant autobiographical event in conversation with others. Following the death of Australian celebrity Steve Irwin, in an adapted version of the collaborative recall paradigm, 69 participants described and rated their memories for hearing of his death. Participants then completed a free recall phase where they either discussed the event in groups of (...) three or wrote about the event on their own. Finally, participants completed the original questionnaire again, both 1 week and 1 month after the free recall phase. Discussion influenced later memories for hearing of Irwin’s death, particularly memories for emotion and shock. Qualitative analysis of the free recall phase suggested that during conversation a shared understanding of the event developed, but that emotional reactions to the event were silenced in ways that minimised the event’s impact. These findings are discussed in terms of the processes and consequences of sharing public and personal memories in conversation. (shrink)

This paper introduces a new, expanded range of relevant cognitive psychological research on collaborative recall and social memory to the philosophical debate on extended and distributed cognition. We start by examining the case for extended cognition based on the complementarity of inner and outer resources, by which neural, bodily, social, and environmental resources with disparate but complementary properties are integrated into hybrid cognitive systems, transforming or augmenting the nature of remembering or decision-making. Adams and Aizawa, noting this distinctive complementarity argument, (...) say that they agree with it completely: but they describe it as “a non-revolutionary approach” which leaves “the cognitive psychology of memory as the study of processes that take place, essentially without exception, within nervous systems.” In response, we carve out, on distinct conceptual and empirical grounds, a rich middle ground between internalist forms of cognitivism and radical anti-cognitivism. Drawing both on extended cognition literature and on Sterelny’s account of the “scaffolded mind” (this issue), we develop a multidimensional framework for understanding varying relations between agents and external resources, both technological and social. On this basis we argue that, independent of any more “revolutionary” metaphysical claims about the partial constitution of cognitive processes by external resources, a thesis of scaffolded or distributed cognition can substantially influence or transform explanatory practice in cognitive science. Critics also cite various empirical results as evidence against the idea that remembering can extend beyond skull and skin. We respond with a more principled, representative survey of the scientific psychology of memory, focussing in particular on robust recent empirical traditions for the study of collaborative recall and transactive social memory. We describe our own empirical research on socially distributed remembering, aimed at identifying conditions for mnemonic emergence in collaborative groups. Philosophical debates about extended, embedded, and distributed cognition can thus make richer, mutually beneficial contact with independently motivated research programs in the cognitive psychology of memory. (shrink)

In this paper, we aim to show that the framework of embedded, distributed, or extended cognition offers new perspectives on social cognition by applying it to one specific domain: the psychology of memory. In making our case, first we specify some key social dimensions of cognitive distribution and some basic distinctions between memory cases, and then describe stronger and weaker versions of distributed remembering in the general distributed cognition framework. Next, we examine studies of social influences on memory in cognitive (...) psychology, and identify the valuable concepts and methods to be extended and embedded in our framework; we focus in particular on three related paradigms: transactive memory, collaborative recall, and social contagion. Finally, we sketch our own early studies of individual and group memory developed within our framework of distributed cognition, on social contagion of autobiographical memories, collaborative flashbulb memories, and memories of high school at a high school reunion. We see two reciprocal benefits of this conceptual and empirical framework to social memory phenomena: that ideas about distributed cognition can be honed against and tested with the help of sophisticated methods in the social cognitive psychology of memory; and conversely, that a range of social memory phenomena that are as yet poorly understood can be approached afresh with theoretically motivated extensions of existing empirical paradigms. (shrink)

For corporate memory and enterprise ontology systems to be maximally useful, they must be freed from certain barriers placed around them by traditional knowledge management paradigms. This means, above all, that they must mirror more faithfully those portions of reality which are salient to the workings of the enterprise, including the changes that occur with the passage of time. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how theories based on philosophical realism can contribute to this objective. We discuss how (...) realism-based ontologies (capturing what is generic) combined with referent tracking (capturing what is specific) can play a key role in building the robust and useful corporate memories of the future. (shrink)

Remembrance is constitutive of music. For music emerges not as an isolated physical stimulus. Rather, it is experienced, i.e., a present musical moment is tied to its temporal antecedents. It is tempting to conceive of remembrance as repetition and as thus opposed to oblivion. Yet to memory selectivity is crucial. What is not selected, falls into oblivion. Hence as we remember we have forgotten already. The present moment evokes remembrance, and exhibits what was then in the light of what is (...) now. Remembrance changes the past it recovers. Listening to music, we may experience anamnesis to be metamorphosis. (shrink)

Memory is studied across a bewildering range of disciplines and subdisciplines in the neural, cognitive, and social sciences, and the term covers a wide range of related phenomena. In an integrative spirit, this chapter examines two case studies in memory research in which empirically-informed philosophy and philosophically informed sciences of the mind can be mutually informative, such that the interaction between psychology and philosophy can open up new research problems—and set new challenges—for our understanding of certain aspects of memory. In (...) each case, there is already enough interdisciplinary interaction on specific issues to give some confidence in the potential productivity of mutual exchange: but in each case, residual gulfs in research style and background assumptions remain to be addressed. (shrink)

We identify a particular type of causal reasoning ability that we believe is required for the possession of episodic memories, as it is needed to give substance to the distinction between the past and the present. We also argue that the same causal reasoning ability is required for grasping the point that another person's appeal to particular past events can have in conversation. We connect this to claims in developmental psychology that participation in joint reminiscing plays a key role in (...) memory development. (shrink)

Published in Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro (eds), _Prefiguring Cyberculture: an intellectual history_ (MIT Press and Power Publications, December 2002). Please do send comments: email me. Back to my main publications page . Back to my home page.

Book reviewed in this article:John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture.