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| For hundreds of years, people have created "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 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.
"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 mementoes, Cornell created small specimen cabinets or memory theatres 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).
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 controul! -- We are to be sure a miracle every way -- but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.
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).
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.
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 "countercultural", 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:
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"In South Africa one of the legacies of apartheid was mass poverty, so one of the important provisions of that constitution was the right to shelter.... The South Africans also struggled to balance majority prerogatives and minority rights. One of the fiercest debates was over the right to be educated in the language of one's choice...." |
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"Many Eastern European countries, emerging from Communism, included language about freedom of contract and private property in their constitutions." |
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"Rwanda, which was torn apart by genocidal attacks, ratified a multiparty democratic constitutions that has clauses on limiting ethnic and regional divisions and forbidding discrimination on the basis of ethnicity." |
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"[S]ome drafters of the Ukraine constitution... wanted a provision that would require the press to be objective...." |
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.
A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory by Emily S. Rosenberg (Duke).
History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa by Annie E. Coombes (Duke).
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.
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 Offrendas, R.I.P. Shirts.
See also Weblogs.
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 gravesites 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 offrendas and other installations honoring the dead, both Mesoamerican and worldwide. Information: www.museumca.org.
Memory Boosting, Memory Suppression The President's Council on Bioethics, charged with making recommendations on such matters as reproductive cloning and stem-cell research, has also considered ethical implications of the pharmaceutical revolution as it relates to memory: Should we develop drugs that would enhance memory in normal individuals? Should we develop drugs that can eliminate unwanted memories, such as trauma? Link to papers and transcripts from the Council's 2002 and 2003 sessions on memory:
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Staff Background Paper, "Remembering and Forgetting" (10/02) | ||||
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"Remembering and Forgetting: Physiological and Pharmacological Aspects", presentation by and discussion with J.L. McGaugh (10/02) | ||||
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"Remembering and Forgetting: Psychological Aspects", presentation by and discussion with D.L. Schacter (10/02) | ||||
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"Beyond Therapy: Better Memories", discussion of two papers (03/03):
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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:
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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. |
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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. |
Some widely shared memories that are, objectively, false.
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Many people remember seeing television film footage of the first airplane striking the World Trade Center, when in fact no such footage exists. Of course, many people saw many repetitions of the second plane crash, which may have contributed to the memory. |
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Many people claim to remember that Julia Child (1912-2004), the author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and host of many television cooking shows on PBS (including The French Chef), once dropped a chicken she was cooking on the kitchen floor, dusted it off, and continued the preparation, saying "Remember, you are alone in the kitchen, and no one can see you" (the story was retold in her obituary in The Economist, 08/28/04). In fact, it was a potato pancake, and it fell onto the work table rather than the floor ("Julia Child, the French Chef for a Jell-O Nation, Dies at 91" by Regina Schrambling, New York Times, 08/14/04; Child also told the correct story in an interview with Terry Gross on the NPR radio program Fresh Air). Of course, it could have been a chicken; doubtless Child would have done exactly the same thing. And it's funnier if it's a chicken. |
The events of September 11 renewed interest in the phenomenon of flashbulb
memories. In a classic paper, Brown and Kulik 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 newspaper stories indicate that there are several
studies in progress of flashbulb memories for the World Trade Center
attacks.
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.
Click here for a study of people's flashbulb memories for the Challenger Disaster of 1986.
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):
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Genealogy 101: How to Trace Your Family's History and Heritage, by Barbara Renick 2003). |
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A Family Affair (a guide to collecting memories at family reunions), by Sandra MacLean Clunies (2003). |
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.
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.
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 Desstruction 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 elss 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 thta 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.
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.
See also The Memory Hole.
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:
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Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the consequences of Interpretation (Indiana, 1988) and |
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Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning in Europe, Israel, and America (Yale, 1993). |
Other books on memory and the Holocaust include:
Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing by Dora Apel (Rutgers).
Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust ed. by Shelley Hornstein * Florence Jacobowitz (Indiana).
Death and the Nation: History, Memory, Politics by Edith Zertal (Dvir). Reviewing this book (as well as In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II by Yosef Grodzinsky), Baruch Kimmerling notes: '"Never forget" has been the mantra of Jewish and Israeli politics for three decades. But in Death and the Nation, Idith Zeral argues, daringly and I think rightly, that one can "remember too much" ("Israel's Culture of Martyrdom", The Nation, 01/10-17/05).
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 confesed 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 individuls 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:
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Perrow, C. (1986). Complex organizations: A critical essay (3rd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. |
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Powell, W.W., & DiMaggio, P.J. (Eds.) (1991). The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. |
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Scott, W.R. (1992). Organizations: Rational, natural, and open systems. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. |
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Scott, W.R. (1995). Institutions and organizations. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, Ca.: Sage. |
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Singer, J.E., & Druckman, D. (1997). Enhancing organizational performance (report of the Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council). Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. |
See also Organizational Memory.
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 gatehring information, items left behind in nondigital 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 beglected as it would not have been in the past, virtually lost to the great majority of potential users".
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."
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.
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 Marha 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 Witnes 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.
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attitudes |
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factoids |
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fairy tales |
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ideas |
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myths and legends |
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news |
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rumors |
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stories |
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Phenomena instigated by memes include:
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fear cascades |
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moral panics |
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hysterical panics. |
For sympathetic analyses of the "meme" concept, see
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The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore (Oxford University Press, 1999). See also Blackmore's article, "The Power of Memes" (Scientific American, October 2000). |
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Viruses of the Mind: The New Science of the Mind by Richard Brodie (Integral Press, 1996). |
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 wtory 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 "tellable" 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, 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 |
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. Tey 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).
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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).
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 duece, 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.)
In Nineteen Eighty Four (written 1948; published 1949), George Orwell told 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.
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After the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, Joan Didion reminds us that advertisers and commercial film and television producers often removed images of the World Trade Center towers from their products ("Fixed Opinions, or the Hinge of History", New York Review of Books, 01/16/03). |
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On May 31, 2002, the United States Department of Education eliminated everything on its website that did not "reflect the priorities, philosophies, or goals of the present administration [of President George W. Bush]", including the informational digests prepared by the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC). nevertheless, many of these documents have been archived by The Memory Hole. |
"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.
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).
Other salient examples:
| Dancing at Lughnasa, by Brian Friel. |
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Madame Melville, Goodnight Children Everywhere, and Franny's Way by Richard Nelson. |
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The Tricky Part, by Martin Moran, a "theatrical memoir" (actually, a monologue), of the author's three-year sexual relationship, when he was a very young teenager, with another man. In an interesting case of life imitating art which was imitating life, The Denver Post published a pair of articles that identified the man in question, and provided details of his abusive relationship with other boys ("Memory Play: A Cathartic Can of Worms" by Jesse McKinley, New York Times, 04/21/04). |
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"). Recently, 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).
Patient Communications Unlimited has produced "Differential Diagnosis Mnemonics and the Medical History", software designed by Allan Platt for a Palm Pilot PDA, which includes a large number of mnemonic devices for use in taking a patient's history and making a medical diagnosis.
Link to a page of resources on mnemonic devices in the arts, business, history, humanities, math, science, and around the house.
Link to a page of mnemonic devices useful in physiology.
Movies
Memory and its failures commonly feature as themes in the movies. Think about Kurosoawa's Rashomon, Hitchcock's Spellbound, Arnold Swartzenegger in Total Recall, or Memento.
In an article in the New York Times (12/23/01), John Leland noted that "amnesia rides again in Hollywood, reflecting a culture that until a moment ago had little use for remembering". Whereas an earlier generation of amnesia movies reflected the "social dislocations" of World War II, Leland argues that the new batch reflects the a historical thinking and emphasis on self-reinvention that was characteristic of the 1990s. Link to Leland's article.
Click here for an ongoing list of films, classic and recent, good and bad, in which memory or amnesia play a prominent role in the plot.
Music bears a special relationship with memory. For example, the work of the American composer Charles Ives often attempts to represent events from his personal history. As Alex Ross noted in a recent New Yorker essay (10/08/01, p. 78),
"The Housatonic at Stockbridge", a movement in Ives' Three Places in New England, "enshrines the memory of a summer walk that Ives took with his wife, Harmony, along the banks of the Housatonic River in the Berkshires (Alex Ross, "Pandemonium: A Celebration of Charles Ives", New Yorker, 06/07/04). Ross continues: "Ives seldom evoked the past without also suggesting the emotional distortions of memory. Indeed, this might be one of Lincoln's 'mystic chords of memory' -- not yet touched, it seems, by those long-awaited better angels of our nature."On May 7, 1915, the Lusitania was sunk by a German torpedo, taking with it more than a thousand lives. Later that day, in downtown Manhattan, an insurance executive and part-time composer named Charles Ives was sanding on an Elevated-train platform when he heard a barrel organ playing "In the Sweet Bye and Bye." One by one, those around him began to sing along: first, a workman with a shovel, then a Wall Street baker in white spats, and finally the entire motley crowd. "They didn't seem to be singing in fun", Ives recalled, "but as a natural outlet for what their feelings had been going through all day long." Ives recorded the experience in an orchestral work entitled "From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose." It was intended to capture "the sense of many people living, working, and occasionally going through the same deep experience together."
Writing of a performance of Ives's "The Housatonic at Stockbridge", a movement of Three Places in New England, the critic Paul Griffiths noted that Ives's music was "analogous to a river's swirling, to the experience of time (whereby the present is always overlaid with memory, fantasy, and expectation)..." (New York Times, 09/26/02).
Link to a description of the programs on "Music & Memory: A Season-Long Exploration of How Music Evokes the Past, presented by the American Symphony Orchestra (Leon Botstein, Music Director) during its 2001-2002 concert season. This page also contains links to the ASO's program notes for the concerts.
Narrative therapy is an approach to psychotherapy that encourages patients to analyze the stories they tell, and the stories they are told, about themselves. Introduced in the late 1980s by Michael White, a psychotherapist at the Dulwich Centre for psychotherapy in Adelaide, Australia (www.dulwichcentre.com.au), narrative therapy assumes that peoples' lives and the relationships are shaped by the stories about themselves that are told in their families and other communities, and helps people to "re-author" their life-stories in a manner that they find preferable and more fulfilling. Narrative therapy is obviously related to psychoanalysis, which also involves storytelling, except that there is no assumption that the stories being told are historically accurate. Because these stories are negotiated in a family context, narrative therapy is also related to family therapy. Because narrative therapy focuses on the story, not on history, and makes no judgment as to whose story is "truer" or "better", in a sense it is a "post-modern" form of therapy.
An article on the occasion of the Thanksgiving holiday points out that family gatherings often involve the telling of stories about family members ("Don't Be the Turkey at a Family Reunion" by Deborah Baldwin, 11/21/02). These stories are often embarrassing, and that's part of the fun, but they can also promote stereotypes that no longer match the subject's identity. As we change, we update the stories of our lives, but we also need to update the stories that other people tell about us. Moreover, different family members may have different narratives concerning the same events; these stories need to be reconciled somehow. (There is a whole magazine, Reunions, devoted to techniques for organizing and getting through these events).
Books on narrative therapy:
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Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends by M. White & D. Epston (Norton, 1990) |
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Story Re-Visions: Narrative Therapy in the Postmodern World (Guilford, 1994) |
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Psychoanalysis and Storytelling by Peter Brooks (Blackwell, 1994) |
In literary studies, narratology is the term given to the formal analysis of narratives. The term itself was apparently coined in 1969, based on a 1966 aphorism by the French postmodern critic Roland Barthes (itself a play on a line from Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus: "Numberless are the world's narratives". As defined by Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, narrative consists of "all those literary works which are distinguished by two characteristics: the preence of a story and a story-teller" (The Nature of Narrative, 1966). Peter Books has written that narrative "is one of the principal ways in which we organize our experience of the world -- a part of our cognitive tool kit that was long neglected by psychologists and philosophers" (quoted by William Safire in "Narrative: The new story of story", New York Times Magazine, 12/05/04). There is now a Society for the Study of Narrative, which publishes a journal, Narrative, devoted to narratological research; there is also a Narrative listserv on the internet.
Because so much of autobiographical and everyday memory consists of stories, narratology connects the psychology of memory to literary studies. Theories of storytelling began with Aristotle, but the Oxford Companion to English Literature (6th ed., 2000, ed. by Margaret Drabble) locates the modern tradition as beginning with V. Propp's distinction (in Morphology of the Folktale, 1928) between the what and the how of narrative. Propp further agued that there are 31 basic elements or functions in all folktales, appearing in a fixed order. Similarly, A.J. Greimas argued that all stories revolve around six basic roles, or actants: subject, object, sender, receiver, helper, and opponent. With respect to narrative technique, W.C. Booth (The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961) made distinctions between the "real" and the "implied" author of a novel, and between "reliable" and "unreliable" narrators. This last concept is especially important for the study of memoir: while first-person narratives are very compelling to the reader, the fallability of memory means that the writer may well be an unreliable narrator.
For a recent survey of narrator types and narrative orders, see also G. Genette, Narrative Discourse (tr. 1980).
Most people don't get autobiographies written about them, or publish memoirs themselves, but for many the obituary -- a full-page spread that begins on the front page of the New York Times or a couple of column inches in the local paper -- is a source of collective memory about an individual -- a public representation of a person's life, and a vehicle for others to remember, and be reminded of, him or her. Some obituaries are prepared well in advance of the person's death, while others are written on the spot by professional journalists. Some obituaries are prepared by the family of the deceased, some are prepared by the deceased him- or herself (in advance, of course). Two letters to the advice columnist "Dear Abby" (Contra Costa Times, 09/30/03) illustrate some of the problems of obituaries as memories. In one case, a man's obituary was prepared by his second wife, mentioned her and their children, but completely omitting mention of the decedent's first wife and their children. In the other, Wayne K., of Puyallup, Washington, noted that he wrote his own obituary, and arranged for its publication in his local newspaper, as part of advance preparations for his memorial service -- which he intends to hold at age 80, and attend, assuming he is still alive. On writing his own obituary, Mr. K. wrote:
"I did it because I wanted people to remember what I wanted them to remember about me, rather than leaving that decision to someone else."
Ofrendas, (offerings) are common features of celebrations of El Dia de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead) in Meso-American cultures. Like the memory tables offered by North American funeral parlors, they are opportunities to reminisce about the departed person.
See also Descansos, R.I.P. Shirts.
The writing of history has been traditionally based on diaries, documents, and other written sources. Recently, however, historians -- especially social historians -- have taken an interest in historical data, such as the memories of the participants in historical events, that does not exist in written form, and must be collected and transcribed before it is analyzed . Oral history provides information about the impact of events on the lives of ordinary people that would not necessarily be found in the documents left by elites. At the same time, it raises interesting issues of individual and collective memory.
Because oral history involves the participation of human subjects in ways that history written from documentary records does not, oral-history research has sometimes come under the purview of university committees established under federal regulations for the protection of human subjects. The argument is that the publication of oral histories might prove embarrassing, compromise privacy, or pose some other risk, to the informants. However, some oral historians and other social scientists (such as faculty in anthropology and journalism) have argued that oral histories pose little or no risk. In September 2003, the federal Office for Human Research Protections ruled that oral histories do not fall under its definition of research involving human subjects, because their goal is not to yield "generalizable principles of historical or social development", but rather to explore "a particular past". The decision has been well-received by major organizations of historians, but the downside is that it might imply that oral history fails to meet the standards of rigorous social science. (Source: "Federal Agency Says Oral-History Research is not Covered by Human-Subject Rules" by Jeffrey Brainard, Chronicle of Higher Education, 10/31/03.)
Read a short essay on oral history and memory, with links to relevant Internet resources.
"Organizations have records and other ways of recording history. These records are more or less accurate, more or less complete, more or less shared, and more or less retrievable at some future date. How organizational memory functions and how t functions differently at different times and for different parts of the organization are questions that considerably affect the pattern of organizational beliefs. The tendency to use or activate different parts of an organizational memory will vary across individuals as well as organizational subunits" (James G. March, Decisions and Organizations; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988, p. 349).
Organizations are specific forms of institutions, themselves shaped by a wider field of institutional processes, as well as the characteristics of their individual members. Although organizations have a concrete existence (e.g., as an academic department in a university) that more abstract institutions may lack, at some point, organizations themselves may be subject to institutionalization.
Scott (1995) quotes the sociologist Robert K. Merton:
There may ensue, in particular vocations and in particular types of organization, the process of sanctification... through sentiment-formation, emotional dependence upon bureaucratic symbols and status, and affective involvement in spheres of competence and authority, there develop prerogatives involving attitudes of moral legitimacy which are established as values in their own right, and are no longer viewed as merely technical means for expediting information ("Bureaucratic Structure and Personality", in Social Theory and Social Structure, originally published in 1940; 2nd ed., 1957, p. 202)
Thus, although universities did not possess departments as such in the 19th century, it seems almost inconceivable that a new university would not have them. And the institutionalization of discipline-based departments, such as psychology and sociology, may serve as impediments to interdisciplinary inquiry.
Just as individual persons have memories, so collectivities of persons, like organizations, can also be said to have memories. Within organizations, such as academic departments, organizational memory is sometimes embodied in a long-time staff member who has seen many department chairs come and go. But Levitt and March argue that "the lessons of experience are maintained and acumulated within routines despite the turnover of personnel and the passage of time. Rules, procedures, technologies, beliefs, and cultures are conserved through systems of socialization and control" ("Organizational Learning", in the Annual Review of Sociology, 1988). This more abstract, and for that matter more collective, form of organizational memory is of particular interest. How do organizations learn, and remember, and forget? Is there organizational amnesia?
For introductions to the sociology of institutions and organizations (none of which make any particular mention of institutional memory), see:
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Perrow, C. (1986). Complex organizations: A critical essay (3rd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. |
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Powell, W.W., & DiMa |
