What is social/collective/cultural memory?

Three aspects:

1. The cultural mediation and social organization of individual
memory (e.g. is it possible to repress and recover memory?)
2. The repositories of our collective knowledge about the past
(e.g. books, myths, museums, urban landscape)
3. The images and knowledge we have that comes from these
repositories of collective knowledge (e.g. Paul Revere)

Why is all memory in some sense social? All memories are
located in one or more of the following social phenomena:

1. Language, rehearsal, cues, schemas (Schacters point)
2. Institutions, that is, patterns of rules, habits and records
3. Collectively created monuments dedicated to the preservation
of memory
4. Patterns of memory that characterize certain social groups
Example: generational memory
Why is young adulthood important for the deveopment of
generational memories?
Which events are most memorable, for whom, and why?

Dynamics of distortion in memory: X is what objectively happened
but Y is what is subjectively remembered

Example in social memory: Civil War

How are objective events like this distorted in social memory?

Dynamics of distortion in social memory: Distanciation

Similar to retrospective bias. Over time, memory fades and
distortions tend to fit with the present situation. You lose
details but gain perspective.

Example: Thomas Jefferson

Dynamics of distortion in social memory: Instrumentalization

Similar to suppression. The deliberate distortion of the past to
meet certain needs (using the past as an instrument). Examples
include cover-ups, selective commemoration, marketing the
past. In pluralistic societies, instrumentalization is more
difficult since it relies on the manipulation of information.

How might instrumentalization work in Civil War example?

Dynamics of distortion in social memory: Narrativization

Similar to the narratives of recovered memories. Distortion takes
place when people make a story out of a memory. Simplifying
it, making it more interesting, giving it a beginning/middle/end,
telling it in terms of heroes/villains, fitting it into larger stories.

Example: Vietnam


Dynamics of distortion in social memory: Conventionalization

Similar to encoding. Not everything get into the historical record
or leaves traces to be uncovered. Social memory gets distorted
when some things get left out, because of deliberate destruction
or neglect.

Example: Slavery

Dynamics of distortion in social memory: other themes for the rest
of the course

How widespread are these memories? Are they common to the
whole society or only to a particular group?
Are there people who dispute the accuracy of these memories?
Who and why?
Is there a split between elite and popular versions of this
memory? Between the way it is located in monuments and
documents versus how it is located in individual or group
memories?
What are the causes of a social memory being widespread?
What are the causes of distortions?