From collective memory to memory systems

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Barnier AJ (2010) Memories, memory studies and my iPhone. Memory Studies 3(4): 293–7. Beim A (2007) The cognitive aspects of collective memory. Symbolic ...
Editorial

From collective memory to memory systems

Memory Studies 4(2) 131–133 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1750698011399526 mss.sagepub.com

Andrew Hoskins

In his editorial: ‘Memory, Media and Menschen: Where is the Individual in Collective Memory Studies?’, Wulf Kansteiner (2010) questions the value of continuing interrogation of the concepts of the individual and the collective in the field of memory studies. This debate includes a critical discursive shift away from explorations of ‘what is memory’ to a growing focus upon ‘how does memory matter’ (Brown, 2008: 264). Yet the collective term is so deeply embedded in everyday, institutional and academic accounts of memory, it is often either employed as though its meaning was already given (presumed as oppositional to or simply as ‘not’ individual) or used in a resigned fashion at the unsatisfactory prospects of the alternatives. The latter in some accounts at least results in a stasis of sorts, as Bill Niven (2008: 428) considers: ‘while authors distance themselves from the term “collective memory”, they still appear to operate within its parameters’. In this issue of Memory Studies, however, collective memory is afforded some richer and more nuanced treatments and configured as a complex set of both intersecting and colliding constituencies. For instance, building on a considerable trajectory of work, Howard Schuman and Amy Corning’s systematic empirical research interrogates public opinion as a form of collective memory. They argue that it is the identification of ‘collective knowledge’ (regardless of its accuracy) that is a first essential step towards unearthing the ‘roots’ of collective memory. Their study is of the American public’s shifting collective memory of the relationship between the early 19th-century US President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a slave, and his paternity of one or all of her children. Schuman and Corning reveal a modulation of collective memory through mapping various cultural mediations of the Jefferson–Hemings relationship with the birth cohort of their respondents (in addition to consideration of other predictor variables of education, race, and gender). Generational gravity is also a significant element in Lorraine Ryan’s typology of ‘mnemonic resistance’ in her article ‘Memory, Power and Resistance’. She employs categories drawn from classical media theory as the basis of her triad of individual interpretations of, and ‘resistances’ to, dominant memory narratives. Both Schuman and Corning, and Ryan, remind us of the influence of the ‘reminiscence bump’ (Rubin et al., 1988), namely that knowledge acquired during the period of early adulthood has been found to be particularly accessible. That this feature of remembering holds for both remembrances of public events as well as more personal and autobiographical Corresponding author: Professor Andrew Hoskins, Adam Smith Research Foundation, College of Social Sciences, University of Glasgow, Adam Smith Building, 40 Bute Gardens, Glasgow G12 8RT.

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memory offers a potentially rich site for the study of the nexus of individual and collective memory (cf. Ingrid Volkmer, 2006). One trend beyond (or between, cf. Aaron Beim, 2007) the individual and collective binaries of parts of memory studies is evident in the outward-turn of cognitive science heavily inspired by philosophy over the past decade (see, for example, the growing literature on the ‘extended mind’ including Richard Menary (2010). Indeed, John Sutton (2009) and Amanda Barnier (2010) map some of these developments in their editorials for this journal as well as in their ongoing collaborative empirical work. Collective and other forms of memory from these and other more extensionist perspectives are often positioned as part of ‘memory systems’ wherein individual, collective and cultural remembering inhabit ongoing, dynamic and more connected (cf. José van Dijck, 2010) sets of relationships. This dynamic characterization of remembering is evident in a number of the contributions to this issue through a focus on auto/biographical work. First, Antonina Harbus illuminates the constructive synergies between cognitive science and literary studies towards an interdisciplinary understanding of the relationship between ‘life-writing’ and autobiographical memory. Second, Mia Stephens and Roy Neill employ a framework of ‘linguistic ethnography’ to show the ongoing construction of biographical narrative in a winemaking community. They offer a version of a distributed model of memory whereby the apparent anchorage of place in memory is at the same time thoroughly negotiated through the telling of ‘small stories’. Third, the distribution of memory in space, place and over time is also nicely captured in Catherine Stevens, Jane Ginsborg and Garry Lester’s inquiry into the relationship between contemporary dance perfomance and long-term memory. Their article reveals how the multimodalities of the performance of dance and the environment are inflected in memory of dance, as a ‘network’ of associations. However, some critics of collective, extended and distributed accounts of memory suggest that the concept of memory loses its unity and explanatory force if stretched beyond the bounds of the individual. This gives Kourken Michaelian’s case, in our final contribution in this issue, that the types of memory even within the individual do not form a unified natural kind an extra radical significance. Critically analysing the received hypothesis of multiple memory systems, Michaelian argues that ‘procedural memory’ – roughly, remembering how to perform certain tasks – has little in common with ‘declarative’ remembering, such as memory for personal experiences or for facts. Remembering how, or ‘nondeclarative memory’, is in fact not (in Michaelian’s view) in the business of information processing at all, and is thus ‘in an important sense not a kind of cognition’ at all. So the concept ‘memory’ in cognitive psychology and neuroscience is already dramatically fragmented, even before we consider collective and cultural memory systems. Whether one actively seeks or rejects a nexus of the multiple forms of memory richly detailed in the accounts in this issue, we continue to welcome articles that critically develop and challenge the dimensions, parameters and the lexicons of the study of memory. Acknowledgement My thanks to John Sutton for his comments and suggestions.

References Barnier AJ (2010) Memories, memory studies and my iPhone. Memory Studies 3(4): 293–7. Beim A (2007) The cognitive aspects of collective memory. Symbolic Interaction 30(1): 7–26.

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Brown SD (2008) The quotation marks have a certain importance: Prospects for a ‘memory studies’. Memory Studies 1(3): 261–71. Kansteiner W (2010) Memory, media and Menschen: Where is the individual in collective memory studies? Memory Studies 3(1): 3–4. Menary R (ed.) (2010) The Extended Mind. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Niven B (2008) On the use of ‘collective memory’. German History 26(3): 427–36. Rubin, DC, Wetzler SE and Nebes RD (1988) Autobiographical memory across the lifespan. In Rubin DC (ed.) Autobiographical Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 202–24. Sutton J (2009) Looking beyond memory studies: Comparisons and integrations. Memory Studies 2(3): 299–302 van Dijck J (2010) Flickr and the culture of connectivity: Sharing views, experiences, memories. Memory Studies. doi:10.1177/1750698010385215. Volkmer I (ed.) (2006) News in Public Memory: An International Study of Media Memories across Generations. New York: Peter Lang.

Author biography Andrew Hoskins is Interdisciplinary Research Professor in Global Security in the College of Social Sciences, University of Glasgow, UK. He is Co-Editor (with John Sutton) of the Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies book series: (www.palgrave.com/products/Series.aspx?s=PMMS). His recent books include: (with Akil Awan and Ben O’Loughlin) Radicalisation and Media: Connectivity and Terrorism in the New Media Ecology (Routledge, 2011) and (with O’Loughlin) War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War (Polity Press, 2010).

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