Remembering as a Cultural Process
Author: Wagoner, Brady; Brescó, Ignacio; Awad, Sarah H.
Date: 2019-11-23T08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Psychology; Cognitive Psychology & Cognition; Social Science; Anthropology; Cultural & Social; Experimental Psychology; Social Psychology; personality; General; Psychedelic Library
Description: This brief charts out principles for a cultural psychology of remembering. The idea at its core is a conceptualization of remembering as a constructive process--something that occurs at the intersection of a person and their social-cultural world. To do this, it moves away from the traditional metaphor of memory as storage and develops the alternative metaphor of construction as part of wider social and cultural developments in society. This new approach is developed from key ideas of Lev Vygotsky and Frederic Bartlett, in particular their concepts of mediation and reconstructive remembering.
Publisher: Springer

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Brady Wagoner, Ignacio Brescó and Sarah H. Awad

Remembering as a Cultural Process

Brady Wagoner

Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

Ignacio Brescó

Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

Sarah H. Awad

Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

ISSN 2192-8363e-ISSN 2192-8371

SpringerBriefs in Psychology ISSN 2626-6741e-ISSN 2626-675X
SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science ISBN 978-3-030-32640-1e-ISBN 978-3-030-32641-8
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32641-8

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Series Editors’ Preface

Remembering in Context: Guidance for Feeling

This small book makes a major contribution—showing how the seemingly personal act of remembering is implicitly guided by its preexisting ideological positioning. That positioning may be internalized by a person during one’s life course, or suggested by externally situated cultural objects that are encountered peripherally in everyday life (Lyra and Pinheiro 2018; Marsico and Tateo 2019). A monument to a particular event in the past, or the struggle for the visual space where commentaries on the present are painted, whitewashed, and re-painted (political graffiti—Chap. 6 ) are all guidance devices for affective relating that the person is expected to undertake to the society. It is notwhat is remembered buthow one should remember that is being socially negotiated—through history textbooks, parades of public commemorations, and monuments. It links socially privileged meaning systems with the personal life-worlds. Or—at the least—it makes an effort in that direction.

Such guidance for how one is to remember events that one has not, and could not, directly experienced has unique properties. It isaffectively directed ,catalytic , andpersistently episodic .

First, human acts of remembering are directed—one should remember A (“Napoleon as a hero”) and not non-A (“Napoleon as a mass murderer”), and it has to happen in an affectively differentiated way. A hero is to be appreciated, a murderer is to be condemned. It is not coincidental that one of the first casualties of political revolutions are monuments—a hero story of the previous political regime has to be removed from the public view as quickly as possible. The capture of Baghdad by the American forces started from tearing down the huge monument of Saddam Hussein; likewise, after the end of communist-led states in Eastern Europe, the many statues of Lenin ended up in scrap yards.

Second, the suggestions for remembering are nonbinding. They do not determine what is being remembered but create the context for which direction of feeling the act of remembering could take. A popular narrative about Michael Collins as a hero of Irish independence—repeated in families, schools, or pubs—is a catalytic device that does not lead to inquiry about who Michael Collins was, but rather to the generalized halo about him; whoever he was, he was a positive actor in history. However, that is the Irish point of view and not one necessarily shared by the British.

Third, the guidance is episodic. It is not part of a specific educational agenda in a here-and-now setting, but a transient moment where some comment about the particular nature of a historical event is made. Thus we all by-passingly refer to “velvet” revolutions or “great” wars—each of such epithetic mentions is an affect marker that is discursively attached to the meaning of the actual event, and thus distances our remembering efforts from the reality. In the “Great War” (as World War I was then labeled), an estimated 15–19 million people were killed. An occasional remark of it as “great” gives an episodic suggestion for its remembering. Likewise we all episodically pass by a monument of a general who distinguished himself in a particular war—not thinking of the actual events of the war and about the many people killed who led to the glory of this particular general. Memory is socially suggested to be fragmented, superficial, and affectively accepting the hegemonic message encoded in the words of the parents (about ones great-great-grandparents), school history textbooks, and public monuments.

The innovative solution to the problem of how human memory is socially guided is introduced in this book by re-focusing research on the adaptability and forward-oriented character of memory. Instead of documenting how “good” (or “bad”) human memory is in one domain or another, the authors of this book undertakea qualitative analysis aimed at examining how remembering is transformed over time according to the forms and systems of meaning of a given society in its historical transformation. This new focus links history, sociology, and cultural psychology in a new paradigm of a truly interdisciplinary nature. This innovation is solidly built on classic psychology—Frederic Bartlett’s work on remembering is at its core. Yet Bartlett’s work was limited to the constructive efforts toward meaning that the people who remember are involved in. In contrast, the new paradigm introduced in this book moves to look at the roots of the confabulations that Bartlett’s subjects introduced. These roots are in the societal encodings of the socially guided directions for remembering. These directions are monological—"this general was a hero” is the message in a monument, rather than “by putting this monument in this location we open a public debate about the hero role of this general.” In fact, the possible disputes about the decision of whether to build the present monument are expected to have ended before the decision to build the monument has been made. Of course, at times such discussions—usually deeply ideological—continue after the monument is erected. These can burst into iconoclastic actions even hundreds of years later under new hegemonic ideological contexts—monuments to the soldiers of the Southern Confederacy in the US Civil War of the 1860s, erected in the latter end of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century, have now been forcibly removed in many towns in the southern United States.

How are such historical transitions in relation to monuments possible? In the human dialogical self, acts of suggestion and counter suggestion are constantly involved as a mediation of the ongoing construction of the Self. Individual recollection is part of one’s internal dialogue about creating the future—based on earlier social interactions and folk stories about society, family, and oneself (Rhodes et al. 2019; Mironenko et al. 2019). The dialogic process continues as a way of dealing with the future—except in moments when it reaches a state of monological outcome (dialogical monologization) that can lead to conviction-based action in the social domainwithout any doubts about the value of the given action. Thus, killing an “enemy” is seen as a “patriotic duty,” or disfiguring or destroying a monument as an act of “purification” of a shared space from the “wrong” influences. The fights about the graphic messages in the city (see Chap. 6 ) is an example of externalized dialogue between two monologized ideological positions that were in combat for the future of society at the time.

Finally, the new paradigm introduced in this book contains novel methodological tools that open an alley for future development of specifically cultural-psychological methods that work as a direct link between a person’s experience and the guiding messages encoded in cultural objects. The specific innovation is the use of theactive haptic exploration of the symbolic objects. Having researchers actively explore specific features of the monuments by touch leads to the possibilities of turning the many discussions of embodiment into concrete bodily experiences. Different religious institutions have used such bodily involvement techniques over centuries for ideological conversion or belief maintenance tasks: one can embrace the statue of San Diego in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela from behind, for some seconds, with the assumption of replenishing one’s reservoir of funds of religious identity. Using such probes of bodily inclusion in research method construction has the potential to open doors to productive empirical research—which could be calledpremembering (pre + remembering). This would be in line with the focus on the construction of the future through the act of remembering. After all, memory is for the future and operates in the open-endedness of the human psyche through the unity of pre-constructive imagination and reconstructive memory processes (Marsico and Valsiner 2017).

We hope that the readers of this book will gain new insights from the innovative moments the authors bring to our science. Cultural psychology is interdisciplinary from its origin—yet it still needs to develop methods for empirical investigation that match its interdisciplinary synthesis. The work in this book is a step in this direction.

References

- Lyra M., & Pinheiro, M. (Eds.). (2018).Cultural psychology as basic science: Dialogues with Jaan Valsiner . New York: Springer.

- Marsico, G., & Tateo, L. (Eds). (2019).Ordinary Things and their Extraordinary Meanings. Annals of Cultural Psychology: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind and Society (Vol. 3, pp.1–287). Charlotte, NC, USA: Information Age Publishing;

- Marsico, G., & Valsiner, J. (2017).Making History: Apprehending future while reconstructing the past . In R. Säljö, P. Linell & Å. Mäkitalo, (Eds.).Memory practices and learning: Experiential, institutional, and sociocultural perspectives (pp. 355–372). Charlotte, NC, USA: Information Age Publishing.

- Mironenko I., Proskuriakova, E., Rafikova V., Kozlova, Y., Simonovich, A., & Proshina, D. E. (2019). Walking in St. Petersburg—Vienna Walks Continued,Human Arenas.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-019-00076-8

- Rhodes, P., et al. (2018). Hidden present, visible absent in the City of dreams: Assembling the collective imagination.Human Arenas, 1 , 151–165.

Jaan Valsiner Giuseppina Marsico Berlin, GermanySalerno, Italy August 2019

Introduction: From Memory to Remembering

The guiding question of this book is how to think about and study remembering in terms of process, flow, interaction, emergence, as well as culture. This approach requires turning away from psychology’s standard procedures for investigating memory through the analysis of static outcomes of some task, where memories are quantified and compared as finished products. There is certainly value in these procedures and the knowledge they have given us, but at the same time they have missed the fundamental energies, movements, emotions, and transformations that construct these memories. These are forces that cannot be tied down as discrete variables or studied simply as frozen snapshots. In fact, we argue that memory can only ever artificially be considered a finished product in that we are continuously revising, adapting, and developing memories in light of new experiences, changing environments, life challenges, and future goals. Thus, in the place of the language “how variable x influences memory,” this book will focus on how memories emerge withinchanging patterns of relationships between past, present, and future, as well as people, objects, history, and culture.

The static and contained appearance of memories has more to do with our concepts and methods of study than the phenomenon itself. Developing new concepts and methods is thus essential to bring the underlying process dynamics and relational qualities of remembering to the fore. In this book, we replace the mechanical language of static containers, through which information passes and is “processed,” with a focus on holistic developmental movements and a methodology to investigate remembering as a temporally organized event that is situated in contexts that are both social and material. In other words, we will analyze howmemories emerge and change through time as part of a system of relationships. One of the key components of this system is that of culture, which itself needs to be theorized in process and relational terms rather than a convenient category for comparing people in different parts of the world. To do this, we borrow and adapt concepts and methods from cultural psychology, which construes culture as a tool (instead of a self-enclosed context) and looks at how it is used by people in different everyday social activities. In short, we aim to move beyond fixed spatial metaphors (both of culture and memory) and instead highlight temporal processes of construction and reconstruction by examining remembering as culture in action.

This introduction will first describe some of the guiding principles we use to approach remembering as a cultural process and second outline some of the methodologies we have developed to study it as such. It concludes with a brief preview of the book’s contents.

Focusing on Process and Relations

From the beginning, let us make clear that we are focused on psychologicalprocesses over mentalfaculties , which is why we haveremembering in the title instead ofmemory. The very word memory itself misleads us to think that there is a distinct thing in the mind/brain that is responsible for recall. Instead, what we observe when we say someone is remembering is an activity whereby an experience that we recognize as from the past is brought into the present moment. Almost a century ago, Bartlett (1932) began to consistently use the gerund of verbs instead of static nouns to describe remembering, perceiving, imagining, and thinking in process terms. Seen as an activity there are no strict boundaries between these psychological processes—all these labels point to different ways of using the past in the here and now. He even described remembering as an “imaginative reconstruction” (p. 213). The difference between imagining and remembering for him was one ofdegree : A person who is faithfully focused reconstructing on the pastqua past is remembering, while the person who is content to let his or her mind wonder is imagining. Contemporary neuroscientists have recently noted that the same regions of the brain are active when a person is asked to remember the past or imagine the future (Schacter et al. 2007). Rather than the storage capacity of a mental faculty, our focus of analysis thus becomes an active person, using the past, to make a living response oriented forward within the current environmental demands.

From this perspective, it is also no longer possible to contain remembering in the head of an individual; instead, it is analyzed as happeningbetween a person and environment, as a means of orientation and action there. Recent theories of extended and distributed cognition have argued for the need to explore how resources of remembering are distributed across brain, body, and world (Sutton et al. 2010): the task and setting will determine what resources are mobilized and coordinated in an act of recall. The boundary between the so-called internal and external resources is thus changing and dynamic. For example, using a notebook to remember information externalizes demands on internal memory. Furthermore, cultural approaches in psychology have shown how many resources and psychological tools have an external social origin but gradually become internalized in human development (see Chap. 2 ). Finally, these approaches point out that remembering serves a number of different functions beyond creating accurate representations of the past, such as motivating action, guiding innovation, and social bonding. As such, success of remembering should be evaluated first and foremost in terms of whether it opens up or shuts down our personal and collective agency within the standards of assessment specific to different social contexts (Brown and Reavey 2015). This is not to say that accuracy is unimportant but that it needs to be assessed in light of the environment in which recall takes place, such as whether it is part of a psychology experiment or everyday conversation. The environment in this context includes various material arrangements and artifacts, as well as other people, social positions, cultural practices, and systems of meaning, all of which play a key role in remembering.

The question of how the broader social and cultural world shapes and is shaped by mind has been the focus of cultural psychology. In Shweder’s (1990) words:

Cultural psychology is the study of the way cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, transform, and permute the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion. Cultural psychology is the study of the ways subject and object, self and other, psyche and culture, person and context, figure and group, practitioner and practice live together, require each other, and dynamically, dialectically, and jointly make each other up. (p. 1)

In this approach, culture is an inherently relational notion. It requires a psyche, just as much as a psyche requires it. The very notion of culture, understood as a tool, artifact, or resource, calls for an active individual making use of it according to specific goals and activity settings. No cultural environment exists independently of the way we humans appropriate and make use of it. Here, culture and mind are no longer regarded as independent and dependent variables, respectively, but they are understood as constitutive elements of each other. As Vygotsky (1987) points out, the use and continuous renewal of cultural tools has allowed humans to go beyond the limits of purely biological development imposed by nature and thus expand their psychological functions. For example, the expansion in human memory capacity can be explained, from a socio-genetic point of view, by the mediation of different cultural artifacts incorporated in human activity throughout history, ranging from knots in ropes and written notes to family albums and memorials.

This is quite different from the typical understanding of culture in psychology and popular language use as a kind of container, in which people belong to as a function of language, ethnicity and geopolitical borders (Valsiner 2007). Culture seen as a container allows for easy comparisons of people living in different parts of the world, as can be seen in statements like “People in countrya do and thinky , while people in countryb do and thinkz .” These kinds of general statements might seem helpful at first, but they miss the dynamic diversity of action and thought found in any society. Moreover, people move both between societies and within them. From a materially extended or socially distributed notion of mind, varying contexts provide different sets of cultural resources and constraints for individuals operating within them. This notion of context implies that which weaves together different components into a meaningful whole (Cole 1996), rather than an empty container in which things happen. A memorial, for example, offers a rich symbolically charged environment for stimulating reflection on a given past, while simultaneously imposing certain norms of “respect” on visitors (see especially Chap. 7 ). In contrast, a traditional psychology laboratory experiment is impoverished in terms of the mnemonic resources available to the subject, so as to force the person to rely on individual cognitive factors in recall. Other forms of experimentation in psychology have, however, been invented to promote and explore the use of cultural resources in recall (see especially Chaps. 2 and 5 ).

The notions of culture, context, and resources help us to describe thehorizontal relations shaping acts of recall; however, we must also includevertical relations, such as a person’s life history and previous episodes of remembering (Brown and Reavey 2018; de Saint Laurent and Zittoun 2018). As the process philosopher and psychologist William James (1890) described it, experience is not only a relationship with other things in space but also a relationship with oneself over time. The latter temporal relationship includes both our immediate stream of consciousness, as when we turn around on our experience (in James’s terms the “I” becomes a “Me” or what Bartlett called “turning around upon schema”), and the connections we make to previous episodes of our lives. Any single memory often collects many episodes into one, as when we explicitly compare episodes (“it is like...”) or implicitly findinvariances between several episodes of our lives. Neisser (1982) named the latter “repisodic memory” (adding a “re-” to “episode”) in his famous study of John Dean’s memory of conversations with Nixon concerning Watergate. Comparing the taped recordings of conversations with Dean’s own testimony, he noted that while many of the details were wrong, the testimony was true to the character of the conversations at a more general level. In a more social guise, Halbwachs (1992) earlier noted how certain family memories condense multiple different episodes into a composite image of the past that provides a model and valuation of family life to its members. In this way, memories become powerful anchors of group and personal identity and as such provide helpful guides for navigating our lives in the present. The present is thus made sense of and acted upon in relation to previous (r)episodes of our life. We are adept at identifying invariances across our experiences, such that the present moment is connected with a network of past experiences either implicitly or explicitly. For example, in our study of the national 9/11 memorial (Chap. 7 ), participants often established relationships between their experience of the memorial pool and early associated with water places, together with the nostalgia and fear connected to them. From the perspective of this book, we are interested in how these relationships are continuously transformed through time and space.

Developing Process Methodologies

Although psychology now has many methods at its disposal, there are scandalously few that take processes and holistic relationships seriously. Instead, phenomena are typically quickly itemized and turned over for statistical analysis. Even the majority of qualitative methods tend to focus on identifying themes that cut across a sample rather than relationships and transformations. To explore the qualitative emergence of something new, our methods must be able toaccess and analyze changes in single cases through time. It is only at the level of the single case that we can see systematic relationships and their reorganization. A methodology focused oncase studies is thus key for the following reasons: (1) it looks at events as they unfold over time, (2) it sees participants as interdependent with their social-cultural environment (i.e., situated in a particular time and place), (3) it highlights relationships within an integrated whole through different sources of evidence, and (4) it generalizes through theoretical constructions that then need to be tested against other single cases (rather than generalizing through statistics to populations). This is not to say that we cannot quantify data—in several places of this book we do—but that this is done in order to further illustrate qualitative relationships and to situate single cases (Wagoner 2009).

The focus on single cases was key to Bartlett’s (1932) methodology, where he analyzed how stories and images change as they were reproduced and transformed either by a single person over increasing time intervals or by being serially passed through several people (Wagoner 2017a, b; Chapter 2). This methodology is extended to explore qualitative changes introduced into material when remembering in a number of differentcontexts ,tasks , andmedia . Regardingcontext , our studies span from the setting of a laboratory experiment to the complex ecology of a city. In both cases we include the wider social, cultural, and political context in the analysis of the data produced. Participants bring into the laboratory their wider systems of meaning they take over from the specific groups to which they belong (Halbwachs 1992). For example, in Chap. 3 we show how participants used a narrative template from Hollywood ghost stories to interpret and recall an unfamiliar Native American story calledWar of the Ghosts , and in Chap. 4 the wider context of the Basque conflict in Spain provides the resources to recall a story about the Northern Irish conflict. In the setting of an urban walk, there is a much richer ecology of resources immediately available to stimulate recall, but the principle point remains the same in both cases: people use different cultural tools at hand from their everyday life (ideas, images, stories, etc.) to make sense of what they encounter.

Thetask concerns what the researcher requests that the participant accomplish and with what resources. Remembering in conversation with another person (in contrast to remembering alone) both places additional constraints on the activity (e.g., coming to consensus) and enables recall (e.g., by providing a stimulus and potential corrective to it) (see especially Chap. 3 ). Furthermore, Middleton and Edwards (1990a) note that conversation creates a freer and more jovial atmosphere compared to a solo laboratory exercise, which tends to be approached more like a school exam. In Chap. 3 , a conversational task is used as a means ofexternalizing processes of remembering in order to analyze the transformation and emergence of definite memories out of an initial vague feeling. Another task involves creating a narrative out of a set of diverse material relating to the Basque conflict, modeling the task of a historian (see Chap. 5 ). In this case, participants do not merely recall a story provided by the researcher but mustproduce a story out of the available material and their own previous knowledge of events. The researcher can thus explore what participants attend to and ignore, as well as the genre into which they set the different events into a temporally ordered form. Analysis focuses on how this is done as a function of their (dis)identification with different sides of the conflict. Finally, asking people to recognize, associate to, and connect stories with urban sites and images is a relatively free and imaginative task (see Chaps. 6 and 7 ). It is also perhaps the most naturalistic task, being closest to our everyday life experience and thinking.

Themedia of remembering are intentionally varied in this book. We have from the beginning shied away from using the usual word-lists and other minimally meaningful stimuli in favor of material that is culturally rich, such as stories, images, and built environments, like memorials and street art. Each of these has its particular affordances for remembering, though they can also be seen as highly interrelated. For example, images are connected to places in the city, which also elicit narratives of social conflict (see especially Chap. 6 ). Narratives are windows into common sense thinking (Bruner 1990), in that they highlight a society’s typical kinds of actors, actions, situations, and valuations. Moreover, telling a narrative regarding an issue of social concern, such as the Basque conflict in Spain, inevitably positions one in society—for or against, a part of this group or that. Remembering typically proceeds in order to justify a social position. People are also skilled at using different story genres to actively positioning themselves—for example, telling a story ironically to distance themselves from all the actors involved (see Chap. 5 ). Beyond narrative, studies here employ a number ofvisual methods (Reavey 2013; Rose 2001; Pink 2013), especially photo documentation and elicitation (Chap. 6 ), as well as subjective cameras that records first person video and audio (Chap. 7 ). These provide a means of getting closer to the world as experienced by participants and thereby narrowing the gap between inchoate experience and its description. This includes their embodiment in the world, spatial arrangements, materiality, and affective connections to it, which are more difficult to explore using purely discursive methods. In other words, visual methods provide a platform to explore the broader cognitive ecology of memory as can be identified in, for example, the urban landscape (Chaps. 6 and 7 ).

Preview of the Book: A Research Journey

The present book describes our collective journey in the exploration of remembering as a cultural process. This was initiated by our interest in advancing Frederic Bartlett’s seminal ideas and integrating them with new directions in psychology, especially cultural psychology. InThe Constructive Mind: Bartlett’s Psychology in Reconstruction (Wagoner 2017a), the first author analyzed Bartlett’s work and legacy in detail, including his intellectual sources and how his ideas were adapted by others that followed. As such the present book will only briefly outline some of Bartlett’s key concepts and methods that we directly use in our own studies. Instead, our starting point is a conceptual history of memory in Chap. 1 , seen through the different metaphors that have been used to construct concepts of memory over millennia, according to the technologies, values, and social practices at a given place and moment in time. This historical and conceptual analysis shows clearly the cultural variability of memory as well as how certain conceptions, based on the metaphor of storage and containers, have been largely taken for granted. Chapter 2 then develops the metaphor of construction as a way of finding a new starting point for approaching memory, not based on memory storage, but as a social-cultural process. The groundwork for this approach was already set by two early twentieth-century psychologists, Lev Vygotsky and Frederic Bartlett, whose ideas are also foundational for cultural psychology.

The rest of the book then presents a series of studies in which our distinctive approach to remembering is developed step-by-step. Each chapter introduces new concepts and methods to capture the specific dynamics of memory in question. The data for these studies was also collected in different parts of the world (namely, Egypt, Germany, Spain, the UK, and the USA). The studies progress from Bartlett-styled experiments on story recall to ecologically situated research on memory in urban space. Chapter 3 presents a study that extends Bartlett’s (1932) most famous experiments into conversational remembering task in order to access themicrogenetic emergence of memories in real time. Microgenesis is an empirical strategy for capturing and analyzing unfolding processes, which was developed by Heinz Werner and Lev Vygotsky, among others. This study also provides a concrete empirical example of how to bring together the theoretical and methodological traditions described in Chap. 2 . One important finding of the study is how people reflectively use narrative templates available from the wider cultural world to interpret and remember a foreign story. The study presented in Chap. 4 brings this kind ofnarrative mediation to the fore by showing how it progressively transforms memory of national history toward existing group conventions. In this case, when Spanish participants recall a story about the Northern Ireland conflict, they shape it to look more and more like a story about the Basque conflict, according to their own respective position in it. The Basque conflict is further thematized in Chap. 5 but instead of trying toreproduce different narratives about the history of the Irish conflict, participants were asked toproduce a narrative of the Basque issue by using a set of documents. The rationale behind this method is to somehow emulate the role of historians when writing accounts of the past on the grounds of a selected set of documents, which in this case also acted as memory props for the participants. The study also introduces the notions ofsocial positioning ,dialogicality , andargumentation to understand memory dynamics in a socially contentious situation.

Chapter 6 further explores memory in a conflict situation, but does so by looking at how people make sense of and relate to the changing city space of Cairo after the 2011 Egyptian revolution. With this we move out of the laboratory into the rich ecology ofurban memory . The study develops variousvisual methods to follow how the urban space is intentionally shaped and reshaped by various images from different social groups to match their narrative of the conflict. Chapter 7 then focuses in on memorials as specific urban sites for the negotiation of memory. It considers how memorials have developed historically and how new architectural forms (what have been called “counter memorials”) set up particular conditions for individual’s connecting personal memories to collective events. This is illustrated with a case study at “the National 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero” in New York. Participants described their experiences onsite while wearing subject camera glasses that record first person video and audio. Thus, we were able to analyze how different features of the site were involved in their experience of it, especially the specific ways in which participants’ physical interaction with the site led them to create personal links that simultaneously evoke the collective past.

We hope that the studies comprising this book will help bring to the fore the cultural dimension of remembering, understood as a dynamic process. If, as Vygotsky stated, the invention and continuous renewal of cultural artifacts has enabled human beings to overcome the limits of purely biological development, we hope that a psychology more open to the sociocultural condition of the human being can provide us with better tools to overcome existing reductionist visions of our psyche.

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- Sutton, J., Harris, C. B., Keil, P. G., & Barnier, A. J. (2010). The psychology of memory, extended cognition and socially distributed remembering.Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, 9 (4), 521–560.

- Vygotsky, L. (1987).The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky (The history of the development of higher mental functions) (Vol. 4). New York, NY: Plenum Press.

- Wagoner, B. (2017a).The constructive mind: Frederic Bartlett’s psychology in reconstruction . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

- Wagoner, B. (2009). The Experimental Methodology of Constructive Microgenesis. In: J. Valsiner, P. Molenaar, N. Chaudhary, and M. Lyra (Eds.).Handbook of Dynamic Process Methodology in the Social and Developmental Sciences (pp. 99–121). New York: Springer.

- Wagoner, B. (2017b). What makes memory constructive? A study in the serial reproduction of Bartlett’s experiments.Culture & Psychology, 23 (2), 186–207.

Acknowledgments

This book describes our journey developing an approach to remembering that is cultural, constructive, and process oriented. Many people have been a part of this journey. Jaan Valsiner has been a continual source of inspiration and encouragement to all of the authors. Wagoner also owes special thanks to Gerard Duveen, Alex Gillespie, and Tania Zittoun, who were instrumental in his early formation. Ignacio Brescó would like to thank Alberto Rosa in this connection. Pina Marsico and Lilith Dorko have been extremely supportive of doing this book project and patient with our delivery. We would not have had time and resources to complete this project if it were not for the opportunities provided by the Obel Foundation, who funded “The Culture of Grief” project that the first two authors belong to, and the Lyon Institute for Advanced Studies, where the first author finished the book. Finally, we have rewritten the following earlier publications for this book and thank the publishers for their permissions:

- Estudios de Psicologia/Studies in Psychology (2017) and (2019)

- Memory Practices and Learning: Interaction, institutional and sociocultural perspectives (2017)

- Peace & Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology (2016)

- Theoretical Psychology: Global Transformations and Challenges (2010)

Contents

1 Rethinking Metaphors of Memory: A Conceptual History
1

2 Theories of Constructive Remembering
11

3 Microgenesis of Remembering: A Conversational Study
23

4 Narrative Forms in the Recall of National History
35

5 Conflict, Memory, and Positioning: The Multivoiced Context of the Basque Conflict
49

6 Urban Memory: Stories of Revolution
61

7 Experiencing Memorials: The Materiality of Memory
75

Appendix I
91

Appendix II
99

Index
103

About the Authors

Brady Wagoner

is Professor of Psychology and Director of the MA and PhD programs in Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he also co-created theF.C. Bartlett Internet Archive. He is associate editor of the journalsCulture & Psychology andPeace & Conflict. His research focuses on the cultural and constructive dimensions of the mind, particularly in relation to memory, imagination, and social change. His most recent books includeThe Constructive Mind: Bartlett’s Psychology in Reconstruction (Cambridge University Press, 2017),Street Art of Resistance with Sarah H. Awad (Palgrave, 2017),Handbook of Culture and Memory (Oxford University Press, 2018) andThe Psychology of Radical Social Change with Fathali Moghaddam and Jaan Valsiner (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He has received two early career awards from the American Psychological Association (divisions 24 and 26) and has won research fellowships at Institutes for Advanced Studies in Lyon and Madrid.

Ignacio Brescó de Luna

is Associate Professor at the Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Denmark. He is a member of the Research Centre for Cultural Psychology, co-founded by the Danish National Research Foundation and AAU under theNiels Bohr Professorships Scheme. He is also a member of the Culture of Grief center, funded by the Obel Foundation. He received his PhD at the Autonomous University of Madrid, where he worked as Assistant Professor until 2014. His research topics revolve around collective memory, national identity, the teaching of history, and the narrative mediation of remembering. He has co-edited a special issue on collective memory inCulture & Psychology (2017), on memory and conflict inPeace & Conflict (2016), and on cultural psychology inEstudios de Psicología (2019). Among his recent books areThe Psychology of Imagination: History, Theory and New Research Horizons , with Brady Wagoner and Sarah H. Awad (Info Age, 2017), andThe Road to Actualized Democracy: A Psychological Exploration , with Brady Wagoner and Vlad Glăveanu (Info Age, 2018).

Sarah H. Awad

is Assistant Professor in General Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. She received her PhD in Cultural Psychology from Aalborg University, MSc in Social and Cultural Psychology from London School of Economics and Political Science, and BA in Mass Communication from the American University in Cairo. Her research interests are in the interrelation between the fields of cultural psychology, communication, and social development. She has published work exploring the process by which individuals develop through times of life ruptures and social change using art and storytelling. She has a special interest in visual methodology and the analysis of urban images and their influence on identity, collective memory, and politics within a society. Her most recent books includeStreet Art of Resistance , with Brady Wagoner (Palgrave, 2017), andThe Psychology of Imagination: History, Theory and New Research Horizons , with Brady Wagoner and Ignacio Brescó de Luna (Info Age, 2017)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

B. Wagoner et al.Remembering as a Cultural Process SpringerBriefs in Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32641-8_1

1. Rethinking Metaphors of Memory: A Conceptual History

Brady Wagoner[1] , Ignacio Brescó[2] and Sarah H. Awad[2]

(1) Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

(2) Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

Keywords

MetaphorsConceptual historyArt of memoryHistory of psychology

All human knowledge is ultimately rooted in metaphorical (or analogical) modes of perception and thought, wherein one thing is used to understand another (Leary 1990). Accordingly, metaphors are much more than a simple ornament to language that can be easily substituted for a literal expression; instead, the topic (e.g., life) and metaphorical vehicle for describing it (e.g., a journey) are linked by a set of interacting associations such that their characteristics mutually influence one another (Black 1962). Thomas Hobbes’s statement “man is a wolf” makes us think of man (the topic) as wolf-like (the vehicle) in being violent, wild, cruel, and untamable. Moreover, we might also begin to see wolves in more human-like terms. The metaphorical words become meaningful within a larger semantic field of culture (Ricoeur 1977), in this case the image of man as rational and ethical being brought into what is seen as the opposing animal realm. The use of metaphor permeates our everyday language structuring and our understanding of life, relationships, communication, politics, and many other domains (Lakoff and Johnson 1980).

One particularly important context for the present chapter is the use of metaphors in science. Metaphors help scientists to construct theoretical models to describe and explain the world (Hesse 1966). The atom is analogized to the solar system, gas molecules are described as behaving like billiard balls, sound is visualized as waves in water, and the immune system is said to “recognize” pathogens. Metaphors thus help us to productively “fill in gaps” in our existing understanding and generate new approaches to the phenomenon of interest. In this way, theoretical models are partly constituted by the metaphors they rely on rather than offering literal descriptions of the world. This constituting characteristic of metaphors is even more pronounced in the social sciences, as we will see in the brief history of how memory has been conceptualized with metaphors that follows. This history will show how memory shifted from an external to internal event and changed in relation to new technologies, practices, and social values. It will help us to understand how memory got fixed as a thing in the head and thereby set the ground for developing more dynamic, relational, and process-oriented concepts that take onboard culture, history, social relationships, and materiality.

The Storage Metaphor

We are accustomed to thinking of memory today in both science and our everyday life as some kind of container or archive for storing information or experiences. This root metaphor has provided the basis for a vast number of specific metaphors of memory, of which we will review only a fraction (for a detailed history, see Brockmeier 2015; Danziger 2008; Draaisma 2000). First, there are metaphors of memory as various kinds of smaller containers that are literally used for storage of things, such as chests, drawers, vaults, purses, and even compost bins. The last in the list is particularly interesting in that it implies transformation and mixing together of literally organic material, rather than taking a discrete thing out of the container in roughly the same form as it was put in, which the other storage metaphors in the list tend to imply (Randall 2007). As we will see below, this conception fits some recent research on constructive memory . Rooms have been another fertile metaphorical source, such as libraries, archives, wine cellars, warehouses, and offices. They point to various models of organizing items according to authoritative plan. Derrida (1995) points out that the Greek word arkhe (from which “archive” is derived) meant both “commencement” and “commandment,” while the Latin archivum was the house of a magistrate who ruled. The roots of the word highlight the principle of power at work deciding what is remembered and forgotten as part of an organized system that involved an exercise of power. What is deemed worthy of memory is not a random process but an interested one, which is true at both individual and collective levels.

In addition to the magistrate’s house, one finds metaphors of larger structures in buildings (such as palaces, abbeys, cathedrals, and theaters) and landscapes (such as caves, mineshafts, fields, gardens, and labyrinths). In his Confessions

, Augustine (1991) famously described an imagery palace that was full of many “large and boundless spaces” of memory that could be seen to encompass the smaller spaces of previous thinkers. And the palace was even further extended into gardens, fields, and caves. With such a large place, the task of locating a particular piece of knowledge required considerable concentration. In terms of valuation , Carruthers (1990) points out that while contemporary culture tends to praise geniuses for their “creativity,” in early medieval society, “memory” was the most desirable attribute. Einstein is the prototype of genius today, whereas it was Augustine in medieval society, yet the two thinkers had similar personalities and working habits. In reality both thinkers were virtuosos of memory and creativity: in order for them to make their breakthroughs, they had to master existing fields of knowledge. Thus, in contrast to the way they are often opposed today, memory was earlier seen as the foundation for creativity and invention (Glăveanu and Wagoner 2016). A person developed a random access memory scheme over the course of one’s life in which old material could be reshuffled and reused and new material could be integrated into it (Carruthers 1998).

From this short list of specific metaphors, we can see how generative the root metaphor of storage has been. In fact, it has become so ubiquitous that we tend to fail to see it as being metaphorical at all. What began as a new and dynamic way of seeing (i.e., “a living metaphor”) with time and success can become a fossilized perspective (i.e., “a dead metaphor”). In order to see the assumptions that the root metaphor of storage brings with it requires exploring how memory was understood before it gained ascendancy. In the Homeric world, the word mneme (memory) was probably used in two specific contexts: reciting epic poetry and delivering a speech at a banquet. At this time, memory was not yet seen as a private, individual function but as a public event. Moreover, it was understood to come from outside the individual through the intervention of divine beings, Mnemosyne (the personification of memory) or the muses (her daughters). Figure 1.1 illustrates the goddess Mnemosyne imparting memory to a speaker at a banquet by touching the back of his head. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey begun by evoking them in order to aid the bard in remembering. In oral cultures the story changes at each retelling such that many variations of it proliferate. But without the model of written texts and thus literal reproduction of information, people see it as the same story within the standard of what human memory is capable of. Oral practices of memory continue to this day in the form of family reminiscence, public rituals, and ancestor worship, but the conceptualization of memory it carries with it has been largely forgotten in literate culture. Where ancestor worship is dominant, memory takes on an active form of dialogue with the dead. For example, the Sora group of Northern India uses the same word to refer to dead ancestors and to memory (Vitebesky 1993). The deceased are not seen here as attachments in the past, but as active in the present and as having the power to pull the living into death by imparting their memories onto the living. In this way, they must be actively negotiated and appeased through various rituals .

Fig. 1.1

A Greek mosaic of Mnemosyne inspiring a speaker at a banquet

The storage conception of memory begins with Plato’s living metaphor of memory as “block of wax in the mind .” He famously wrote: “When we wish to remember anything we have seen, or heard, or thought in our own minds, we hold the wax to the perceptions or thoughts, and in that material receive the impression of them as from the seal of a ring. Whatever is so imprinted we remember and know so long as the image remains” (Plato, Theaetetus, pp. 191D–191E). This metaphor makes a number of radical changes to the conceptualization of memory. First, memory is generalized beyond the specific contexts of public speaking to a wider range of activities. Second, the rather abstract and intangible notion of memory becomes a concrete, materialized thing—a block of wax that receives impressions. The wax tablet was a new technology used for writing at Plato’s time that emerged together with the spread of literacy. Figure 1.2 is an example of this technology, which involved making marks in the wax surface with a stylus. Third, memory becomes located inside the individual and thus is separated off from contextual relationships. This follows the logic of written versus oral communication: the latter makes use of many contextual factors, while the former is much more decontextualized in its aim of communicating across space and time. Fourth, memory as writing implies three distinct phases of writing, storage, and reading or in the language of cognitive psychology encoding, storage, and retrieval. For Plato the wax tablet was a living metaphor to offer new perspectives on memory. He himself offered other metaphors such as an aviary and more implicitly dialogue and pregnancy (see his Meno), to explore other aspects of memory. But already in Aristotle, the metaphor begins to be taken literally, emphasizing how sense experiences become physically inscribed in the body. Medieval monks would go even further, recommending that one could improve one’s memory by warming or applying ointments to the back of the head in order to soften the wax (Danziger 2008).

Fig. 1.2

Wax tablet and stylus used in ancient Greece for writing

The Art of Memory

The metaphor of storage was particularly useful to the art of memory tradition, which developed from ancient Greece to the seventeenth century (Yates 1966). We have already seen above its use in Augustine’s (1991) description of the memory palace. The tradition’s mythic origins point to a story of a poet named Simonides, who leaves a banquet hall just before the ceiling collapses, killing everyone inside. Simonides finds he can identify which body belongs to which person by imagining their placement around the table and thus discovering how space can be used to organize memory. Previously memory had been linked to the linear and temporal structure of oral language as with bards’ recitation of epic poetry. In organizing memory within a spatial framework
, one breaks this linear order (see also Halbwachs 1950/1980, chapter 4). All mnemonics employ something easy to remember in order to remember something more difficult. The early practice of the art of memory involved imagining a memorable familiar place, such as a street or building, and then placing symbolic images of these things one wanted to remember within the discrete loci of it—this is known as “the method of loci .” Augustine (1991) used places from Carthage, where he lived, and the famous twentieth-century mnemonist Shereshevsky imagined walking down Gorky Street in Moscow. In addition to spatializing memory, this tradition also employed the power of mental imagery: the more strange and evocative the image, the better it would stick in memory. Complex systems of translation between images and themes were also developed, such as animals and things in the shape of letters, similar to modern day children’s books. When one wanted to remember the material, one simply walked through the place in one’s mind and read off the images left there. This was analogous to the ways that written words (i.e., symbols) occupy discrete spaces on surfaces in written texts, and the tradition itself contributed to the development of books (see below). Interestingly, Shereshevsky independently developed the same technique as the art of memory in order to perform his vast feats of memorization and recall, which Luria (1987) concluded were limitless due to his powers of mental imagery and synesthesia. The technic has also been revived by other champion mnemonists today (Foer 2011), but in both cases without a link to its cultural history, which we will now describe in more detail.

The art of memory was taught for much of its history as a key component of rhetoric from the ancient world on. Ancient Roman orators used it to recall the themes of public speeches. This is where the expression “in the first place” comes from, referring to the first loci in which an image representing a theme was to be found. In medieval times it was reappropriated for the learning of material to become a better person (Carruthers 1990). Memory was a stomach to digest material into oneself. Dante’s Divine Comedy is an excellent example of heaven and hell as memory systems to remind one of the virtues and vices. One need only remember the vivid images of punishments described in different circles of torture to steer the noble path. Books themselves became organized according to the principles of a spatial framework and vivid imagery. Their organization in terms of chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and punctuation is outgrowth of the art of memory. Medieval books also used powerful images to facilitate reader’s memory for the material (see the example in Fig. 1.3). For the illiterate masses, cathedrals functioned as an alternative spatial memory system in which stained glass windows or figures surrounding the entrance told biblical stories through images, a kind of medieval comic book. In the Renaissance memory theatres were envisioned to organize a world of knowledge. They believed under certain conditions the microcosm of the human mind could come into harmony with the macrocosm of the universe. Like the earlier uses of the art of memory, the goal was not literal reproduce of factual information. It was not until the emergence and proliferation of mechanical forms of reproduction (viz., the printing press) that this function became prominent (Glăveanu and Wagoner 2016). At the same time, this technology as well as the reformation’s iconoclasm led to the end of the art of memory tradition. In all this, we see how when practices, values, and technologies change so too functions and concepts of memory. In this book we will attempt to adapt notions of place and visual imagery used in the art of memory to answer contemporary issues that concern remembering, especially in an urban and politicalcontext (see esp. Chaps. 6 and 7).

Fig. 1.3

A medieval book organized according to the art of memory

Memory in the History of Psychology

When psychology emerged as a discipline in the nineteenth century, its founding fathers Herbart and Wundt argued that the category “memory” was too vague and commonsensical to be included in the new science. Their philosophical vision of the discipline, however, was supplanted by Ebbinghaus’s approach, which put empirical results over theoretical speculation and was more directly serviceable within social practices, such as in schools. His studies of memory are considered a major turning point for psychology as a whole. This has much more to do with his methodological approach than to the way he conceptualized memory, which was very much in continuity with Plato’s notion of the wax tablet. But whereas Plato was concerned with truths in memory, Ebbinghaus focused on the retention of literally meaningless material. This celebrated method of nonsense syllables (consonant-vowel-consonant combinations, such as RAL) provided him with constant and interchangeable units that allowed for quantification. Ebbinghaus (1885/1913) memorized lists of nonsense syllables to discover the quantitative laws of memory. For example, he shows that most forgetting takes place rapidly and then takes place more gradually after more time has passed (i.e., “the curve of forgetting”). However, meaningful material, such as poetry (viz., Byron’s Don Juan), had a much more gradual curve of forgetting when compared to nonsense syllables and was memorized ten times faster. Although Ebbinghaus set out to study “pure” memory through his new method, it is quite clear that he had the practice of formal schooling in mind. In fact, he was working as a school tutor at the same time he was performing his experiments. Ebbinghaus was able to experimentally investigate memory in this way by reducing its meaning to the traditional school practice of memorization and retention of information without much regard for its meaning and usefulness besides passing an exam. The principles discovered were in the service of aiding students to optimize rote learning, in which the ideal is exact recall of all information given. Ebbinghaus’s studies set off research in “experimental pedagogics” and in their standardization led to experimental procedures that have persisted in psychology to this day, as well as traditional education practices focused on learning by rote.

Another important conceptual transformation in the conceptualization of memory happened after the Second World War, when psychology began to adopt a new technological metaphor that would spread widely through the discipline in the decades to follow: the computer (for a history see Gigerenzer and Goldstein 1996). The computer metaphor gained currency on the back of research exploring possibilities for making information flow between humans and machines more efficient in military and industrial tasks to aid the war effort. It was not a long step from the investigation of interactions between humans and machines to start to consider humans as machines within this context (Wagoner 2017). Psychologists began to argue that if computers could be built that behaved like human beings that would show that mental processes were organized according to mechanical principles. Oldfield (1954) made an analogy between human memory and the way a computer stores information by recoding of elements according to an economizing plan. Information is here magnetically inscribed on a hard disk in the form of binary code rather than as marks on wax, but the root metaphor is fundamentally the same. In time, the brain came to be considered the hardware of these “processing” operations, while the instructions were the software that puts it to use. For both computers and minds, programs provided “a series of instructions” or a “recipe for selecting, storing, recovering, combining, outputting, and generally manipulating [information]” (Neisser 1967, p. 8). The central term of the new cognitive psychology was “information processing,” whereby information in the form of finite and discrete symbols are combined to various ends. This of course fit the Ebbinghausian model of memory for items of information and the assumptions of the inscription metaphor more generally. The computer metaphor had the conceptual consequence of cutting the mind off from its surroundings: a computer is only concerned with what is fed into it. Moreover, the method of experimentation in which the laboratory was seen as a “neutral” context for reactions to occur under different conditions, as well as the use of easily segmented material to be remembered, such as word lists, further affirmed the concept of memory as an internal faculty for storing information. Bruner (1990) has pointed out that all these characteristics of the metaphor sidelined the study of everyday meaning making and memory. Despite these changes, at a more general level, the computer did not fundamentally alter the ancient metaphor of the wax tablet going backto Plato.

Conclusion: Reflecting on the Taken-for-Granted

We might ask at this point why has the storage metaphor of memory been so persistent and how has it constituted social practices of remembering? Part of its success is the flexibility of the metaphor itself. The things stored can be literal or symbolic inscriptions, as with written language (Danziger 2008). External memory in the form of making inscriptions on surfaces has also been immensely important throughout human history from prehistorical cave paintings, through practices of tattooing and scarification (Connerton 2011), to books and various modern recording technologies. But most of all, the spread of literate culture made the metaphor of inscription and storage all the more natural and as such invisible. The model of books and archives was immediate and readily available as an intuitive metaphorical source.

As mentioned above, metaphors in the social sciences constitute their object in a much more fundamental way than in the natural sciences. In saying “the heart is a pump,” there is an actual physical thing that we can approach, but when it comes to memory, no such thing exists (Brockmeier 2015). In contrast, memory takes shape precisely in response to the metaphors we use and the practices we put it to. Human beings also understand the descriptions made of them and often change their action and experience according to those descriptions. Whereas the electron does not change as a result of being labeled an electron, a person might change by being labeled a “machine” or “depressed.” It has been jokingly said that people who get therapy from a psychoanalyst begin to have more psychoanalytically themed dreams. Psychological theories often have the power to change social reality, whereas physical phenomenon is unaffected by our descriptions of it. Philosopher Ian Hacking (1995) has called this “looping effects of human kinds.” Human kinds are categories related to mind and behavior. In contrast to natural kinds, they require a background of intelligibility in social practices that both the researcher and subject share. This background provides the meaningful framework for evaluating and constructing ones object of study. How do we know that we are studying “memory” and not some other phenomenon? Contemporary neuroscience demonstrates that we cannot differentiate remembering one’s last birthday from imagining one’s next in a brain scan (see, e.g., Schacter et al. 2007). To know if something is memory, we have to look first to social practices to see what is commonly referred as such and only afterward can we even begin to identify neuro-correlates for these activities (Harré 2002).

This brief history has focused on how memory has been metaphorically understood in relation to changing social practices, values, and technologies. We found that much of contemporary theorizing in psychology has deep roots in our cultural history, even if its specific technological metaphors and methods of study are new. The aim of the metaphorical history has been to both offer a critique of long-standing metaphors that we now take for granted as the reality and begin to constructively develop alternative metaphorical models. If the very phenomenon of memory changes in relation to various social-cultural factors, it would be wise to foreground these in developing new theories of memory. But in the place of divine beings or dead ancestors, we will argue that cultural tools and social practices are the essential components of human remembering. This is itself linked to the art of memory tradition in its culturally developed and meaning-making practices for aiding and enhancing memory, as well as the importance of place and imagery in this process. As psychology moves away from the “information processing” framework of the first cognitive revolution and begins to instead focus on situated “acts of meaning” (Bruner 1990), time is ripe for new conceptualizations that capture these dynamics of mind. The next chapter explores the possibilities offered by the metaphor of construction, which implies an ongoing process of building memories with cultural tools, such as language, narrative, images, and mnemonic strategies. The psychologists Frederic Bartlett and Lev Vygotsky powerfully explored this idea in the early twentieth century. As we will see in the next section, both thinkers offer radical possibilities for rethinking memory as an agentic process taking place both in and outside the head and offer innovative methods to study it as such. Their legacies set the groundwork for the introduction of other concepts and methods that we will introduce in the different chapters of this book.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

B. Wagoner et al.Remembering as a Cultural Process SpringerBriefs in Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32641-8_2

2. Theories of Constructive Remembering

Brady Wagoner[1] , Ignacio Brescó[2] and Sarah H. Awad[2]

(1) Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

(2) Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

Keywords

ConstructionVygotskyBartlettSocial-culturalMethodology

The idea that memory is constructive is now widely accepted in psychology as well as across the different disciplines within memory studies. However, what precisely this means is not always clear. More often than not, construction in psychology has been used as a way of trying to save the storage metaphor rather than replace it (Brockmeier 2015, 2017). In cognitive psychology it has typically come to mean that memory is distorted, inaccurate, and prone to error (see Wagoner 2017a, b). This operationalization of construction comes with a number of problems: First, both accurate and inaccurate memories are constructed by the same mechanisms. So we need to show under what conditions memory tends toward one rather than the other. Second, most now agree that what is generally important for remembering is not whether it creates accurate representations of the past but that it is useful for the person in the present adaptation to the environment. An obsession with accuracy often obscures this issue (Brown and Reavey 2015). Third, if we do not take literal recall to be the ultimate standard by which to assess memories, then assigning accuracy requires a much more nuanced approach. There are different levels of accuracy, such as remembering the gist of a conversation versus word-for-word recall. The standards of accuracy also will change according to the social context one is in: much stricter standards are required in formal schooling and courts of law versus causal conversation. Finally, looking across history and societies, it is clear that the kind of memory that is valued has varied widely, including standards of accuracy (Danziger 2008). In Chap. 1 we saw how the focus on literal accuracy only become an important standard with industrialization—from ancient times through the Renaissance, thinkers saw little use for the recall of discrete pieces of information. To develop a more nuanced approach to constructive memory, we review the theories of two foundational thinkers—Vygotsky and Bartlett—and the lines of research that have arisen from them. They share an understanding of individual memory as having social origins and thereby being embedded within evolving cultural traditions. However, each also brings something unique to the question of what makes memory constructive.

Vygotsky’s Theory of Culturally Mediated Memory

The impressive advances in memory ability and the diversification of kinds of memory in human history as well as ontogeny cannot easily be accounted for through a purely “natural” process of evolution or biological maturation. Donald (2018) has pointed out how the cultural environment and the forms of memory it affords have fundamentally shaped the human mind through evolution, human history, and ontogenetic development. But the shaping of memory by cultural technologies can be simply demonstrated by the use of mnemonics (such as the art of memory, see Chap. 1), which was also a key analogy for Vygotsky. In a famous paper, Miller (1956) described how we can remember seven plus or minus two pieces of information naturally at a given time. But with the simple technique of “chunking” information into meaningful units, the number can be vastly increased. The organization of books into chapters, sections, and paragraphs itself is an external memory technology that pre-chunks material into manageable units for digestion into internal memory (Carruthers 1990; Danziger 2008; chapter 1). The power of these cultural tools to enhance and shape our memory in a given direction is clear. Of course, there is a learning process of familiarizing oneself with them before they can be effectively used. We need to both explore how the diverse technologies of memory found in societies around the world are used to mediate memory and the process by which they are incorporated into members of a given society. Human beings did not evolve for cultural tools such as writing but are nonetheless gradually transformed through them in ontogenesis. In short, to be human means to develop through culture.

Vygotsky’s theory of mediation begins with the idea that higher psychological processes first appear in social interaction and only later reappear inside the child. He famously described how the pointing gesture emerged out of the child’s attempt to reach on object. When the adult responds by retrieving the desired object, the child begins to direct the gesture to adult rather than the object. At this point it has become a meaningful sign. To complete the Vygotskyian developmental story, the child might then use the gesture to control their own attention. Thus, the child’s mind grows out of participation in community’s practices wherein he or she encounters and internalizes meanings found there, personalizing them in the process (Valsiner 2007). In relation to memory, Vygotsky and Luria (1930) gave the example of tying knots on a rope used as an account practice in preliterate societies. The technique requires giving the knot meaning, transforming it from a neutral object into a sign. The sign has reverse action, in that it acts back on its creator triggering memory for the object when seen. In this way humans come to control themselves from the outside through mediation of meaningful signs. These include the notes we write to ourselves in our planner or the objects we bring back from a vacation to remember the trip. Figure 2.1 outlines the basic features of sign mediation in Vygotsky’s theory. The basic unit of analysis is that of a triangle that includes the subject/person, an object (in this case, a memory), and a sign (e.g., a knot on a rope). The subject’s relationship to the object comes to be mediated by the sign. In some versions of the triangle, theorists turn it into a prism that also includes the “others” (Zittoun et al. 2007), but we will leave this issue for now and return to it in the chapters that follow. However, the triangle needs to be situated within the subject’s ongoing activity: sign mediation arises when there is a problem or rupture, requiring the subject to reorganize the situation through signs to overcome the barrier. In one study by Vygotsky’s co-worker Levina (1968), children were asked to get some cookies from a high shelf, which they could not reach from the ground. The experimenters observed how when children could not reach the cookies, they began to talk to themselves in language (signs), reconstructing the situation and bringing different elements together in order to find a solution: placing a chair below the shelf to stand on.

Fig. 2.1

Sign mediation triangle and its situated emergence

The methods developed by Vygotsky were designed to trigger and display the process of sign mediation and explore transformation of psychological operations through children’s development. In a famous experiment conducted by Leontiev under Vygotsky’s guidance, they compared child of different ages on recall of a list of words, with or without an external memory aid. They used a standard procedure in the first condition, but in the second and third conditions, they provided children with picture cards to act as external mediators or signs. The first condition was to approximate “the natural” line of development (i.e., biological maturation) and the second the “cultural” line. Vygotsky (1987) saw the two lines as dialectically related through human development in that they mutually transform one another. In the second condition, the cards were already conventionally paired with words by the experimenter, while in the third the child is allowed to make their own combinations between words and picture cards. For the picture cards to work, children had to transform them into meaningful signs to be later used to trigger memory. The results of the study when graphed somewhat resemble a parallelogram (see Fig. 2.2): there is little difference between with and without cards conditions for children of 4–5, who do not yet understand their instrumental value. But from 5 to 12 years of age, the performance of children with picture cards massively improves over those without. Later the two groups begin to converge again. Vygotsky explained this later trend as children’s increasing ability to use internal images as mediators, thus making the external picture cards redundant. Although this brilliantly fits Vygotsky’s theory of development, van der Veer and Valsiner (1991) point out that it could just as easily be the result of a ceiling effect. Such ambiguities require exploring the specific process by which the child solved the task. A more fine-grained analysis of children’s action lead Vygotsky to nuisance his theory of mediation and more definitely separate it from behaviorist models.

Fig. 2.2

Relationship between unmediated memory (B) and mediated memory (C), where pictures are pre-paired with words, through child development. (Adapted from van der Veer and Valsiner 1991)

It is worth noting that the experimental setup is designed not to identify some causal relationship but to trigger a process of mediation which unfolds as a result of the child’s own agency in the situation. The experimenter may guide the child toward a particular means (here the picture card or some aspect of it) but cannot determine how the child will use them, if they do at all. Unlike the maximum control of contemporary experiments that create easily quantifiable data for statistical comparison, Vygotsky’s method profits from the participant’s construction of novelty, the active creation of new mean(ing)s to solve a problem. One might expect children to make links between picture card and target word through strong associations between them, for example, using the picture of a “horse” to remember “sled.” But children often also made nonobvious links between picture and word. For example, one child used a picture of a crab at the beach to remember “theater,” explaining “The crab is looking at the stones on the bottom, it is beautiful, it is a theatre” (Vygotsky 1987, p. 181). Structures, such as these, were created for the first time by the child and could not be explained within the framework of associative psychology: They were more narrative than associative bond. A more complex explanation would have to be sought that captured the nuances of children’s reasoning. Vygotsky (1987) identified three components of the process by which children successfully or unsuccessfully arrived at the target word. These components gradually become integrated in children’s development, but they can be inferred from young children’s errors:

1. 1.

The instrumental component resembles Vygotsky’s original theory of mediation, whereby the child uses a sign in the act of remembering. The child does use the picture card to help them remember, but the process is not yet integrated with the operations of imagining, thinking, abstracting, etc. With only this component, children sometimes create absurd structures, such as “I remember this like a fish at a funeral” (p. 183, my emphasis). Experimenters can facilitate the child’s creation of new structures by simply drawing their attention away from the target word to related words or a part of the object itself and thus providing the scaffolding required for the child to successfully complete the task by opening up meaningful elaboration of the stimulus.

2. 2.

The imaginative component is the child’s (unaided) ability to create their own novel structure, as we saw with the child’s narrative connecting crab to theater. This is a simple form of analogical or metaphorical thinking, described in detail in Chap. 1. This component may be present while the first is not, in which case the child is unable to use the structure for remembering: the child does not realize that one item can be used to bring to mind the other.

3. 3.

The attention component is the child’s ability to select and direct the mass of emerging images toward the target word, which is placed at the center of the child’s attention, as if marked by an X. One child, for example, selected a picture of a lion to remember the verb to shoot, saying they shot the lion. However, during recall, the child remembered the word “gun” instead of “to shoot” (p. 182). Children without this component could often reproduce the entire structure without arriving at the target word.

Recent research on the development of memory has focused on how adults scaffold children’s early remembering by providing a narrative structure (similar to the imaginative component in Vygotsky’s scheme) that the child can use to construct their experiences (Nelson 2017; Nelson and Fivush 2005). At first children contribute only small details to the conversation, while adults ask questions and elaborate on children’s answers. However, in time, children internalize adult’s questions and their sequence in dialogue, such that children can use them (as tools) to stimulate their own memory without adult guidance. The use of internalized others to remember becomes so automatic that we “forget” their central place in the process of remembering, believing that we are the sole source of our memories (Halbwachs 1992). In fact, research shows exactly the opposite: as Vygotsky would have put it, voluntary memory develops from outer to inner. Children come into contact and internalize more complex narrative structures that are deeply embedded in the cultural traditions of their group, such as different genres or plot sequences. In the education system, they will learn to describe different events in their nation’s history through master “narrative templates ,” such as American’s “quest for freedom” or Russian’s “triumph over foreign aggression” (Wertsch 2002). In this way, the tools of remembering are internalized on the basis of and strongly connected to one’s social identity. These become so deep-seated that we do not realize how committed we are to particular accounts of the past until we begin to argue for them. This point will be illustrated and elaborated in detail in Chap. 4. The power of conventional narratives in shaping remembering brings us to the second major pillar of our research program, Frederic Bartlett’s theory of reconstructive remembering and its basis in his social psychological theory of cultural diffusion.

Bartlett’s Social-Cultural Theory of Reconstructive Remembering

When Ebbinghaus (1885/1913) inaugurated the experimental study of memory, he conceptualized it as a faculty in the individual’s mind (based on the assumptions of the storage metaphor, Chap. 1) and employed a method that highlighted how best to maximize the retention of meaningless information. At the beginning of his book Remembering, Bartlett (1932) criticized this approach and set out to replace it with one focused on a socially situated activity or practice (for a detailed explanation of Bartlett’s work, see Wagoner 2017a). In contrast to Ebbinghaus , his experiments highlighted how people interpret and reconstruct complex stories and images on the basis of their social conventions, personal interests, emotions, and more generally the meaning they gave to it. As with Vygotsky, Bartlett’s approach implies moving away from the passive role traditionally attributed to the subject to what he called an effort after meaning

, whereby the person actively relates to material against the background of previous experience. These studies were inspired by diffusionist anthropology, which analyzed how cultural items change as they move within and between social groups. Of particular interest was the process of conventionalization

, which describes how foreign cultural elements are progressively transformed in the direction of existing social conventions when they enter a new group. Bartlett’s experiments were aimed at exploring the psychological mechanisms behind this wider cultural process. Middleton and Brown (2005) explain, “What Bartlett tries to capture is the essential integration of individual mentality and culture, of the interdependency of cognition, affect and cultural symbols. It is within this model of psychological functioning that Bartlett develops his account of remembering” (p. 17). We will here first review the methods and results of these experiments and second contextualize them within Bartlett’s broader theory of cultural dynamics and concept of schema to highlight how he conceptualized “constructiveness.”

Bartlett (1932) used four methods in his “experiments on remembering .” For our purposes it will be sufficient to describe the two he is most famous for: the methods of repeated and serial reproduction. Subjects were shown a story or image, usually from a foreign culture to simulate the process of conventionalization. They were then to reproduce the story after a delay of usually 15–20 minutes. With the method of repeated reproduction , the same subject returned to do further reproductions at increasing time intervals, sometimes after several years. The method of serial reproduction by contrast had a second subject view the first subject’s reproduction and reproduce it for a third subject to view and reproduce and so on. This is similar to the party game “telephone” or “Chinese whispers.” Both methods thus produced a series of reproductions that Bartlett analyzed according to the principles of single case analysis (Salvatore and Valsiner 2010; Wagoner 2017a, chapter 2), exploring qualitative changes that revealed something about the process of remembering over its static products. For example, Bartlett noted how the Native American folktale The War of the Ghosts

(see Fig. 2.3) was transformed by Cambridge participants toward a conventional English story with elements characteristic of their culture (e.g., “hunting seals” becomes “fishing,” strange proper names disappear, supernatural elements are rationalized, etc.). This analysis is a quite different analysis from most memory studies that look exclusively at the consistency between an initial input and a reproduced output and where transformations are quickly coded as errors. In contrast to this, a constructive vision involves understanding such transformations as illustrating the adaptability and forward-oriented character of memory. Quantification of errors is replaced in this approach by a qualitative analysis aimed at examining how remembering is transformed over time according to the forms and systems of meaning of a given culture. Bartlett described this through conventionalization and a number of other more specific processes of change, such as rationalization, simplification, and blending.

Fig. 2.3

The principle story Bartlett (1932) used in his experiments

Rationalization involves giving the material in question a setting and explanation within one’s own frame of reference. As a result, the material is transformed, either by the omission or modification of some of its contents or by adding new elements incorporated by the subject. In Bartlett’s words, “the general function of rationalization is in all cases the same. It is to render material acceptable, understandable, comfortable, straightforward; to rob it of all puzzling elements” (p. 89). This can occur at the level of specific elements of the story (e.g., “hunting seals” to “fishing”) and for connecting together the different parts of the story into a coherent whole. Bartlett made the analogy to watching a silent film in which the tags have been removed and supplying the tags oneself without being aware of doing so. It also points to the process of fitting the story to already existing narrative genres (see Chap. 5). Another important finding was that subjects tended to reconstruct the material around dominant details, omitting elements that did not fit the theme and bending others to it. His analysis also identified such transformation of the material as the assimilation of its contents “to existing cultural forms within the receiving group” (p. 268), “the simplification or the dropping out of elements peculiar to the group from which the material proceeds” (p. 369), and the retention of other elements for which there is an appropriate framework in the receiving group. All in all, Bartlett highlighted the importance of both the individuals’ active role and their sociocultural context. This is so because, as Misztal (2003) points out, “despite the fact memory is socially organized and mediated, individual memory is never totally conventionalized and standardized” (p. 11). Progressive transformations involve increasing both conventionalization and personalization of the material. Following Castorina (2006), interpretation and remembering can be understood as two acts performed in the intersection of an active subject (i.e., the carrier of a set of knowledge, values, and resources that are historically constructed) and a given cultural product (endowed with certain characteristics as a result of a historical process of elaboration).

It was not actually until a decade after his experiments had been conducted that Bartlett began to think of them as being about remembering. The change was in response to a wider cultural shift in thinking about memory that included how to treat traumatized soldiers and commemorative practices arising in the aftermath of First World War. Before re-conceptualizing the experiments, Bartlett (1923) wrote a book that systematically outlines a diffusionist theory of culture based on social psychological principles.[1] For this he made use of a wide range of ethnographic data rather than his experimental studies. It was in this work that we first encounter his key concept of construction

, which he used to describe how cultural patterns coming from diverse sources could be woven together in accordance with the group’s orientation to the future. The greatest stimulus to cultural construction was when two groups with different social organization came into symmetrical contact with one another. Under these conditions, “mixing” and “blending” of culture are widespread, often leading to the development of cultural forms not previously seen in either group before their meeting. Bartlett (1923, p. 281ff) gave the example of the emergence of a new religious cult within a Native American community . The process was triggered by a man who brought the drug peyote to his community after having encountered it on his travels to Oklahoma. Although development of a new cult was stimulated by the introduction of a new cultural object, it grew on the foundations of the group’s old practices, such as the use of a sacred mound that was used in a buffalo dance ritual of the earlier religion. Later, Christian elements like the Bible were further incorporated into the cult through other group contacts. Bartlett emphasized that the growth of the cult was not planned by any single individual but rather involved bringing together a number of scattered influences, what he called “social constructiveness ” (Bartlett 1923, 1928a, 1932).

In his early book, Bartlett (1923) also put “construction” of the new in dialectical relation with “conservation” of the past. The two were conceptualized together as the dynamic mechanisms of social stability and change. He saw “traditional” cultures to be primarily conservative, but this did not mean that they held rigidly to their traditions: “it is because the group is selectively conservative that it is also plastic” (Bartlett 1923, pp. 151–152). Traditional group’s cultural patterns are flexibly carried forward and adapted to new circumstances. This description directly parallels Bartlett’s (1932) conceptualization of schema as an organized mass of past reactions adapted to the particular demands of the individual’s present environment (Wagoner 2013, 2017b). To take his most famous example, a stroke in a game of tennis is channeled through a history of previous stokes but is also flexibly adjusted to the specific context in which the new stroke must be made. Rather than describing this as a “conservative” tendency , as he did with social groups, Bartlett (1932) begins to include it in Remembering as part of a general theory of what makes remembering “constructive.” This was done to further emphasize that memory should not be thought of in the terms of the storage metaphor, that is, as a static register of the past in the form of isolated traces left on the mind/brain, but rather as an adaptive living process that responds to environmental conditions. Remembering is an activity that takes place at the intersection between a person and social-material environment, not something that simply happens “in the head.”

His theory of remembering also retains aspects of the radical form of “construction” described in his earlier book in what he called “turning around upon [one’s] own schemata and constructing them afresh” (p. 206). This referred to the human ability to reflect one’s remembering, bring it under one’s control and put it in relation to material from other contexts. It is in this process that diverse experiences are put in relation to one another creating new possibilities for action. Bartlett (1932) describes how “a man can take out of its setting something that happened a year ago, reinstate it with much if not all of its individuality unimpaired, combine it with something that happened yesterday, and use them both to help him to solve a problem with which he is confronted to-day” (p. 219). In characteristically British fashion, Bartlett (1935, p. 224) gives the example of an enthusiastic journalist’s account of a cricket match: “To describe the batting of one man he finds it necessary to refer to a sonata of Beethoven; the bowling of another reminds him of a piece of beautifully wrought rhythmic prose written by Cardinal Newman.” However, he did not explain how the “turning around” takes place, which Bartlett (1932) himself admitted, “I wish I knew how it was done” (p. 206). Using Vygotsky’s theory of sign mediation, we can say that it involves a social mechanism: we use the cultural tools borrowed from society to step outside of our own flow of activity, thereby regulating our own remembering and in turn shaping it in particular directions. This is similar to Mead’s (1934) theory of self-reflection , whereby we become other to ourselves in experience by taking the perspective of others toward ourselves. The movement from actor to observer is a dynamic one, as famously theorized by James (1890) in his description of the “I” and the “me” in the stream of consciousness. What Vygotsky and Mead essentially do beyond James is to situate this dynamic within a social process (Valsiner and van der Veer 2000). This also brings Bartlett’s theory in line with approaches that highlight dialogical processes in remembering (see Chaps. 6 and 7), where different voices are brought forth to respond to one another in recall. In the next chapter, we will offer an empirical illustration of how to begin to bring together Bartlett’s and Vygotsky’s theories and methods to overcome gaps identified in each. In so doing, it will highlight some of the particular cultural tools and strategies people use in constructing memories in conversation with one another.

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Footnotes

1

This tradition of research has recently been revived by Kashima (2000, 2008). However, this work puts its emphasis mainly on assimilation rather than forward-oriented constructive tendencies that were so important to Bartlett (see esp. Wagoner 2017a).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

B. Wagoner et al.Remembering as a Cultural Process SpringerBriefs in Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32641-8_3

3. Microgenesis of Remembering: A Conversational Study

Brady Wagoner[1] , Ignacio Brescó[2] and Sarah H. Awad[2]

(1) Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

(2) Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

Keywords

BartlettConversationRepeated reproductionMicrogenesisSuggestion

Although Bartlett’s methodology is much more process oriented than most, it still did not give him access to constructive remembering in the moment that it was occurring. He had to infer this from the written reproductions and the comments his subjects made on the process. We are left guessing by what specific pathways his subjects changed, for example, “hunting seals” into “fishing,” as well as the process by which accurate recall was achieved. His method captures a series of outcomes of each episode of remembering and leaves the researcher to make inferences about the specific processes involved. Bartlett supplemented this data of reproductions by probing participants’ experience of doing the memory task with questions both during and after (Edwards and Middleton 1987). But this form of self-observation allows for only a limited view into the process as it is occurring. In fairness to Bartlett, he was constrained by the technology of his time (viz. paper and pen) to record processes of remembering. Today, researchers can record and scrutinize audio and video data to explore the processes of remembering as they occur, moment-to-moment. However, the researcher still needs to find a way of externalizing and objectifying these processes, which are usually intra-psychological, as audio and video devices do not capture private thoughts.

This problematic led Wagoner and Gillespie (2014) to extend Bartlett’s method into a conversation task
, where two participants that have read the same story are given the task of recalling it together. In so doing, the participants have to verbalize their thoughts to each other, thus making visible at least some spontaneous processes of remembering. This methodological strategy converges with the think aloud protocol in which speech can be seen as a window into psychological processes (see Ericsson and Simon 1993; Valsiner 2003; Gillespie and Zittoun 2010). However, because Ericsson and Simon (1993) asked participants to verbalize their thoughts when they were ostensibly alone, they were creating an artificial scenario. Participants in the present study were never asked to verbalize their thoughts as such but did so simply by virtue of doing the task with another. After having had the participants read War of the Ghosts
(see Fig. 2.3) twice at regular speed and waiting 15 minutes, we gave the following instructions: “As a pair discuss and write down the story you read earlier as accurately as possible. If you decide to change what you have already written, put a single line through the portion you want to delete and rewrite your correction next to the deleted portion.” Participants returned to the laboratory 1 week later to produce a second reproduction as a dyad. The conversation task tapped into the familiar everyday activity of remembering together with others. As Middleton and Edwards (1990a) found in an earlier study, participants in this form of experiment approached the task in a much freer and jovial way than in an individual paper-and-pencil task, which tends to be approached as if it were a school exam. Even though we gave explicit instructions to “write down the story you read as accurately as possible,” the participants could still be found to deviate from the task and make jokes and associations to the story.

This methodology, tapping into spontaneous and everyday remembering, thus allows us to unpack and illustrate the process by which transformations and conventionalizations identified by Bartlett come about. We are not the first to explore conversational remembering in a Bartlettian context, but others have not analyzed the conversations as providing a window into the microgenesis of memories (Werner 1956), that is, their emergence within a social and psychological process . For example, Middleton and Edwards (1990a) highlight how the discursive norms of different social settings shape remembering (contrasting an experiment with everyday conversation), while Weldon and Bellinger (1997) showed that people remembering collaboratively recall less than the pooled recall of individuals. Neither study looked at the qualitative transformations happening through time in the conversational data nor compared it to qualitative analysis found in Bartlett’s (1932) own research. In what follows we will provide several examples that explore the processes behind key transformations earlier identified by Bartlett (1932), such as “hunting seals” to “fishing,” the change and disappearance of foreign proper names, and rationalizing links between episodes of the narrative and its supernatural elements. From our data we can see that transformations are not entirely “unwitting,” as Bartlett implied, but can be corrected through a process of self-suggestion and other-suggestion. In short, we will look at the processes by which memories emerge, highlighting the processes of mediation involved.

Illustrations of Remembering as an Emergent Process

Overcoming the Conventionalization of “Hunting Seals”: Accuracy in Constructive Remembering

As described in Chap. 2, “constructive ” is typically operationalized in contemporary cognitive psychology by looking for “errors” and “distortion” in memory . In contrast to this, we argued that construction should be understood in a broader sense as characterizing all processes of remembering, both accurate and inaccurate. The following is a short example of construction leading to accuracy. The participants, Bill and Henry, do not simply accept the first memory to become public but reflect and modify it in the process of remembering. Excerpt 3.1 shows how initial conventionalization of the phrase “hunting seals” is overcome and the correct one is remembered :

Excerpt 3.1

The original text:

One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals

Written reproduction:

Two guys hunting seals from Enudan.

Participants’ dialogue:

3

Henry:

Ok, so, there were two guys hunting

4

Bill:

No, no, no. There were two guys looking for seals

5

Henry:

They were hunting seals

6

Bill

Hunting seals. Two guys hunting seals [writing]. Ok, so there are two guys hun-

Bill and Henry’s first written reproduction is correct, but analyzing Excerpt 3.1 reveals that they initially engaged in conventionalization and then corrected themselves. Thus here we can zoom in on the process of correcting conventionalization. Henry recalls “hunting” and Bill recalls “looking for seals”—neither is correct, though both are in the right general semantic field. They arrive at the correct phrase “hunting seals” (lines 5–6) together, through disagreement and mutual suggestion. This seems to illustrate Merleau-Ponty’s (1945, p. 413) point: “the objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed.” Suggestions do not lead to passive adoption . Rather, the alterity of the other’s suggestion becomes a dialogical counterpoint, calling forth a new response. One participant’s response stimulates an opposite but related idea in the other, which transcends and integrates the former (see Marková 1987). Similar to the way Bartlett described “turning around upon schema” (see Chap. 2), construction here involves reflection and the weaving together of different perspectives in the process of remembering. It adds to his account that this reflection or mediation can be on one’s own remembering or another ’s.

The Microgenesis of Memory for Foreign Place Names

Another frequently noted transformation to War of the Ghosts was with regard to the unfamiliar place names, “Egulac” and “Kalama.” Bartlett (1932, p. 82) found that “Egulac” was frequently changed to words like “Emlac,” “Eggulick,” “Edulac,” and “Egulick” before disappearing entirely, which happened with all but 1 of his 20 participants. This finding was also frequently present in our data. In Bill and Henry’s written reproduction (above), we see that they have transformed it into “Enudan,” though this happens immediately with no further elaboration. With other participants, however, we find a microgenetic process of elaboration taking place in the conversation. This occurs clearly in Ingrid and Michael’s first conversational reproduction :

Excerpt 3.2

The original text:

One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals

Participants written reproduction:

Two men went down the river from Ejunah to hunt seals.

Participants’ dialogue:

1

Michael:

Okay, begin. I don’t remember the name of the first town.

2

Ingrid:

Starts with an E

3

Michael:

E, E

4

Ingrid:

J

5

Michael

E Ebowler or something [laugh]

6

Ingrid:

Ajew, e junar

7

Michael:

Yeah E G U N A H, or something

8

Ingrid:

E G U N A H ?

9

Michael:

Yeah

10

Ingrid:

What was the first sentence then?

11

Michael:

Two men went down the river from [pause] Ejunah to hunt seals.

In this excerpt we see the proper name gradually emerging between the participants. As Brown and McNeil (1966) described in relation to the “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon, the process of activating the latent word tends to happen from the first to the last to the middle part of the word. Ingrid immediately remembers the first letter/sound [E] (line 2). Michael repeats the sound twice in an attempt to stimulate further recall (line 3), a strategy of remembering that was widespread within our participants’ conversations . In this case it triggers Ingrid to recall the next sound [j] which is close to the original [g] sound (line 4). Michael then makes the first attempt to articulate the whole word and does so in a way that comes close to the familiar word Ebola, as in the Ebola virus. He was likely aware of this connection because he does a small laugh after saying it, which could be evidence of “turning around” on his own suggestion. Ingrid makes two more attempts to articulate the full word (line 6), the last of which is recognized by Michael as correct, leading him to spell out the word (line 7). Although they write “ejunah” in their written reproduction, their oral articulation of the proper name actually has a slight [k] sound in it (lines 6 and 9), which is a closer approximation to the original. However, accuracy is not central to the point here. The key issue in the process of emergence is that we can track how something qualitatively new arises in the process of reflection and interaction. This is a process of elaboration happening between the participants, where different versions are produced, some incomplete, on the way to a final form .

Atmospheric Conditions: From Vague Feelings to Articulated Memories

Ingrid and Michael’s conversation proceed to touch on another major transformation discussed by Bartlett: a feeling for the vague “atmosphere” of the weather during recall. In Bartlett’s (1932, p. 80) experiment, “only eight ever reproduced [foggy and calm], and five of these speedily dropped it from their later versions.” However, he notes his participants did tend to evoke “a ‘weather scheme’ which is consonant with a given mood, but no detailed weather conditions” (p. 80). As in the present experiment, descriptions such as “dark,” “cold,” “misty,” and “hazy” were common. Weather is a particularly interesting case for memory in that it is not thing-like but surrounds and engulfs us (Valsiner 2017). In other words, it creates atmosphere in which we perceive and relate to some more definite material: Stories tend to begin by setting the scene before any specific actions take place. Let us consider how Ingrid and Michael arrive at “foggy and hazy .”

Excerpt 3.3

The original text:

While they were there it became foggy and calm.

Participants written reproduction:

Soon it became foggy and hazy.

Participants’ dialogue:

14

Michael

I remember the word hazy and foggy or foggy and dark, it became foggy and dark.

15

Ingrid:

I forgot all about that

16

Michael:

Yeah.

17

Ingrid:

Hazy rings a bell, erm –

18

Michael

Definitely foggy –

19

Ingrid:

Definitely foggy and hazy.

20

Michael:

Foggy and hazy.

21

Ingrid:

Foggy and hazy?

22

Michael:

Yeah

The excerpt can be seen in microgenetic terms : from a vague atmosphere of feeling emerge definite articulations, which in turn are integrated with one another (Werner 1956, 1957). Both Michael and Ingrid have a general impression of the weather in the story, as Bartlett had found, though only Michael remembered that there was a line in the story about it. Out of it, Michael articulates two possibilities “hazy and foggy or foggy and dark” (line 14). Both dark and hazy are additions that nonetheless fit the atmosphere of the story—the story begins “One night…” which tends not be remembered as a specific phrase, but as a background condition against which other phrases are constructed. Michael repeats “foggy and dark” with the extension “it became”; however, it is “hazy” that Ingrid recognizes from the three words articulated by Michael (line 17). Michael asserts that “foggy” was definitely in the phrase (line 18), followed by Ingrid’s assertion that it was both “foggy and hazy” (line 19).

It is interesting that in their second reproduction, Ingrid first remembers “dark and foggy and hazy” as Michael had done in the first reproduction. Both participants then agree that it did become dark in the original story but that they had not remembered this in their first reproduction. In this we see how the previous co-construction sets the stage for the second reproduction. Even though they accurately remember what they wrote down, they attribute Michael’s suggestion of “dark” in the first reproduction to the original story. The reading of the story and the first reproduction of it become blurred, and the latter exerts a greater influence on the whole—in Bartlett’s language, they are part of the same developing schema. This seems to support the findings of memory suggestibility researchers (e.g., Loftus 1975) that suggestions by others during the act of remembering feed-forward into future remembering of the event. We will, however, take a more radical perspective, in which the suggestion by one participant becomes the stimulus for a second suggestion which builds upon the first, incrementally guiding the dyad toward a recollection that the dyad takes as satisfactory. Thus the emergent recollection (regardless of whether it is accurate or distorted) cannot be attributed to the cognitive process of either participant, but, instead, must be conceptualized as emerging through the social process of their interaction .

Constructing Narrative Coherence for a Disjunctive Story

Bartlett (1932) noted that his participants tended to rationalize the story by familiarizing unfamiliar contents as well as creating rational links between the different episodes of the story to render it more comprehensible. The latter points to the mediation of culturally familiar narrative structures. In our data set, it was common to find the memory emerge for definite contents of the story without them being integrated into a narrative sequence. This required an additional process of working them into a coherent whole. For example, the participants Bill and Henry remember close equivalence to the phrases in the original “He told it all, and then he became quiet” and “something black came out of his mouth,” but not what happens between them. They have a vague sense of there being a transition from night to day, but precisely what that something is requires a constructive effort to fill in, which involves coming up with a number of possibilities and selecting between them:

Excerpt 3.4

The original text:

He told it all, and then he became quiet. When the sun rose he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth.

Written reproduction:

People look at him strangely. He became quiet after telling his story. He woke up. Something black came out of his mouth.

Participants’ dialogue:

93

Bill:

He told his story and then became quiet. Right? And then the sun sets [pause] or something

94

95

Henry:

Well, he goes to sleep

96

Bill:

It didn’t say anything about sleep. In the morning he stood up and died

97

98

Henry:

Woke up and died

99

Bill:

All right, so he became quiet after telling the story. Ahh, a photographic memory would be awesome right now. Ok now we’re to the point where he woke up. Did they say he woke up?

100

101

102

Henry:

I don’t think he stood up

103

Bill:

I thought he

104

Henry:

I don’t think he stood up. I think he did wake up

105

Bill:

Ok, so he woke up [writes]. Something black

106

Henry:

Came out of his mouth

From their vague memory for the original phrase “when the sun rose he fell down,” Bill and Henry construct four possible contents: “the sun sets,” “he goes to sleep,” “stood up,” and “woke up.” On the one hand, these suggestions imply a transition between night and day, with temporal marks (i.e., “the sun sets”) and with conventional activities associated with those periods (i.e., “he goes to sleep” and “[he] woke up”). On the other hand, the suggestions express a feeling for vertical movement, both of the sun and of the main character. The latter is given meaning through an “orientation metaphor” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), in which unconsciousness is down and consciousness is up—e.g., “we fall asleep” and “wake up.” Thus, the schematic features of the original story remain and are accurate at a general level, even though the precise contents change to something novel at the level of their particular articulations. The two participants never dispute the fact of there being a transition from night to day and vertical movement; rather these set the stage for their mutual discussion. In their discussion we also find the mechanisms underlying rationalization and conventionalization. Bill and Henry fail to recollect the strange link between the sun rising and the Indian falling down. Thus they replace it with something more familiar in the process of making suggestions and questions based on an embodied up/down feeling and the night-day transition. They then evaluate these suggestions in terms of what feels both familiar and coherent. But this evaluative step is grounded in their own cultural conventions and, as such, is predisposed to turning the unfamiliar into the familiar. In this case, conventionalization occurs because familiar meanings are used both to generate suggestions and to evaluate those suggestions .

Mediation of Narrative Templates from Hollywood Films

One of the most unexpected findings of the experiments was the persistent suggestion that the main character (i.e., “the Indian” or “young man”) of the story was himself a ghost. While Bartlett (1916, 1920, 1928b, 1932) never reported it, we found it in the conversations of five out of the ten dyads. However, it typically only appeared in the conversations without being incorporated into the written reproduction. This was because participants saw it as implied rather than explicitly stated in the original story and often their conversation partner did not validate the idea. The idea tended to come when discussing the puzzling issues of the Indian being shot but not feeling sick, his thought that they are ghosts, “something black” coming out of his mouth, and the last line “he was dead.” In 2006, when this study was conducted, a common narrative template (Wertsch 2002) was being used by Hollywood films about ghosts. These films, such as the Sixth Sense and The Others , involve a protagonist who comes into contact with ghosts. There is then a surprise ending in which we realize that the protagonist him-or herself was a ghost all along as well. This ending explains earlier events of the film and gives the story narrative closure. When this narrative template is applied to War of the Ghosts
, some of the puzzling aspects just mentioned become intelligible, though it does not necessarily change the manifest content. Thus, over 80 years after Bartlett conducted his experiment, we find participants using a new set of narrative frames to familiarize it. Although the outcome is different, due to different cultural narratives in circulation, the process is the same. Again, the finding affirms the need to consider the wider social-cultural world to which participants belong to understand their processes of remembering. As Halbwachs (1992) noted long ago , the psychological laboratory is not neutral to the social frameworks that people remember with in their everyday lives. Participants here seem to be unwittingly mediating their memory with cultural tools taken from a vastly different context. What is remembered is interaction between the contents of the original story and the narrative templates circulating in the wider cultural milieu. This issue of how narrative templates shape and conventionalize memory will be the focus of the next study , described in Chap. 4.

Discussion: Mediating Memory with Suggestion

The emergence of memories in conversation offers a radical reconceptualization of remembering as an ongoing constructive process. What the data indicate is not that people report memories as such, but rather that they work to generate suggestions, based on feelings, images, expectations, and narrative templates, which they simply “put out there” as a way of stimulating remembering. This is an excellent example of mediation in action. Rather than being finalized “outputs,” they are better conceptualized as stimuli which, through the response of either self or other, it is hoped will lead by degrees toward “a memory.” The participants in the study could be described as prompting, joking, and even goading each other toward a reasonable reconstruction. That is to say, what is often being called “a memory” is actually just a phase, or a cross section, of remembering as a process of mediation. People do not “output” memories. They dance around, cajoling themselves and each other toward a reconstruction that will work for their present purposes. This is what Bartlett (1932) had vaguely referred to as “turning around upon schema,” which we have argued can be understood as a process of mediation (see Chap. 2).

The reason why this conceptualization of remembering is potentially radical is because “suggestion” has long been associated with inaccuracy, contagion, and distortion (Motzkau 2009). The more or less implicit assumption in much contemporary research is that the most accurate remembering occurs when the individual is protected from social processes. Studies tend to create specific conditions for “distortion” to take place, such as having a trusted authority suggest entirely probable occurrences, and only consider specific quantitative outcomes that result from these conditions (e.g., Loftus 1975). Nowhere in these kinds of studies do we find an examination of the microgenetic process by which these outcomes are reached. Instead, analysis is done purely at the level of outcomes and aggregates. Research on the so-called contaminating effects of social suggestion chimes with the long-standing assumption that the individual is primary and social processes lead to negative outcomes, such as conformity, obedience, deindividuation, and irrational behavior (Greenwood 2009; Moscovici 2000). More recent research has shown that people are not the dupes of suggestion that psychologists originally made them out to be. People can and do resist suggestions from others if they are given reason to believe they are not reliable. This occurs even if the experimenter tells participants they were subjected to some leading questions some time later (Blank 1998). The “misinformation effect” can even be reversed by informing participants of the nature of the questions they were earlier exposed to (Oeberst and Blank 2012). These later interventions could themselves be thought of as further suggestions, which people use to neutralize, counterbalance, juggle, or synthesize earlier suggestions (as in Excerpt 3.1).

An even more radical point , espoused in the present chapter, is that even an individual alone engages in suggestion, except in this case it is self-suggestion. Individuals, in our study, were seen to make proposals and then disagree with themselves or to ask questions and then answer those same questions. The social process, specifically of prompting and suggestion, cannot be extracted from remembering. Suggestion is at the core of human remembering. As discussed in Chap. 2, Vygotsky’s developmental approach sees adults as guiding children’s remembering through suggestion before they are able to remember by themselves (Nelson and Fivush 2004); later in development children apply the same kinds of suggestions to themselves that they learned by socialization with adults. The child only becomes able to remember on her own through utilizing the technique of suggestion—thus, fitting her memories to conventions of narration found within the group. This also explains why foreign stories are conventionalized: people in the receipt community make suggestions about the story based on their own conventions in remembering it, as can be seen in the above data.

The role of suggestion is also clear in data in relation to its use by participants to turn recall into recognition. It is much easier to recognize something than to recall it (Freund, Brelsford, and Atkinson 1969; MacDougall 1904; Postman, Jenkins, and Postman 1948). The method of repeated reproduction is a recall task, but by making suggestions to themselves and each other, participants are effectively turning it into a recognition task. They make reasonable suggestions and then see whether they recognize the suggestion, thus leveraging the power of recognition for a recall task. Moreover, at some level, participants seem aware of this strategy, and as such, they are often quite skeptical about their suggestions. Thus, again we see that suggestions are not merely passively accepted but actively used, manipulated, interrogated, and even doubted in the process of remembering. We argue this ebb and flow also occurs within participants, when they respond to their own suggestions and questions. That is to say, individual recollection is social in just the same way, with suggestion and counter-suggestion mediating the ongoing reconstruction. Individual recollection often exploits internal dialogue based on earlier social interactions, a process we will see in detail in Chap. 5. But first we will consider more closely the process by which narrative frames mediate memory in the next chapter.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

B. Wagoner et al.Remembering as a Cultural Process SpringerBriefs in Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32641-8_4

4. Narrative Forms in the Recall of National History

Brady Wagoner[1] , Ignacio Brescó[2] and Sarah H. Awad[2]

(1) Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

(2) Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

Keywords

Repeated reproductionNarrative formsConventionalizationRationalization

The increasing spread of Vygotsky’s work in recent decades has resulted in a progressive awareness of the cultural tools that mediate human behavior, thus placing it in the sociocultural context in which it takes place. Along these lines, cultural psychology (Valsiner and Rosa 2007) is interested in studying the mediation of various artifacts and tools used to interpret the world and act in it. A mediation that, in the words of Cole (1996), is applied “with equal force whether one is considering language or the more usually noted forms of artefacts such as tables and knives, which constitute material culture” (p. 114). Thus, as Vygotsky (1978) points out, the basic analogy between all these cultural artifacts lies in their mediating and regulatory function, both in regard to the environment and to oneself.

Interest in the mediational role of narrative forms has gained prominence in the human sciences (Polkinghorne 1988), specifically in psychology (Bruner 1990) and particularly in the field of memory, both individual (Brockmeier and Carbaugh 2001) and collective (Wertsch 2002). As for the latter, this has resulted in a variety of studies (Barton 2008; Heller 2006; Carretero and van Alphen 2014) on the role of different master narratives or narrative templates, namely, a simplified form of making sense of the past, present, and future of a certain community around a conventional narrative theme, such as the quest for freedom or the triumph over alien forces
(Wertsch 2002). While providing a certain intelligibility by conforming to the canons and conventions of each group, the very form of such narratives (viz., its genre, plot, theme, etc.) inevitably conveys a moral content, referred to by the philosopher of history Hayden White (1986) as the content of the form

.

This has been particularly relevant to history teaching and its role in transmitting certain narratives aimed at fostering awareness of a shared past and, therefore, a sense of belonging to the same imagined community

(Anderson 1983; Carretero 2011). Along these lines, several studies have examined the consumption and reproduction of national stories by students with different feelings of belonging and political orientations (Goldberg et al. 2006). A common feature of these works lies not so much in the accuracy of the accounts given by the subjects, but in studying how they interpret and reconstruct the past in the light of their attitudes, knowledge, and especially, the narrative forms available to them. Narrative forms, in this sense, can be considered as co-authors (Wertsch 2002) of the way we make sense of the past.

In line with Chap. 3, the study contained in this chapter stems from Bartlett’s (1932) theoretical and methodological tradition (see Kashima 2000; Rosa and Brescó 2006; Saito 2000; Wagoner 2017), as well as from some of the recent sociocultural approaches to memory discussed in Chap. 2. In particular, the present study (Brescó and Rosa 2017) approaches remembering as a sociocultural process by highlighting the mediational role of narrative forms in the repeated reproduction of two different versions regarding the history of the Northern Ireland conflict by subjects with different positions on this issue. Thus, this study extends Bartlett’s method to a context of conflict in which participants have a stake in what is remembered.

Mediation by Narrative Form in the Repeated Reproduction of National Histories

Bartlett’s method of repeated reproduction is used to study the mediation of two different narrative forms of the same story about Northern Ireland (reading condition as independent variable, pro-British version vs. pro-Irish version) on the subsequent recall of its contents (dependent variable), paying particular attention to those events prioritized and those others dropped along the three recall sessions. The study also analyzes the progressive conventionalization , rationalization , and simplification of the two original stories over the three recall sessions, thus examining through specific cases how subjects have transformed the two versions.

The sample consisted of 16 psychology students—8 from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and 8 from the Basque Country University (UPV) —selected from an initial group of 57 volunteers. The selection was conducted based on the results of a questionnaire on (a) political orientation (left-right), (b) knowledge and positioning on the Irish conflict,[1] (c) position about the relationship between religion and politics, and (d) participants’ national sentiment (Basque or Spanish). Selected participants were distributed according to the reading condition in which they were allocated (pro-British version vs. pro-Irish version), their geographical origin (UAM/UPV), and their self-proclaimed national identity (Spanish/Basque). The groups thus formed were balanced in terms of participants’ degree of historical knowledge, positions about the relationship between religion and politics, as well as political orientation. Table 4.1 shows the distribution of the selected participants according to the reading groups in which they were allocated, their geographical origin, and their self-proclaimed national identity.

Table 4.1

Distribution of participants according to their reading condition and sense of national identity

Origin of participants

Sense of national identity

Reading condition

Pro-British version

Pro-Irish version

Total participants

UAM

Spanish

4

4

8

UPV

Spanish

2

2

4

Basque

2

2

4

The memory material consisted of two texts based on the same history of the Northern Ireland conflict written from a pro-British and pro-Irish perspective (see both versions set side by side in Appendix I). Both versions—written in Spanish and adapted from Edwards and Ranelagh (1993)—include the same historical events (from Roman times to the present), which have been rhetorically constructed through two different narrative forms. The pro-Irish version was entitled History of the struggle for Irish independence from the British Empire. Using an epic tone, the text legitimizes the struggle for Irish independence against British rule and the imposition of Protestantism on the island. The pro-British version , entitled History of the formation of the British State and the Irish issue, has an institutional tone in defense of the political unification of both islands while delegitimizing Irish separatist organizations and claims. The two 1500-word texts, preceded by the title and a brief introduction, consist of 47 meaning units corresponding to the events in both stories (see Table 4.2). The choice of the Irish conflict as memory material, and the inclusion of participants from Madrid and the Basque Country, reflects the intention of choosing a material whose content were little known to the participants, while the form of thematizing and narrating the conflict could be familiar to them. Therefore, the analogy between the Basque and the Northern Ireland conflict—present in the Spanish media (see, e.g., Carlin 2007)—has been intentionally emphasized in both versions.

Table 4.2

Units of meaning in both stories

Units of meaning

Beginning

1

Pre-Norman period (Angles and Saxons)

Norman period

2

Norman invasion (twelfth century)

3

Creation of parliament

4

Norman alliances and Irish clans

5

Irish resistance against the Normans

Tudor dynasty

6

Henry VIII: Anglican schism (sixteenth century)

7

Henry VIII: political-religious unification of the island

8

Restrictions on Catholics

9

Effective control of the island by the Tudor

10

Irish revolts against the Tudor

Stuart dynasty

11

Rise of the Stuart dynasty (seventeenth century)

12

Charles I Stuart: promises restitution of rights to Catholics

13

Cromwell’s defeat of Charles I

14

William of Orange’s defeat of James II Stuart

15

Law prohibiting Catholic kings and parliamentarians

16

Union Parliament of Scotland

17

Declining Gaelic culture

Formation of the United Kingdom

18

Formation of the United Kingdom (1801)

19

Removal of restrictions on Catholics

20

Industrial Revolution: elimination of tariffs

21

Potato famine: half a million deaths in Ireland

Irish nationalism and autonomy

22

First Irish separatist parties

23

State/Anglicans union parties

24

Gladstone has the Law of Autonomy for Ireland (1867)

25

Creation of Sinn Fein

26

Growing importance of Irish separatists in parliament

27

Second Law of Autonomy for Ireland

28

Threat of intervention by the British army against that law

Fight against the government

29

Easter Monday Rebellion 1916

30

British Army reaction

31

Popular Representation Act

32

Government of Ireland Act: granting some autonomy

33

Acceptance in Northern Ireland. Rejection in the south

34

Formation of the IRA (1919)

35

British Army response

Truce and treaty

36

Truce between the IRA and the army (1921)

37

Irish Free State treaty (1921)

38

Approval of treaty

39

Rejection of De Valera, Collins accuses him of treason

40

Approval of treaty through referendum

Civil war in Ireland

41

Civil war (1922–1923)

42

Death of Collins

Independence

43

Valera president of Ireland (1937)

44

Formation of the Republic of Ireland (1949)

45

Recognition by England

Final

46

Bloody Sunday (1972)

47

Good Friday Agreement (1998)

As for the procedure, three recall sessions were held on the Madrid and Basque Country University campuses during spring of 2009. The 16 subjects selected from the results of the initial questionnaire were divided into two reading groups. At the beginning of the first recall session, the two stories were distributed, and the groups were given 30 minutes to read the texts. Subsequently, the material was collected, and the participants were given 10 minutes to answer a questionnaire aimed at evaluating different contents of the stories; afterward a white sheet of paper with the following statement was given to each student: “Please try to remember the story that you have read, and give your text a title.” Participants were given 30 minutes for this task. The same steps were repeated 1 week later in the second recall session and 3 weeks later in the third session; thus there was 4 weeks between the first and the third recall session.

Data analysis was conducted through the text analysis software QDA Miner® . Each recall was analyzed and divided up into units of meaning in order to examine which units from the original material were recalled. This allowed us to produce a table with SPSS® data, showing the reproduction or omission—scoring 1 or 0 accordingly—of the 47 units of meaning from the original material. In turn, this allowed us to present the results as charts, where the x-axis shows the 47 units in both stories, while the y-axis stands for the proportion of recall of each of these units. Thus, each point on the graph represents the proportion of subjects that remembered a specific unit in each reading condition. This quantitative data processing —in line with other studies (Bergman and Roediger 1999; Roediger III et al. 2000)—has been combined with a qualitative analysis focused on the progressive transformation (rationalization, conventionalization, and simplification) of the material during the three recall sessions.

Transformation of the Two Histories Throughout the Three Recall Sessions

Two different types of analysis are presented here. Firstly, in order to identify certain general trends attributable to the variables of the study, we present the results associated with the proportion of units of meaning remembered in each reading condition (pro-Irish/pro-British version). Secondly, in order to qualitatively examine the gradual transformation of the original material along the three recall sessions, an example of rationalization, conventionalization, and simplification is discussed. Both analyses are preceded by the results obtained from the questionnaire regarding the subjects’ positioning on the Northern Ireland conflict prior to reading the stories.

Participants’ Previous Positioning on the Conflict

There were no significant differences in each reading group’s—pro-Irish/pro-British version—mean scores; thus, the results showed the two groups had a similar positioning on the conflict before reading the memory material. However, significant differences were observed in the mean scores of the subjects’ sense of national identity. As shown in Fig. 4.1, participants with a Basque identity had a significantly more positive attitude toward Ireland, the IRA , and the separatist cause, while those who expressed a sense of Spanish identity had a significantly more positive attitude toward England .

Fig. 4.1

Previous attitudes on the conflict according to participants’ national identity

The Mediation of the Narrative Form of the Two Versions in the Repeated Reproduction of Their Contents

The analysis of the recollections corresponding to the two versions of the Northern Ireland conflict showed, first and foremost, a progressive simplification of their contents throughout the three recall sessions, to the extent that many of the units of the original materials are omitted from the first recall session in both conditions (see Figs. 4.2 and 4.3). Thus, the units referred to the Norman period, the Stuart dynasty, and those units comprised between the emergence of the first Irish nationalist groups (unit 22) and the creation of the Irish Republican Army (unit 34) are absent, from the very beginning, in the first recall session regardless of the version of the history read. Also, in line with Bartlett’s findings (see Chaps. 2 and 3 for more details), results also show the retention of certain elements over time, some of them common to both stories. Thus, the proportion of recall of units 1 (German invasions), 22 (first Irish nationalist groups), 34 (creation of the Irish Republican Army), and unit 47 (Good Friday Agreements[2]) is above average throughout the three sessions, regardless of the version read. Primacy and recency effects might explain the high proportion in the recollection of the first and last units, respectively, while high recollection of units 22 and 34 could be accounted for by their importance as turning points in the development of the conflict.

Fig. 4.2

Recall of the pro-Irish version in the three recall sessions

Fig. 4.3

Recall of the pro-British version in the three recall sessions

However, this parallel process of selection and omission over the three sessions also yields some significant differences when prioritizing certain events in each reading condition, resulting in a progressively differentiated recall profile of each version of the story as recall sessions pass. This becomes particularly obvious in the third session, carried out 4 weeks after reading the original material. Thus, if we contrast the recall profiles of both stories obtained in the last recall session (see Fig. 4.4) and focus on those units that are proportionally more remembered in each group, we can infer, as ideal types, two narrative structures built around different dominant events in each case (see Table 4.3).

Fig. 4.4

Recall in the third session according to the version read (pro-British/pro-Irish)

Table 4.3

Most recalled units in the last session per reading condition

Pro-Irish condition

Pro-British condition

1. German invasions

1. German invasions

2. Norman invasion

6. Religious schism of Henry VIII

9. Political and religious control of Ireland

12. Charles I promise to restore rights

18. Formation of the United Kingdom

21. Famine in Ireland

22. Emergence of separatist groups

22. Emergence of separatist groups

34. Formation of IRA

34. Formation of IRA

37. Irish Free State treaty

39. De Valera’s rejection of the treaty

42. Death of Michael Collins

47. Good Friday Agreement

47. Good Friday Agreement

As for the pro-Irish condition, we can see that, leaving aside unit 1—relative to the German invasions that only affected Great Britain—the beginning of the story is marked by a series of events showing the subordination of Ireland to England, as well as the repression of the Catholic religion. Such events correspond to units 2 (Norman invasion), 6 (religious schism of Henry VIII), 9 (political and religious control of the island by the Tudor), and, to some extent, 12 (Charles Stuart’s promise to restore political and landowning rights denied to Irish Catholics). After these units, we find unit 21 (relative to half a million deaths caused by the potato famine on Ireland and the passive reaction of the British government to it), immediately followed by unit 22 (emergence of the first Irish nationalist movements), which would represent, in light of the foregoing, a reaction against the previous “injustices” from the neighboring island. In this line, unit 34 (creation of the IRA) represents a development of the previous unit, moving from political activity to armed struggle in order to attain the sovereignty of Ireland, a struggle that would continue until the Good Friday Agreements (unit 47).

As for the pro-British condition, it also begins with unit 1 (German invasions). However, unlike the other condition, the next important unit here is unit 18 (formation of the United Kingdom), followed by 22 (first nationalist movements) and, occurring much later, unit 34 (formation of the IRA). The latter two units, although present in almost the same proportion in the pro-Irish condition, have a different meaning in light of those that precede them. Here, unlike the pro-Irish condition, there are no units alluding to territorial conquests or suppression of rights. By contrast, unit 18 refers to the constitutional union of Great Britain and Ireland. Thus, in this case, both the formation of the first separatist groups and the creation of the IRA are no longer a reaction to a previous period of conquest and repression, but a reaction against the constitutional legality in force, thus reflecting another way of interpreting the conflict. We also see how, unlike the pro-Irish condition—where the creation of the IRA tends to move on directly to the Good Friday Agreements—in this condition such agreements are preceded by units 37 (treaty of the Irish Free State), 39 (rejection of the De Valera treaty[3]), and 42 (death of Michael Collins[4]). These units would indicate not only the willingness of the United Kingdom to reach a peaceful resolution but also the intransigent stance of certain Irish nationalist supporters of the use of violence.

The Transformation of the Material in the Three Recall Sessions

In the previous section, we saw the general tendency regarding the recollection of each version of the Northern Ireland story. In this section, we complement these results with specific cases illustrating the direction in the transformation of these recollections during the three recall sessions. To this end, we have focused on three aspects identified by Bartlett (1932) when applying the method of repeated reproduction (see Chap. 2 for more details): (1) rationalization
(where the material is transformed according to the general idea obtained from the text), (2) conventionalization
(where the material is assimilated to the narrative forms and meanings of a particular group), and (3) simplification (dropping out of those elements peculiar to the group from which the material proceeds).

Rationalization of Bloody Sunday

This example[5] comes from a UAM student with a sense of Spanish identity assigned to the pro-British condition and without a clear prior position on the Irish conflict. In Table 4.4, we can see how different violent episodes of the Irish conflict progressively condense into one: Bloody Sunday[6] (unit 46). However, this event undergoes a complete transformation throughout the three recall sessions to the point that in the third one the IRA is made responsible for the carnage. In the first recall session, this event is attributed to the British army, although the killings carried out by Irish groups under the command of De Valera are described as “bloody.” In the second recall session, the mention of the British army disappears, and Bloody Sunday begins to be associated with the IRA, while in the third recall session, this group clearly stands as the perpetrator of the carnage. In short, through this transformation, we can see how Bloody Sunday—a massacre committed by the British army—is rationalized in order to make it fit into the pro-British storyline read by this participant .

Table 4.4

Rationalization of Bloody Sunday
(italic added for emphasis)

First recall session

Second recall session

Third recall session

Eamon de Valera did not agree with this Treaty and decided to continue down the path of violence. This turned into a bloody Civil War that ended in Collins’ death. His murder was at the hands of gunmen who were under the orders of De Valera. The killings were bloody and there were civilian victims, so much so that the English army got involved. They protagonised Bloody Sunday

Supporters of independence gradually became more and more radical, resulting in a terrorist organization called the IRA. This organization defended the separatists’ interests through violence; they came to protagonise what was known as Bloody Sunday

… while their positions were becoming radicalized, a terrorist group called the IRA emerged, his objective being the independence of Ireland by means of violence. They protagonise Bloody Sunday

Conventionalization of the Murder of Michael Collins

This example—taken from a UPV student with Basque national sentiment, assigned to the pro-British condition and with prior positioning clearly in favor of the Irish cause—alludes to the murder of Michael Collins, shot to death by followers of De Valera during the civil conflict in Ireland. This conflict caused a confrontation between the two nationalist leaders due to the rejection of De Valera to the Irish Free State in 1921 whereby the south of the island was endowed with some autonomy, while the north remained part of the United Kingdom. As we can see in Table 4.5, in addition to changing the name of Michael Collins to “Millen,” this student transforms his death from being shot to death to “a bomb” in the first recall session, which he then turns into a “car bomb” in the following two sessions. This conventionalization process responds to the common use of the term “car bomb” in the context of the Basque issue, since this was a well-known way in which the terrorist group ETA used to operate in that conflict .

Table 4.5

Conventionalization of the murder of Michael Collins (italic added for emphasis)

First recall session

Second recall session

Third recall session

Millen accepts this proposition but the IRA believes that accepting this decision is a betrayal, so they kill Millen by planting a bomb

Faced with this situation, the IRA accuses Millen of treason: they believe that autonomy does not go far enough, they want the full independence of Ireland and continue attacking, this time they attack Millen by planting a car bomb

In South Ireland, Mullen becomes the democratic president and admits that England has offered them very little independence. As the IRA believes he has surrendered to the British government, they attack and kill him with a car bomb

Simplification of the Initial Part of the Story

This example, taken from the same participant above, shows how some events of the story—in this case, those at beginning—are progressively simplified (and somewhat modified) over the three recall sessions. Specifically, the fragment included in Table 4.6 alludes to some of the first nine units of meaning in the story—covering from the presence of the Angles and Saxons during the pre-Norman period up to the effective control of Ireland by the Tudors and the imposition of the Anglican religion on the island by Henry VIII. As we can see, in addition to exchanging the Anglican religion for the Catholic one—resulting in the latter being the religion imposed in Ireland at the expense of the former and not the other way around—this participant states the beginning of the problem in increasingly simple terms. Thus, in the last recall session, the participant omits any explanation relative to the occupation of Ireland, using instead a colloquialism—a vulgar one, in the Spanish original version—to emphasize the arbitrariness and injustice of such an act: “the British took control of Irish lands for no reason; por el morro (in Spanish original, that is to say, just like that, without giving any compensation for it).” This simplification of the problem also reflects a position on the conflict contrary to the pro-British version of the story that this participant read, thus demonstrating that not all participants were equally receptive to the narrative form of each story.

Table 4.6

Simplification of the initial part of the story (italic added for emphasis)

First session

Second session

Third session

First, there were the Angles and Saxons. After, the king of England invades Ireland by force—an island that was not very economically stable—and implements Catholicism. This decision was taken without consideration of the Irish people’s opinions, who totally disagreed with this action

Before the Catholics arrived, the Angles and Saxons lived in Ireland. Catholicism arrived when the English crown began to invade Ireland. In order to expand their lands, England decided to integrate Ireland into its reign

Initially the Angles and Saxons lived in Ireland. But, when the English crown arrived to England, Catholicism entered Ireland, and the British took control of Irish land for no reason

Discussion and Conclusions

This study empirically examines the mediation of the narrative form in the interpretation and remembering of historical accounts. We have seen how two versions of the history of the Northern Ireland conflict—using the same events but different narrative forms—have generated two different recall patterns where prominence has been given to the reproduction of certain contents over others. Thus, while in the pro-Irish condition participants tended to remember those events portraying repressive actions (invasions, political and religious control of Ireland) that would justify the struggle for independence, recall of the pro-British version has tended to be built on those institutional events that would legitimize the maintenance of the United Kingdom.

The general trend has thus been that of reproducing the theme and the moral content conveyed in the very form of narrating each version of the conflict. This is also manifested in the rationalization of certain parts of the material, namely, the transformation of Bloody Sunday
, where victims and perpetrators have been reversed according to the moral perspective of the read version. The reconstructive and cultural dimension of remembering pointed out by Bartlett has also been reflected in the adaptation of certain elements of the Northern Ireland conflict to certain expressions commonly used in the Basque conflict. Thus, in a typical case of conventionalization
, we have seen a shooting transformed into a “car bomb.” Indeed, the implicit analogy between the two conflicts may have been behind the initial pro-Irish positioning of those participants with a sense of Basque identity, thus hampering the influence of the narrative form on remembering the pro-British version, as shown in the simplification example above.

We believe these results point to the importance of the narrative form of historical accounts. On the one hand, we have seen a significant impact of narrative forms on the transmission of certain accounts of the past and, consequently, in the adoption of certain positions by individuals unfamiliar with its contents. However, it is also worth noting that not all participants were equally receptive to the narrative form of each story. The results also show the sometimes-conflicting reception of certain historical narratives by individuals (particularly those with Basque sense of identity) who were already previously positioned in relation to the Northern Ireland conflict. Remembering as a sociocultural process may involve both increasing conventionalization and personalization of the material. This is so because, while being a socially organized and mediated process, it is carried out by an active agent, from a specific positioning. The next chapter further explores the role of narrative forms by analyzing how individuals—with different positionings on the Basque conflict—remember a particular episode of that issue by whether reproducing or, conversely, personalizing different partisan versions of that episode provided by different political actors.

References

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Footnotes

1

Likert scales (1/5) rated participants’ attitudes regarding the key characters involved in the conflict (Ireland, England, the Unionists, and the IRA), the goals in dispute (Irish independence, United Kingdom’s institutions), and the two main religions in Northern Ireland (Catholicism and Protestantism).

2

Signed on 10 April 1998 between the governments of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, with the participation of most parties in Northern Ireland, this agreement put an end to the Northern Ireland conflict.

3

Eamon De Valera (1882–1975) was an Irish nationalist leader who became prime minister and president of Ireland. He opposed the division of the island and the retaining of the Irish Free State as part of the British Commonwealth. This led him to clash with Michael Collins.

4

Michael Collins (1890–1922) was a member of the IRA intelligence who participated in the negotiation of the treaty that led to the formation of the Irish Free State. Being both chairman of the provisional government and commander-in-chief of the National Army, Collins was killed in 1922 in an ambush during the civil war that followed the signing of the treaty between the free state government and supporters of the republic, led by De Valera.

5

All examples included in this chapter are translations from the original Spanish language. Italic has been added for emphasis.

6

On 30 January 1972, during a demonstration in Derry (Northern Ireland), the British soldiers opened fire and killed 14 unarmed protesters.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

B. Wagoner et al.Remembering as a Cultural Process SpringerBriefs in Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32641-8_5

5. Conflict, Memory, and Positioning: The Multivoiced Context of the Basque Conflict

Brady Wagoner[1] , Ignacio Brescó[2] and Sarah H. Awad[2]

(1) Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

(2) Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

Keywords

ConflictDialogicalityBasque issuePositioningNarratives

While the previous chapter addressed how narrative forms mediate the way in which individuals consume and try to reproduce different versions of the Northern Ireland conflict, the present chapter examines how individuals produce different versions of the Basque Country[1] issue by giving a particular narrative form to a set of documents related to that conflict. More specifically, the study (Brescó 2016a) included in this chapter shows how individuals, identified with different positions on the Basque issue, interpret, select, and give different narrative forms to a set of journalistic documents related to a controversial episode of this conflict—the failed peace process that took place in 2006 between the terrorist group ETA and the Spanish government. Through this study, we seek to further address remembering as a cultural process by stressing the role of narratives, as meaning-making tools, provided by a particular social context (Brescó 2016b; Brescó and Wagoner 2016). Here the concept of context transcends a purely physical description of a person’s environment—viz., the notion of “behavior setting” à la Barker (1968). From a cultural psychological perspective, contexts are the construction of agents in relation to an environment that is physical, social, and symbolic (Moscovici 2000). In the case at hand, the context is marked by a nationalist conflict in which various political actors have competing stories and ways of understanding the abovementioned peace process in accordance with their respective positions on the Basque issue. Working with this notion of context entails bringing to the fore the dialogical dimension of remembering inherent to conflicts.

Dialogicality, Voices, and Positions in Nationalist Conflicts

Conflict and dialogicality go hand in hand, in that every conflict calls for at least two possible and competing positions. This dialogical relationship therefore takes place within an argumentative context
(Billig 1987) characterized by the presence of different voices and storylines which ultimately compete to impose their own form of defining the conflict according to the specific claims of each party concerned. In defining the very nature of the conflict, such storylines allocate blame or legitimacy among the warring factions involved by appealing to certain norms or principles. This typically applies to nationalist conflicts. As Billig (2001) points out, “when groups declare themselves to be national groups, they are making particular political statements, evoking an ideological history of entitlements and rights” (p. 219).

Positioning theory addresses “the study of the way rights and duties are taken up and laid down, ascribed and appropriated, refused and defended in the fine grain of the encounters of daily lives” (Harré and Moghaddam 2011, p. 132). This framework has also been applied to conflicts with a greater timescale (see Moghaddam and Kavulich 2008). In these cases, positioning refers to the set of rights and duties that different political actors, such as groups or states, discursively attribute to themselves and to other parties according to the way in which they come to define the conflict. In nationalist conflicts —such as the Basque issue—we typically find two general positions. Thus, defining the conflict as one derived from an attempt to subvert the existing national state unit—viz., the Spanish state unit—may lead to a positioning that claims the right to preserve the constitutional order and the duty to defend it against any separatist attack. Conversely, defining the conflict as one caused by the oppression of a state against the free will of an alleged national community—viz., the Basque country—may result in a positioning that claims that it is the duty of that state to recognize the right of such community to self-determination, a community which, in turn, might undertake the duty to fight for such a right, even by resorting to force.

According to Harré (2005), “duties and rights exist in the discursive domain” (p. 237). In nationalist conflicts, the duties and rights claimed by each group are usually justified through certain narratives on the past. Such narratives constitute indispensable tools enabling individuals to identify themselves with their groups and their respective claims. However, this mediational role of narratives does not imply that people do not have their own voices. As Wertsch (2018) points out, “narrative tools do not mechanistically determine human discourse and thinking. Instead, the very notion of a tool implies an active user and suggests an element of variability and freedom” (p. 5). This leads us to the question of agency when studying how people reconstruct the collective past. Echoing the Bakhtinian question, one might ask: Who is doing the talking? To whom does the voice belong? According to dialogical self theory
(Hermans 2001), both the self and culture are conceived as a multiplicity of positions and voices among which dialogical relationships can be established. Thus, the varying number of positions and voices that characterize societies also operates within the self, which is conceived as a society of mind insofar as “like a society, the self is involved in oppositions , agreements, disagreements, contradictions, negotiations and integrations” (Hermans 2002, p. 148). This dialogical dimension of the self may vary depending on the capability of bringing the argumentative context of social issues into self-talk or, in other words, to convert heterodialogue between voices and positions in society into autodialogue within the self (Valsiner 2002). Here, agency is not vanished amid the multiplicity of social voices. In fact, internal dialogue is a necessary element for individuals to contrast different positions and go beyond them, thus opening the door to the construction of more personal ones (Lawrence and Valsiner 2003).

Remembering the Peace Process of 2006 in the Basque Country

The 22nd of March 2006 was a day that inspired hope for the Basque conflict . That morning, the terrorist group ETA announced a “permanent ceasefire .” However, that announcement was surrounded by controversy since the very beginning due to the different ways in which the ceasefire was interpreted by the main political actors involved in the conflict. In its statement, ETA justified the ceasefire by its desire to promote a democratic process in the Basque Country whereby that region’s right to self-determination could be recognized. The Spanish government (headed at that time by the socialist president, José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero) deemed the ceasefire as an opportunity to commence a peace process. By its part, the main opposition party (the right-wing People’s Party) considered the ceasefire as a truce-trap and accused the government of having secret deals with the terrorists and surrendering the country to ETA. On the 30th of December, ETA planted a bomb at Madrid Airport, causing two deaths. That attack was the culmination of 9 months of tension, during which the main political actors devised various accounts to legitimize their own position in respect to a process understood as a democratic process

, a peace process, or as a truce-trap

. Thus, following the bombing attack, diverse ways of understanding that process were consolidated by means of different storylines which also acted as tools by which people could interpret, recall, and draw conclusions from the ceasefire according to their identification with the main parties involved.

Aims of the Study

This study seeks to examine remembering as a dialogical and multivoiced process within the context of the Basque conflict (see also Brescó 2009; Brescó and Wagoner 2016). In particular, the present study (Brescó 2016a) examines how subjects, identified with different political actors, adopt their respective positioning and interpretation of the conflict and how, in light of same, they reconstructed the truce period with the aid of a set of journalistic documents relating to that event. Narrative mediation is therefore crucial here, for it is expected that participants will make sense of the abovementioned documents by means of the storylines provided by the different political actors involved in the episode. Different uses of these narratives are expected according to the degree of identification with the main political actors, ranging from a monological reproduction of the group’s version to a more personalized and dialogical account in which different voices can be heard.

Of the 16 undergraduate students who participated in the study (8 from the Autonomous University of Madrid and 8 from the University of the Basque Country), 4 were included in Brescó (2016a). On the one hand, three participants clearly identified with the three main actors involved in the peace process[2] and, on the other hand, one subject with a more personalized and dialogical account of that episode. Data collection took place in the Autonomous University of Madrid and the University of the Basque Country and consisted of three tasks:

1. 1.

Definition of the Basque conflict: Participants were first asked to give a brief definition of the Basque conflict.

2. 2.

Presentation of news sources for developing an account of the peace process: Then, each participant was given three sheets of paper containing 23 short documents on the 2006 peace-making process extracted from various Spanish newspapers.[3] Those documents, arranged chronologically, were composed of five pictures, ten broadsheet headings, and eight brief excerpts of statements delivered by the main political actors involved in the process (see the set of documents in Appendix II).

3. 3.

Writing a story about the peace process: Participants were then asked to look at the material that had been handed out and write a short account of the peace-making process. Subjects were allowed to use and interpret the sources however they wished, for example, only using documents that already supported their views, omitting those which they found irrelevant or which conflicted with their views, and adding whatever extra information they considered appropriate.

Results

Participant 1: Green[4]

Green is an 18-year-old student from the University of the Basque Country, who sympathizes with Batasuna’s position. The following is Green’s definition of the Basque conflict—prior to the presentation of the news sources—and his ensuing account of the ceasefire period:

Definition of the Basque Conflict

“It is a conflict between an oppressed nation and two oppressor states (Spain and France) which refuse to recognize the right all democratic states have: the right to self-determination. This situation has led to an armed conflict.”

Account of the Ceasefire Period

“ETA declares a truce and ceases all its actions. The government says that it is willing to meet with ETA. Batasuna expresses its willingness to negotiate the future of the Basque Country. The Spanish state keeps imprisoning, torturing and oppressing the Basque People, especially Batasuna and its supporters. Given the course of events and the government’s inability to move forward, ETA decides to send out a warning to the government by planting a bomb at Madrid airport. The government doesn’t react and the truce comes to an end. Then, ETA returns to its armed struggle.”

Green clearly takes Batasuna’s position and makes it his own by defining the conflict as one caused by the oppression of the Basque people by both the Spanish and French state. Building up on such position, the participant justifies and delegitimizes the actions of the main figures involved in the ceasefire period. Thus, according to Green’s account, despite ETA’s good intentions, the Spanish government failed in its democratic duty by not listening to the Basque people, thereby causing ETA to exercise its right to resume the armed struggle. It is also worth noting that in order to support his version, this participant overlooks those documents (included among the handed-out material) referring to ETA’s violent activities during the ceasefire. Instead, he uses in his narrative the news article from Gara—a newspaper close to Batasuna—which talks about arrests and acts of torture suffered by Batasuna’s supporters. Here, it is the government that is responsible for the truce’s failure by not responding to ETA’s warning in the form of a bomb attack, this being conceived as a form of communication.

Participant 2: Red

Red is an 18-year-old student from the Autonomous University of Madrid , who sympathizes with the Socialist Party.

Definition of the Basque Conflict

“It started as a conflict centred on the Basque collective identity and rights. However, nowadays it is an armed conflict centred on political, economic and social interests.”

Account of the Ceasefire Period

“ETA announces a ceasefire followed by a dialogue-based peace plan which is supported by all political parties except the right (People’s Party). From the very beginning there is constant opposition from the right, which jeopardized the process. In fact, the right organized several demonstrations with the sole aim of making the peace process fail. They tainted the Socialist Party with conspiracy theories and accused Zapatero of yielding to ETA’s claims despite the fact that during that time the government arrested more individuals than any previous administration. In turn, ETA kept using violent means. Given the fact that an agreement could not be reached (where you have to first lose to win), ETA broke the ceasefire, thus ruining any chance of maintaining the dialogue. However, despite the failure, it was worth a try, wasn’t it?”

Red defines the conflict as one caused by different economic and political interests, where arms prevail over words, though he also points to its origins in identity. Thus, contrary to Green’s definition of the issue, Red does not regard the armed struggle as part of the solution, but as the major impediment to dialogue. From this positioning, we can infer that the government has both the duty and the right to seek a dialogued way out to the conflict. By the same token, it follows that both ETA and the People’s Party have a duty to support this pursuit. In accordance with this positioning the truce’s failure is attributed to both the People’s Party and ETA in Red’s account. As for the former, this participant highlights the conspiracy theories put forward by the right and the accusations of surrender made against the government, which Red contrasts with the arrests made during the peace-making process. Thus, whereas in this case the reference to the arrests serve to offset the accusations levied against the government for not complying with its duty to fight against ETA, the previous subject referred to the arrests to illustrate the government’s failure to comply with its duty to respect the ceasefire. As for ETA’s role, Red’s version, unlike Green’s, makes reference to the violent activities carried out by this group during the peace-making process as a key factor in the breakdown of the truce.

Participant 3: Blue

Blue is an 18-year-old student from the Autonomous University of Madrid who sympathizes with the right-wing People’s Party.

Definition of the Basque Conflict

“There is a group of people from that region who don’t feel Spanish so they use violence.”

Account of the Ceasefire Period

“Thanks to a series of secret agreements between ETA and the Socialist Party, with many concessions made by the latter, a truce was achieved. During the supposed truce period, the government was completely willing to hold talks with the terrorists while they kept on committing terrorist acts. Thousands of Spaniards marched, demanding that Zapatero stop yielding to ETA’s claims. In turn, the People’s Party split with the government due to Zapatero’s erroneous strategy. This event ended with the terrorist attack on Madrid Airport, which caused two casualties (this is, in fact, the only way ETA understands dialogue). After this attack, we are still supposed to believe that the government has dropped negotiations with ETA.”

Blue considers the violence employed by a supposed anti-Spanish faction as being the origin of the Basque conflict, thus somehow assuming a connection between not feeling Spanish and the use of violence. In analyzing Blue’s account of the truce period, we observe that this participant takes People’s Party positioning and makes it her own. Thus, unlike the previous participants, she assesses the truce in quite a negative light, even going so far as to describe it as a “plot” between the socialist government and ETA. In line with those who supported the conspiracy theory along the peace process, Blue’s words echo the statement by a People’s Party member—included in the material—whereby ETA’s ceasefire announcement was linked to Zapatero’s supposed concessions to that group. Along these lines, Blue’s account refers to one of the pictures provided featuring numerous people demonstrating against the socialist government. Blue also includes in her account some of the news referred to ETA’s terrorist activities during the truce period and explicitly refers to the terrorist attack and the two resulting casualties. Her remark on this tragic outcome—described as ETA’s only way of understanding dialogue—echoes Green’s version in which the attack was conceived as a form of communication. All in all, Blue’s version would prove the uselessness of dialogue with the terrorists. In light of this, the position taken by the People’s Party throughout the peace process becomes no longer a failure, but a patriotic duty against a preceding immoral agreement.

Participant 4: Reddish

Reddish is a 21-year-old student from the University of the Basque Country. Like Red, she sympathizes with the Socialist Party, but unlike the former, she does not completely identify with the position of this party and its version of the truce period.

Definition of the Basque Conflict

“Some radical sectors believe that the Basque Country should be independent from the Spanish state. Consequently, the terrorist organization ETA is trying to destabilize the political system by means of attacks. On the other hand, the political parties have been unable to find a peaceful solution to the conflict either.”

Account of the Ceasefire Period

“On the 22nd of March, ETA announces a ceasefire which leads to a negotiation process. We don’t remember if this process started in secret or not. If so, it would be a deplorable beginning since we reckon it is our right to be informed about the government’s terrorist policy. From the very outset, the Prime Minister Zapatero sought the cooperation of the People’s Party. However, the refusal of the latter, together with some innuendos launched against the government, did not contribute to getting the process underway. Throughout the truce period Zapatero repeatedly stated his commitment to peace and dialogue, though in my opinion he did not treat us as fully responsible citizens, since he did not tell us the whole truth about the process. Yet, in spite of that, we supported and still support his attempt to achieve peace. However, amid all that secrecy it was difficult to maintain faith in the truce, particularly when the government was constantly evading decisive questions about its actions. Therefore, although the opposition’s discourse, accusing the government of surrendering to ETA, was pure demagogy, a lot of people (including myself) agreed with the People’s Party’s criticism of a number of obscure points regarding the process, e.g. a possible prior agreement with ETA. It is a well-known fact that, after having shown little sign of giving up violence (extorting money from Basque entrepreneurs and stockpiling weapons), ETA ended up planting a bomb at Barajas airport. This marked the end of a somewhat obscure and yet necessary peace process.”

This more complex form of positioning regarding the Basque conflict is reflected in how the truce period is narratively reconstructed. On the one hand, we can see how Reddish partially adopts the government’s position, defending its right to achieve peace via dialogue and criticizing the obstructive stance of the People’s Party throughout the process—viz., the accusations levied against the government of giving in to ETA. On the other hand, Reddish makes her own some of the People’s Party’s criticism against the secrecy surrounding the negotiations with ETA. The result is a version of the truce period in which different voices and positions are brought head to head, something that is clearly visible in the very structure of the narrative, which, far from being linear, takes the form of a dialogue through the continued presence of conjunctions such as “although,” “yet,” and “however” throughout the account. Thus, without fully siding with the positions of the actors in the conflict, Reddish uses some of their criticisms and claims to construct her own version of the peace process, a version containing a more personal position, identified by the idea of a responsible citizenry—a heretofore absent collective actor—having the right to be informed. Such positioning is reflected in the more ambiguous, but at the same time more open and complex, way of defining the peace process at the end of the account as “an obscure and yet necessary process.”

Discussion and Conclusion

Throughout these four samples, we have seen how the definition of a conflict necessarily involves the assumption of a positioning in relation to it. In turn, participants’ positioning on the Basque issue has rendered different ways of remembering the truce period by discursively justifying and delegitimizing the actions of the main political actors involved. The different versions have also resulted in certain storylines “in which it becomes not only acceptable, but even one’s duty to undertake the actions in question” (Slocum, 2008, p. 209). As we have seen, Green, Red, and Blue identify with the positioning of ETA, the socialist government, and the People’s Party, respectively, thus assuming—and to some extent reproducing—their corresponding versions of the truce period. This is reflected in three rather monological accounts in which these participants seem to adopt the voice of one of those actors.[5] Yet, if we regard the three versions as a whole, we can see an example of what Wertsch (2002) calls hidden dialogism
, inasmuch as each version constitutes an implicit response to a competing interpretation of the same episode.[6] This broader perspective highlights the importance of considering the multivoiced and argumentative context in which different positions compete against each other.

However, the multivoiced dimension of the conflict not only becomes apparent through the external dialogicality between different accounts dominated by certain voices; it also manifests itself through the internal dialogicality within Reddish’s account. The multivoicedness of the Basque conflict is brought into Reddish’s version of the truce period, thus converting heterodialogue between different voices in society into autodialogue within the self. We can see a higher degree of agency in the way Reddish appropriates the words of others and reframe them through her own way of seeing the Basque issue, thus generating a more complex and personal account. Thus, whereas in the previous cases, the participants’ words express the views of the main political actors on the truce period, in Reddish’s case, the words of the same political actors are used to express the participant’s own view of it.

Remembering cannot be conceived as an independent faculty operating in a social vacuum. As we have seen in this study, participants’ remembering of the truce period is mediated by the different storylines provided within a multivoiced context, resulting in different versions of that episode, ranging from monological accounts to more dialogical versions. Such a continuum between monologue and dialogue shows the extent to which individuals can be rigidly stuck in certain positions or more willing to accept dialogue and new forms of looking at a particular issue. Monological perspectives typically imply adopting a single storyline, not only in reconstructing the past (whether by justifying or delegitimizing actions undertaken by different actors) but also in giving sense to the present and the future (by justifying or delegitimizing different political goals and possible future scenarios). Conversely, a dialogical perspective entails to critically use the range of existing voices on a particular issue to co-construct a more personal position. In the former case, individuals become actors subjected to a ready-made script, whereas in the latter, they become authors endowed with more agency to imagine new ways of looking at old conflicts.

In the differentiated modern societies, where different positions and narratives are at play, the dialogical process of remembering becomes evident (Märtsin, Wagoner, Aveling, Kadianaki, and Whittaker 2011). Individuals take a more-or-less active role within the collectives by using the symbolic tools available at hand in a given sociocultural milieu in order to manage different perspectives. As Bartlett (1932) famously put it, remembering is done in a group not by a group. In that regard, while narratives, monuments, memorials, or images can be actively appropriated by individuals, these symbolic tools set the range of possibilities and constraints for people to engage in different social practices of remembering within a historically situated context. In the present chapter, we have examined remembering as a dialogical process through the appropriation of different narratives in the context of the Basque Country issue. In the next chapter, the material dimension of symbolic tools will be brought to the fore by addressing remembering as a situated process within the urban space. Taking urban space as a dynamic material place, the following chapter will take us to Cairo in order to explore how different social actors deliberately transform the city space through the production of images (ranging from street art to official billboards) to communicate a certain narrative of the 2011 revolution in Egypt, thus triggering different memories to bystanders.

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Footnotes

1

A significant number of people of the Basque Country do not feel part of the Spanish nation and would like this region to be independent. This scenario has been strongly marked by the presence of the Basque terrorist group ETA (Euzkadi ta Azcatasuna, or Basque Country and Freedom in English). Since its first armed action in 1969 (at the end of Franco’s dictatorship), ETA has caused nearly 900 casualties, including politicians, civilians, and military members. After 50 years of violence, along with some failed peace processes, ETA has lost strength in terms of both its operational capacity and social support. Today the conflict is near its end. In 2011 ETA announced the definitive cessation of its armed activity and in April 2017 has started handing over its weapons.

2

These actors are (a) the Spanish socialist government, (b) ETA and its political arm, Batasuna, and (c) the right-wing People’s Party, the main party of the opposition at that time.

3

All political views were balanced across sources: El Mundo and ABC (center-right newspapers, close to the People’s Party), El País (center-left newspaper, close to the Socialist Party), Gara (newspaper close to Batasuna), and La Vanguardia (a Catalan center-right newspaper).

4

To protect the anonymity of participants, we provided them all with code names.

5

To put it in Bakhtinian terms, participants would have been to some degree ventriloquized by those actors’ voices (Bakhtin 1981).

6

As Bakhtin (1986) stated, “however monological the utterance may be…, it cannot but be, in some measure, a response to what has already been said about the given topic” (p. 92).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

B. Wagoner et al.Remembering as a Cultural Process SpringerBriefs in Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32641-8_6

6. Urban Memory: Stories of Revolution

Brady Wagoner[1] , Ignacio Brescó[2] and Sarah H. Awad[2]

(1) Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

(2) Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

Keywords

Urban spaceCollective memoryStreet artUrban imagesEgyptRevolution

Following on with the conception of memory as a constructive ongoing process of remembering, which is facilitated by cultural tools and social practices and is situated within certain time and place, we now look at memory within the spatial framework of the city. Cities are key sites for memories and representations. A city carries memories not only in the formal monuments, buildings, and memorials but also in the informal and often unmarked and unremarkable everyday urban landscapes (Urry 1985; Stevenson 2013). Those landscapes as spaces of perception and memory influence our experiences as city dwellers and provide us with an interface between our personal memories and experiences in those places and the dominant historical narratives and collective memories constructed in those same places (Benjamin 1979). This speaks of an essential aspect of how we as humans interact with our environment and culture. We create signs in our environment to shape our memories and experiences, and through that environment, we—and generations to come—are influenced to remember certain memories and act in certain ways while concealing other memories. It has been the essence of civilizations to purposely build monuments so as not to forget (Vygotsky 1987).

In this chapter we will look at the process by which urban memory is constructed by different social actors as they use cultural tools such as visual and verbal communication and built structures to shape space according to each group’s narrative. The analysis of this process will lead into a reflection on how those produced spaces influence pedestrians and collective memory. Looking at this process will also help us highlight how urban memories emerge and change through time as part of a system of relationships between different social actors using that space. This emphasis on the power of place and imagery in shaping the process of remembering relates back to the art of memory tradition and its focus on culturally developed ways of spatially organizing the things to be remembered (see Chap. 1). This art was practiced at the level of the city by Napoleon III who constructed boulevards filled with images that told the story of the nation’s glory.

The case in focus for this chapter is the urban space of Cairo during and after the 2011 revolution. Times of social upheaval provide a unique lens into the contestation over the representation of public space and how different social actors appropriate it with their own narrative through formal and informal visuals. Thus this case provides an example of a process of collective memory in the making during a time of social mobilization triggered by the revolution, where different social groups had a perceived sense of agency and power over the public space that up to then had been controlled by the authorities. This requires innovative methods to study the urban memory as a transformative and situated process happening through the interaction between different actors over time. This will be discussed in the following sections, as we go through the main conceptions in relation to urban memory, the specifics of the case of Cairo urban space, and the methodological approach, and finally we conclude with the significant, if sometimes disguised, ways in which memory is constructed within the urban space.

Urban Memory

Urban space is conceptualized here not as a static physical place, but as a social product that is in a continuous process of production through different social actors. The centralized authority has dominance over this production process, while other social actors influence alternative reproductions in resistance to this dominance (Lefebvre 1991). The city is thus a theater of social action (Mumford 2002) and a site of political contestation over visual culture and who has power over the representation of society, between vying social groups (Ranciere 2004).

Interventions in the production of urban space could be seen in many actions such as the construction or destruction of structures, how streets and squares are shaped and named, how pedestrians appropriate and use public space, and the images occupying those places in the form of billboards, graffiti, and street art. All these interventions into the city space can be conceptualized as processes of sign creation (see Chap. 2). Those signs together form spatial narratives (Connerton 2009); they tell stories about the past and influence certain ways of remembering it. The stories communicated in each city space are not homogenous; different social groups with differing power dynamics produce different spatial narratives that are representative of their group, preserving certain memories while intentionally concealing others. As such, there are as many ways of representing space as there are social groups (Halbwachs 1950).

In turn, those signs and narratives are perceived and experienced differently by each pedestrian, affected by their current identifications with the space, future relation to it, as well as their memory of all past experiences in it (Kharlamov 2011). The perceivers engage in a cognitive as well as an affective process, a personal as well as a social act, as they appropriate those signs, influenced by the possibilities and constraints of the environment around them, and open to reinterpreting the stories they tell to fit their present concerns and circumstances (Wagoner 2017). This makes the physical as well as the mental representations of space important to study (Foucault 2008), looking at the city as a fully lived space, real and imagined, and experienced individually as well as collectively (Soja 2000).

Of interest here is how collective memory unfolds within a spatial framework (Halbwachs 1950) and how it can be investigated through signs such as monuments, street names, ruins of destructed structures, billboards, graffiti, and street art. The following study investigated two aspects in relation to urban memory: first, how different social actors deliberately transform urban space through the production and modification of signs to communicate a certain narrative and regulate collective memory and, second, how pedestrians perceive those signs and how they trigger site-specific ways of remembering (see Awad 2017).

The Case of Cairo City Space 2011–2019

Looking at the city space of Cairo since the 2011 uprising in Egypt provides an illustrative example of collective memory in the making. The continuous process of space production becomes accelerated in periods of social and political upheavals, where the status quo is disrupted and each social group see a chance for shaping history.

The Egyptian uprising in 2011 arose after growing dissatisfaction of Mubarak’s long-standing regime and its brutality against citizens. After 18 days of protest in January/February 2011, the protests succeeded in overthrowing Mubarak who had been in power for over 30 years. After his deposition the army took charge of the transition period until mid-2012 when the Muslim Brotherhood president Morsi was elected. Morsi’s presidency was short lived; after 1 year, public dissatisfaction and protest grew against his government, leading to the army intervention in mid-2013, demanding his resignation. The army, led by El Sisi—the then defense minister and commander of the armed forces—took a leading position again by arresting Morsi and announcing an interim president. This was followed by a strong crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood group, where many were arrested and killed in protests, and the group was declared a terrorist organization. Mid-2014, another presidential election was held where El Sisi won against Sabahi, the sole opponent. The elections were controversial, and many groups boycotted the elections, questioning its legitimacy. El Sisi’s presidency continues on today through its second term and possibly for many more years of suppressing discontent and opposition. The constitution was amended in April 2019 to guarantee Sisi’s grip over power for another 11 years and the extension of his control over the judiciary and legislative branches of the government.

The interest here is in how those events were inscribed and reinscribed on the urban space, more specifically in the center of Cairo and the epicenter of the revolution: Tahrir Square. These sudden political changes created strongly polarized groups, each with a different narrative of the meaning of those political events. For example, activists who took part in 2011 upheaval saw their protests as one of the people, with no specific leader or political orientation, calling for bread, freedom, and social justice for all, but were quickly appropriated and abused by different politicians, the army, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood on the other hand saw their group as the only legitimate one for presidency after the 2012 elections, and this legitimacy was betrayed by the army coup. For the army, it was the main representative and protector of the people’s interest, first by siding with the people against Mubarak in 2011 and later by supporting the protests against Muslim Brotherhood and taking power to protect Egypt from terrorism and economic deterioration. For the current government, its stability relies on reappropriating what the revolution has claimed and ensuring that the government has monopoly again over urban space production and the representation of the recent events.

Each group was triggered to document and advocate for their version of the recent past, with the army and current government having unparalleled control over city space and official media and the revolution activists and Muslim Brotherhood groups having limited access to city space in addition to social media and international media channels. The focus of this study is how those three narratives unfolded through the dynamics of Cairo’s city space.

Methodology

The methodological approach of this study builds upon sociocultural psychology. Sociocultural psychology is concerned with the interrelation between individuals and their environment, looking at how signs and tools mediate our psychological functioning (Valsiner 2014; see introduction). Looking at urban space production as part of this sign mediation process sheds light on how individuals shape their environment and how the environment around us shapes our mind, emotions, and memories.

The urban signs this study looks at are the different formal and informal graphic images, verbal signs, and structures that were produced to communicate certain narratives about the revolution. These signs were seen mainly through street art and graffiti, street names, billboards, and the building and destruction of different structures and monuments. The analytical approach toward these signs is to look at their social life as they are developed in city space, being appropriated, responded to, and destroyed by other actors. The methodology relies on following and documenting those signs as they are transformed by different social actors in various spaces of the city. Additionally it involves following the different social actors who shape these signs. Social actors in relation to the signs are positioned as producers, audience, and authority. The producer could be a graffiti artists drawing an image or a government entity producing a billboard image or a monument. Audience could be pedestrians or anyone who perceives the sign and possibly acts in response to it. And finally authority refers to those that allow or censor a sign in a place; most of the time, this is the government, but it could also be private owners or pedestrians claiming authority over certain parts of the city and destroying signs that they find to violate their values.

The methodological framework thus relies on four elements: (1) situating different signs within their specific time and place, (2) looking at the social actors involved with each urban intervention, (3) following the sign’s social life from production and transformation to possible destruction, and (4) and finally reflecting on the wider urban space dynamics those signs create and their influence on collective memory.

In terms of methods, ethnographic city walks and documentation were conducted between 2013 and 2016 in 6-month intervals, following the changes in Cairo’s main Tahrir Square in addition to other popular protest squares. Documentation involved the development of images and text seen in revolution street art and the government billboard campaigns, as well as following newly erected monuments and structures that had been destroyed. Outside of this time period, documentation took place through online sources and news media, as well as less frequent field visits.

Data was also collected to represent how different social actors produce, reproduce, and appropriate space. Eleven qualitative interviews were conducted with revolution street artists about their artistic interventions into city space (see Awad et al. 2017), and 25 interviews were conducted in Arabic with pedestrians living in Cairo about how they appropriate the different interventions and changes (see Awad 2017; Awad and Wagoner 2018). The pedestrian interviews included photo elicitation of different signs from authority, revolution artists, and Muslim Brotherhood interventions. The methodology in the photo elicitation borrowed from Bartlett’s (1932) experiments on remembering, using his qualitative and ideographic analysis (Wagoner 2017). Analysis looked at the variety of interpretations participants had, how they reconstructed their memory of the stories that the signs triggered, and how this reconstruction was affected by the participants’ own political views and social positions. Lastly, the interventions of the authority as a social actor were followed by official statements and media reports of new city changes as well as government reactions to other interventions, such as the erasing of revolution street art, issuing new laws criminalizing it, and arresting activists during different city interventions.

The Social Life of Signs in the City Space

City signs were categorized into graphic images , verbal signs, and structures. Those signs were then grouped depending on the social actor who produced them, focusing on three social groups: (1) revolution activists of 2011, (2) army/government, and (3) Muslim Brotherhood. These signs are seen as having a transformative social life from when they emerge into the city space, to how they are perceived and appropriated, then diffused and circulated while being transformed in the process, to when they are finally destroyed or censored. This dynamic can be viewed as a form of Bartlett’s (1932) method of serial reproduction playing itself out in real life on the walls of Cairo and can be analyzed as such (Wagoner 2019).

Graphic Images

Examples of graphic images were especially evident in revolution street art, many of which were to document the revolution according to the narrative of the activist that produced them. Several commemoration themes were observed in revolution street art. First theme was to visually document specific incidents in site-specific locations in the city where they occurred. Street art simplified events of authority’s attack on protestors into simple stencil images on the walls where the attacks occurred; many of those images were later diffused and spread in the city and their meaning elaborated to represent the authority violence and aggression. Figure 6.1 shows the army as the villain over a pile of skeletons representing killed protestors still holding the revolution slogan: “bread, freedom, and social justice.” The mural is placed in Mohamed Mahmoud street which witnessed many of the violent clashes between security forces and protestors, and its walls have been the main destination for the street art of the revolution. In the transformed image to the right, we see several modifications probably done by pedestrians, where the face of the army person is erased and the narrative refuted by text added to the right of the image by a pen: “Fear God you artist (you Egyptian). The people, the police, the army , and the judiciary, and all institutions are one hand.”

Fig. 6.1

Captured by Sarah Awad, Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Tahrir Square Area, Cairo. (Image to the left captured September 2014 and image to the right captured January 2016)

This theme was also coupled with a second commemoration theme that of mourning murals, dedicated to those who lost their lives in the revolution. Those murals honored the memory of the victims as martyrs and often used symbols that subsumed their death within a higher divine cause, such as angel wings and versus from the Quran and Bible. Figure 6.2 shows the faces of several victims and their mourning families.

Fig. 6.2

Captured by Sarah Awad, May 2015, Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Tahrir Square Area, Cairo

The third strategy developed as the army took control after the revolution and many revolution activists were arrested. This stage also influenced a development in the form street art took. There is a shift from elaborate murals to quick stencil or posters, to avoid getting caught while painting in the city. The commemoration strategy was thus to remind pedestrians of the current and parallel life of political prisoners rather than of a past incident of the revolution. Figure 6.3 shows one of a set of posters put on the first day of Eid (feast) with pictures of different political prisoners and the text: “their Eid is in prison ” (Fig. 6.3).

Fig. 6.3

Captured by Sarah Awad, October 2014, Mohandesin Area, Cairo

Authority from the other side not only whitewashed those images and in some instances arrested the activists that made them but also actively created images on billboards and buses communicating an opposite narrative of the army as the protector of the citizens and the revolution and their guardian against terrorism—in short, as the hero rather than the villain. Authority images were seen on the walls of army and official buildings, on public busses, and on billboards all over Egypt. The most famous of their campaigns is the image in Fig. 6.4 representing an army man with a child. The text says: “the army and the people are one hand .”

Fig. 6.4

Captured by Sarah Awad, January 2016, Old Cairo Area, Cairo

Verbal Signs

Verbal signs were also seen in graffiti and street art as well as government billboards communicating directly the desired narratives. For example, one common revolution slogan sprayed on walls was “down with the regime.” This slogan was serially reproduced over the 5 years following 2011, responding to different political powers: “Down with all who betrayed; military, old regime, and Muslim Brotherhood.” The government on the other hand communicated slogans such as “the army and the people are one hand” (as seen in Fig. 6.4) and “together against terrorism.” The Muslim Brotherhood group also used graffiti to spray one homogenous message all over the streets documenting their narrative of the 2013 coup: “Sisi is a traitor… Sisi is a killer… we are against the coup… Morsi is our president.” Even though Muslim Brotherhood did not use visuals as much as the other groups, their simple spraying techniques had a far wider reach in countless side streets all around the country, allowing their supporters to implement it wherever they had access. Figure 6.5 shows an example of such message with the text: “CC” is a killer.

Fig. 6.5

Captured by Sarah Awad, August 2014, Nasr City area, Cairo

Street name changes can also be placed in the category of verbal signs. Raba’a square was the site of a Muslim Brotherhood sit-in protest that ended with army’s forceful removal and killing of around eight hundred people. The site became a symbolic reminder of the army’s crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood protestors. Solidarity with the group could even be expressed by holding four figures up, as the Arabic word Raba’a is related to the word “four.” In order to efface this memory, the military leaders renamed the square after Prosecutor General Hisham Barakat, when he lost his life in a terrorist attack in 2015. This name change created a strong shift in the memory of the place: from a space of grieving and solidarity with the Muslim Brotherhood to a space honoring the general prosecutor who was behind many of the death sentences given to the group’s members.

The revolution activists also used verbal signs and stenciled slogans to commemorate the revolution as time progressed, and it became more risky to do elaborate street art images and murals. In what could be considered the fourth theme of revolution commemoration, many of the statements were meant to recall the abstract idea of the lost revolution and the dream of change. An example of this is a graffiti by Keizer that reads “do you remember the tomorrow that never came,” and other recurrent graffiti statements such as “the revolution continues” and “we are everywhere.”

Structures

For the structures, attention was given to the symbolic meaning of monuments, statues, and buildings, as well as the destruction of these structures. For example, the government attempted to build a memorial in the center of Tahrir Square to honor protestors who lost their lives. Protestors quickly destroyed it, arguing that the ones who killed protestors should not be allowed to build a memorial for them. Attention was also given to the destruction of certain symbolic structures in relation to the revolution. One example is the government’s decision to destroy the burned building of the Mubarak’s regime party (Fig. 6.6). The reaction to the destruction among pedestrian interviewees varied. For those who participated in the protests, it was a symbolic reminder of the victory of the revolution over the old regime, while for others it was an ugly building that now had no functional purpose, so its destruction was seen as inevitable.

Fig. 6.6

Captured by Sarah Awad, May 2015, NDP building before destruction, Tahrir Square, Cairo

Dynamic Process of Urban Memory

The research findings were informative of four main aspects in relation to urban memory: exposure, social life of signs, perception, and the overall effect on pedestrian experience. Below we will tackle each aspect briefly using examples and quotes from interviews.

First, in terms of exposure, the different narratives represented in the urban space had very different power dynamics. The army posters had the most visibility overall, with its narrative displayed on big billboards and relatively stable monuments and official street name changes. All participants interviewed have seen at least 1 of the army signs compared to only 11 out of the 25 participants who have previously seen at least 1 of the street art or graffiti signs. The authority’s intentional censorship and erasing of revolution signs in parallel to actively producing signs with coherent messages in city space showed a clear attempt at shaping the recent collective memory. Most participants perceived this wide exposure and visibility as a clear sign of domination, ownership, and power. As one participant in the pedestrian interview states: “I see the army signs everywhere confirming that the revolution is over, all the roads they build, all the buildings they own, even Tahrir Square all now branded by the Army with all their signs confirming that everything now is owned and controlled by them.”

Second, the transformative social life of images showed a dynamic interaction of the city space signs in response to different social groups’ narratives of the past. It highlighted the agency of all social actors and how pedestrians actively appropriated the signs they were presented within city space, changing their meaning through irony and reproductions to communicate opposing narratives. In contrast to Bartlett (1932) experiments, participants in this study did not reproduce images that are foreign to make them more familiar. Instead, transformation was about changing the meaning of signs to represent the past as they saw it (such as in the transformation seen in Fig. 6.1). The destruction of the revolution street art was seen by some activists as part of the normal social life of street art as a temporary form of expression; one street artist interviewed saw his interventions as an invitation for a democratic dialogue: “But I really like it when people take off my pieces. It is a very democratic process. I am doing it in the area where you live and you have the freedom to erase it just like I had the freedom to put it. It means I moved something in them so badly that they decided to erase it. I touched upon that anger. Maybe it made them think.”

Third, the pedestrian interviews were analyzed to understand what participants remembered through the different signs and how the signs influenced the remembering. Given the recent nature of events, photo elicitation method showed that most signs chosen for the study were effective triggers for remembering site-specific incidents. However, how participants remembered those incidents was not influenced by the intended message of the sign producer. For example, the army image in Fig. 6.4, advocating the protective role it took, did trigger participants to remember how army intervened in 2011, but did not influence how they perceived this intervention; it was perceived as a protection or a coup attempt based on the perceiver’s current affiliations and political opinions. For example, to one participant who supports the army, she says: “the image represents how the army protected people not once but twice, that’s what an army should be to Egyptians. They did mistakes but they had too, we’re not in an easy time and priority now is safety.” While for another participant who identifies with the revolution, she says: “the image makes me angry, like it says the ‘army and the people are one hand’ but then represents an army man and a child… like why are the people in diapers? This is how the army treats the people as dependent immature citizens who cannot have a say in the country’s affairs.” A third participant who identified herself as neither supporting the revolution nor the government says:

You know this photo reminds me of how things are changing so fast. When this photo was first spread in 2011 it was very true. Army did stand by the people against Mubarak and the appearance of tanks in Tahrir Square was a relief, it meant protestors are finally safe. And families would go to Tahrir square with their children and give their child to the army officer on the tank to take a picture with him and that’s exactly the picture. But later when same tanks started killing protestors the photo became silly and now it reminds me of how naive I was when I felt so emotional about this image.

These findings support Bartlett’s (1932) social approach to remembering, highlighting how remembering is not a self-contained process but influenced by our present social context, feelings, interests, and social group membership. It is important here to highlight that this limitation of the signs’ potential for change of perspective is partially due to the memories being of recent events that participants have witnessed firsthand and have strong positions regarding them. The potential for the dominant remaining images to enforce one narrative over the other is more expected in the long term with coming generations, as it becomes the only recount of the past in urban space.

Finally, the affective influence of the signs and their transformation was most evident in the pedestrians’ experience and feel of different city spaces. Even when participants did not notice all the changes occurring in a certain city space in their daily life, they had strong overall feelings of those spaces after the changes. For example, one participant was against the destruction of the building in Fig. 6.5 saying: “it is the only physical icon remaining of the revolution, the only monument representing how the revolts won over authority, they should not destroy it,” while at the time of the interview the building had already been torn down but the participant was not aware of it, in spite of the meaning it held for him. Participants who were part of the revolution had similar reactions about how the space is taken over by the government and traces of the revolution were erased. Feelings of exclusion and lack of belonging were common among those participants. They reported that when they come across signs still remaining from the revolution, they are not only triggered to remember their experience in the early days of the revolution but they are also moved by such signs still remaining in the city space. One participant referred to them as “traces of hope,” still surviving the government’s whitewashing of revolution memory. This and similar signs evoked emotions of reassurance that the memory still lives and affirmation of the presence of opposition.

On the other hand, participants who were neutral or supportive to current regime saw the renovations, the erasing of revolution graffiti, and destruction of the burned building as signs of moving on from the disruption of the revolution and a promise for a new stable city with the government of El Sisi.

Collective Memory and Urban Space

In looking at collective memory as it unfolds in urban spaces, the findings show two varying forces that influence what is remembered through the city space and how it is remembered. From one side there is the deliberate and powerful transformations of city by those in power to represent the “official” collective memory of a community, while from the other side, there is agency of the perceiver as they reconstruct those memories presented in the signs to fit their present ideologies and affiliations.

In the case of Egypt, the government’s efforts in transforming city space does not only exclude the pedestrians who were part of the 2011 revolution but also distances them by destroying spaces that are representative of them and the revolution, sending a clear message that they are no longer agents of those public spaces. This concealing of certain pasts from the urban collective memory also shapes the future, proposing a different future to what the revolutionaries had imagined.

This case study highlights how the urban environment enforces certain memories by exposure and repetition, while promoting the forgetting of others. While authority has a higher influence in this dynamic, this influence is resisted and counteracted by alternative narratives finding their way into urban space, by different social actors using art, storytelling, and creative forms of documentation. In spite of their short temporality, graffiti and street art remain affective tool to establish presence of alternative narratives that demand recognition. Also everyday forms of resistance will continue to trigger reflexivity in the perception of the signs presented in city space; simple acts of walking in the city and exchanging stories of “here used to be…” will open dialogues and promote heterogeneous interpretations of the shared collective memory, subverting dominant social ideologies and power relations (de Certeau 1984). The next chapter will explore dialogues with participants as they walk through memorial sites, which are used to promote memory of a shared, traumatic past.

References

1. Awad, S. H. (2017). Documenting a contentious memory: Symbols in the changing city space of Cairo. Culture & Psychology, 23(2), 234–254.Crossref

2. Awad, S. H. & Wagoner, B. (2018). Image Politics of the Arab Uprisings. In Wagoner, B., Moghaddam, F. & Valsiner, J. (Eds). The Psychology of Radical Social Change: From Rage to Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3. Awad, S. H., Wagoner, B., & Glaveanu, V. (2017). The (street) art of resistance. In N. Chaudhary, P. Hviid, G. Marsico, & J. Villadsen (Eds.), Resistance in everyday life: Constructing cultural experiences. New York: Springer.

4. Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5. Benjamin, W. (1979) One way street and other writings (E. Jephcott & K. Shorter, Trans.). London: New Left Books.

6. Connerton, P. (2009). How modernity forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Crossref

7. de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press.

8. Foucault, M. (2008). Of other spaces. In M. Dehaene, L. De Cauter, M. De Cauter, & L. Dehaene (Eds.), Heterotopia and the city: Public space in a postcivil society (pp. 13–29). London: Routledge. (Original work published in 1967).

9. Halbwachs, M. (1950). Space and the Collective Memory. Collective Memory (trans. F. J. Ditter Jr., & V. Y. Ditter). New York: Harper and Row.

10. Kharlamov, N. A. (2011). The city as a sign: A developmental-experiential approach to spatial life. The Oxford handbook of psychology and culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

11. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.

12. Mumford, L. (2002). What is a city? In: LeGates RT and Stout F (eds) The City Reader, 2nd edn. London: Routledge, pp. 92–97.

13. Ranciere, J. (2004). The Politics of Aesthetics: the distribution of the sensible. G. Rockhill (Trans.). New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.

14. Soja, E. W. (2000). Postmetropolis: Critical studies of cities and regions. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd..

15. Stevenson, D. (2013). The city. Cambridge: Polity Press.

16. Urry, J. (1985). Social relations, space and time. In D. Gregory and J. Urry (eds.) Social Relations and Spatial Structures. Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, pp. 20–48.Crossref

17. Valsiner, J. (2014). An Invitation to Cultural Psychology. London: Sage Publications.

18. Vygotsky, L. (1987). The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky (The history of the development of higher mental functions) (Vol. 4). New York, NY: Plenum Press.

19. Wagoner, B. (2017). The constructive mind: Frederic Bartlett’s psychology in reconstruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Crossref

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

B. Wagoner et al.Remembering as a Cultural Process SpringerBriefs in Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32641-8_7

7. Experiencing Memorials: The Materiality of Memory

Brady Wagoner[1] , Ignacio Brescó[2] and Sarah H. Awad[2]

(1) Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

(2) Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

Keywords

MemorialsCollective memoryEcological psychologySubjective camera

Memorials are public sites that promote memory of a collectively shared past. They function as cultural and historical artifacts that mediate memory and in so doing give meaning to the past based on present and future challenges. Their specificity as mnemonic environments can be seen in their emphasis on highly symbolic meanings concentrated on a particular historical event that is to be related to in the first-person plural—“we must remember and grieve for our dead.” Put differently, they provide a rich “cognitive ecology” for people to relate to their group’s past and as such contrast sharply to the impoverished set of resources available in the typical psychology laboratory. This chapter aims to explore people’s flow of experience within memorial sites, which are spatial frameworks built in order to maximally evoke the past. To do this we develop an innovative process-ecological methodology to capture people’s evolving experience in its complex and tightly coupled relations with the environment. This methodology involves a subjective camera method , which records first-person video and audio, in order to capture the immersive feeling of “being there.”

This chapter begins by describing our theoretical background in memory studies and sociocultural psychology, highlighting the importance of situating memory within history, social life, and material artifacts. The focus is on people in their active and ongoing transactions with their environment, which is the result of historically developed practices and objects. This is followed by a brief description of the twentieth-century history of memorials, pointing to the emergence of a new “counter-memorial” form that many have claimed opens up for a diversity of ways to experience and interact with them. This idea is then tested at the Ground Zero National September 11 Memorial in New York, using the process-ecological methodology already mentioned. The analysis identifies a number of ways in which participants relate to the collective past in the space of the memorial through personal memories, thus showing various lines of interconnection between individual and collective memory.

Remembering Through Cultural Artifacts

Mourning rituals and artifacts of some kind have been universally devised since ancient times (Walter 1999) in order to foster a shared notion of the past and a collective sense of belonging. Commemorating—literally, remembering in common—a collective loss (viz., after the death of a national figure, a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, etc.) implies bringing the past to the present in an emotional manner. According to Halbwachs (1950/1980), collective memory constitutes the organic and affective relationship that a particular community has with its past. Contrary to history, seen as dead memory, collective memory refers to the active past inextricably bound to the present identity of a group (Olick and Robbins 1998). So viewed, the past transmitted through collective remembering—no matter how distant or even mythical it might be—is never a foreign country

, to use Lowenthal’s (1985) expression. Rather, it is something familiar and emotionally linked to a particular community. In the same vein, the commemoration of a collective loss—no matter how remote—is something performed and felt in the first-person plural by a certain group. It fulfills important social functions, such as reinvigorating the emotional bounds with both living and dead members of an imagined community (Anderson 1983).

Psychology, like human sciences at large, has been no exception to the growing interest in collective memory (de Saint-Laurent 2018). Since the early 1990s, an increasing number of works (Middleton and Brown 2005; Middleton and Edwards 1990b; Wertsch 2002) have addressed the way in which people remember, negotiate, and make use of the collective past. These works have moved away from a static and context-free notion of memory—reduced to the retrieval of stored information in the individuals’ brain—in favor of a more dynamic and sociocultural one (Chap. 2). Cultural psychology (Valsiner and Rosa 2007) takes this notion further by focusing on the co-constructive relationship between individuals and the use of cultural artifacts (viz., narratives, monuments, memorials, pictures, rituals, songs, etc.) within specific social contexts. From this theoretical perspective, psychological processes such as remembering are shaped by the possibilities and constraints of a specific setting, which is socially and historically created. Cultural psychology thus aims to find a pathway between individualist and collectivist approaches to memory. Memory experience comes into being and takes form through various symbolic media that are taken over from one’s social group yet personalized in the process of internalization. From this point of view, the unit of analysis is no longer a reified notion of culture or an abstract and isolated individual mind, but an active agent using cultural tools to remember in a specific setting. To quote Wertsch (2002):

…remembering is a form of mediated action, which entails the involvement of active agents and cultural tools. It is not something done by an isolated agent, but it is also not something that is somehow carried out solely by a cultural tool. Both must be involved in an irreducible tension. This has several implications, perhaps the most important being that because cultural tools reflect particular sociocultural settings, mediated remembering is also inherently situated in a sociocultural context. (p. 13)

Thus, the sociocultural environment and mind cannot be analyzed as independent and dependent variables but need to be seen as being mutually constitutive of one another (Shweder 1991). Rather than a clear-cut distinction between the memory of individuals and groups, it is more a matter of emphasis on either how groups organize the means by which individuals remember or how individuals are entangled with and make use of these socially organized means. Recognizing this dialectic between personal and collective aspects of culture leads us to be careful in not taking the intended meaning and use of cultural artifacts at face value. A memorial is endowed with a number of material affordances and preexisting meanings that both enable and constrain manifold ways in which they can be experienced and appropriated by individuals with different life circumstances and at different times. This implies that in order to study how individuals experience memorial sites, we should consider both the materiality of the site and the broader ecology of experience that it opens up (Brown and Reavey in press; Murakami 2018). In the next section, we examine how major transformations in memorial structures over the last century invite new ways of experiencing and interacting with them.

Memorials as Cultural Artifacts: A Brief History

In his historical review on funerary monuments , the German historian Reinhart Koselleck (2002) examines how the advent of modernity brought with it a secularization of memorials. Funerary monuments and rituals began to be politically subsumed in the service of the nation, conceived as a secular religion (Brescó and Martínez-Guerrero 2019), where the cult of death—previously restricted to saints, monarchs, and nobles—would extend to the anonymous and abstract individual, the “unknown soldier,” of modern wars.[1] Against the backdrop of this secularization process, classic memorials tend to (1) celebrate heroes and victories; (2) redeem death and collective loss under higher, albeit secular, causes (viz., the nation, freedom, revolution, etc.); and (3) feature a figurative style, embedded in a self-certain historical narrative, thus conveying a univocal official meaning. According to Young (2016), the dominance of a monological and authoritarian didacticism among these memorials translates into a static fixedness that constrains the ways in which people experience, interpret, and interact with them.[2] Following Linenthal and Engelhardt (1996), it can be argued that this single committed perspective to the past results in conceiving memorials as temples where the past tends to be worshiped and revered (cf. Wertsch 2002). The Valley of the Fallen memorial , built by Francisco Franco and featuring a cross that can be seen from miles around, is a notorious example of this monumental traditional form (see Fig. 7.1). Its perching on the hillside, proximity to where the Kings of Spain are buried, and general style of grandiose architecture leave little doubt about its heroic significance, ordained by the Catholic Church.

Fig. 7.1

Valley of the Fallen in El Escorial, Spain

This cult of death was disrupted after the Second World War, although memorials in the traditional form are still being built today. Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki exceeded the meaning and functionality of the hitherto burial traditions. The absence of a clear narrative capable of conferring meaning to this past called into question the traditional forms in which collective loss had been so far represented and socially remembered. As Young (2016) points out, “how to commemorate the mass murder of Jews perpetrated in the national name without redeeming this destruction in any way? How to formally articulate this terrible loss without filling it with consoling meaning?” (pp. 4–5). From this problematic developed a more minimalist and interactive memorial form. Although not the first, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Fig. 7.2), erected in 1982, is a paradigmatic example and a historical turning point in the development of this form:

Fig. 7.2

Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Carved into the ground, a black wound in the landscape and an explicit counterpoint to Washington’s prevailing white, neoclassical obelisks and statuary, Maya Lin’s design articulated loss without redemption, and formalized a national ambivalence surrounding the memory of American soldiers sent to fight and die in a war the country now abhorred. (Young 2016, p. 3)

Maya Lin’s memorial reverses the rationale behind traditional memorials as (1) no heroic deeds or victories are represented, but rather individual losses; (2) death is no longer redeemed and subsumed into a higher abstract cause, but individualized through the more than 57,000 names chronologically listed according to the date of their death on the memorial’s black granite walls (notably, the memorial was not made to commemorate the “war” but its “veterans”); and (3) the figurative representation of traditional memorials gives way to a minimalist style which, in turn, opens up the possibility for different interpretations and ways of interacting with the site (Carney 1993). Significantly, the memorial requires that the visitor move into and through it rather than observe it from the outside. No longer constrained by a ready-made script, visitors acquire a major role as active participants in the site (Stevens and Franck 2015). As Maya Lin remarks in her original proposal, “the memorial is composed not as an unchanging monument, but as a moving composition, to be understood as we move into and out of it” (cited in Young 2016, p. 4). In opening up the space for multiple interpretations, it renders the site a forum where disparate memories can meet, rather than a temple committed to a single and fixed perspective to the past (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991).

Maya Lin’s groundbreaking work was a turning point that set the stage for a new way of creating and conceiving memorials, giving rise to the so-called counter-memorial turn , based on the “conviction that neither the past nor its meanings are ever just one thing” (Young 2016, p. 14). An explosion of other counter-memorials has followed in Maya Lin, such as Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (as in Fig. 7.3 and on the cover of this book). Eisenman’s memorial resembles Lin’s in that it lacks of any single vantage point from which to view it but is even more minimalist and abstract, as not even names are inscribed on the stone slabs. As Young (2016) remarks, “neither memory nor one’s experience of the memorial is static here, each depending on one’s own movement into, through, and out of this site” (p. 12). In our own fieldwork at the site, we found people anchored what the memorial represented in different ideas, such as a piece of contemporary art, the city’s public space, or a cemetery (Brescó and Wagoner 2019). Moreover, how they conceptualized it in turn set up what behaviors they saw a normatively appropriate there. Eisenman himself explicitly shied away from saying the memorial had a specific meaning, and the institution itself is only to guide visitors with suggestive images carried by personnel on-site, such as of Auschwitz concentration camp, the waves in the memorial’s form, and a Jewish cemetery (see Fig. 7.4). The possibilities and constraints of the environment created by counter-memorials, together with the range of potential ways in which individuals can experience and appropriate these material artifacts, are central elements of interest in our study. The next section will introduce our process-ecological methodology; we used to explore people’s experience of the National 9/11 Memorial.

Fig. 7.3

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Fig. 7.4

Suggestive images to contextualize the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

The National 9/11 Memorial and the Process-Ecological Methodology

Like Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Ground Zero National 9/11 Memorial is an example of a counter-memorial in that its abstract and minimalist style leaves ample room for different ways of interacting and making sense of it. However, it is in many ways much less abstract for visitors than Eisenman’s memorial. First, it concerns a recent past for which most adults were historical witnesses, in contrast to a past in which the generation that experienced the events are mostly dead and thus its memory relies principally on mediation by various cultural forms (see Assman 2010). Second, the memorial includes names of all victims of the 9/11 attacks as well as the victims of an earlier terrorist attack at the twin towers. Although still quite abstract, names index an individual life lost and allow for various forms of interacting with them, as will be described in more detail below. In contrast, we found many visitors to Eisenman’s memorial frantically looking for some text written on the concrete surfaces of the stele to interpret it but there is none to find there. Finally, the National 9/11 Memorial is at the exact site of the tragedy, which creates additional design problematics . The architects of the winning design Arad and Walker described the problem as “how to articulate a void without filling it in?” (quoted from Young 2016). Their solution was a design they called “reflecting absence,” composed of memorial pools in the footprints of the twin towers (see Fig. 7.5). At each pool, water cascades down the sides and then into a shaft in the middle of the pool that is seemingly without bottom. Thus, the memorial draws on water as a powerful sensory component and as a symbol of life and transition .

Fig. 7.5

(a) National 9/11 Memorial and our walking route into it (red line). (b) Participant looks into the pool while describing it physically and symbolically

We used a “walk-along” interview method (Kusenbach 2003) in which participants[3] (N = 8) shared their feelings, thoughts, sensations, and memories as they moved through the site accompanied by the researcher. The main advantage of this method is that it gets closer to participants’ ongoing lived experience in situ. Additionally, participants wore glasses with a subjective camera incorporated into them that records both audio and video from the participant’s perspective (Lahlou 2011). In this way, the researcher is able to get experientially close to the participants’ evolving perspective on the site and connect what they say with what they are looking at. In the presentation of the data, we hope to convey this with screenshots from the video footage. As said above, the aim of this study is to explore how people experience and make sense of memorials and what people remember and feel when visiting them. More particularly, we set out to investigate the extent to which different memorial forms (viz., their architectural style, genre, and material affordances) mediate different ways of articulating memory.

To investigate visitor’s experience of the site, we met participants at a cafe about 6-minute walk away from it. This was done so that they become both more comfortable with us and with wearing the subjective camera before entering the site. We also wanted to explore the experience of transition from the bustle of city streets to the memorial. All our participants mentioned feeling serene and calm on-site in contrast to the city streets, despite the crowds of tourists one had to navigate being there. This feeling was at least partly evoked by hearing the sound of running water on-site as well as its park-like qualities with open spaces and trees. It is also noteworthy that several of the participants began to recall flashbulb memories of 9/11 on entering the site, highlighting the site’s strong connection to the collective past and its anchorage in participants’ personal memories. Having arrived on-site, participants were instructed to move through and explore the memorial as they wished and to describe what they notice, feel, think, and remember as you move around the site. The idea was to get as close to their stream of experience as it was being shaped by various aspects of the site that they encountered in their movement (cf. Kharlamov 2012). In order to make the situation as naturalistic as possible, we asked open questions if the participants were not speaking. However, none of the participants had any trouble describing their experience of the site as the visit unfolded .

Senses and Symbols: From Direct to Indirect Perception

On hearing the instructions , all participants immediately walked over to the first memorial pool (indicated by the dashed line in Fig. 7.5a). This was probably done because they heard the sound of cascading water and could see that people were crowded around something of importance. As they approached, participants tended to comment on the sensory aspects of the site. Again, the water was first experienced through its sound, and only later did visitors get a visual of it. Some even commented on the smell—one said: “the strong smell of chlorine always gets to me, as though, it is like, a cleansing. But it is very harsh to think of it as a cleansing.” If there was a little wind, one would get a light spray of the water when one got close to the pool. And finally one can touch water in a basin at waist level, below the metal surface with victims’ names etched in it. The following quote was said during a participant’s final steps toward the pool, followed by her reflections upon it as she stands in front of it looking in, as seen in Fig. 7.5b:

I’m just noticing how it has individual streams of water coming down the sides, instead of a solid sheet of water. And how the edge has a pool of water that reflects some and is very still. And that (making gesture indicating a waterfall) has a lot of movement. And now I’m seeing all the names written here. I’m seeing “m56.” I don’t know what that means. I’m seeing a rainbow down there. That’s very pretty. (pause) And how the water all goes into that pit (makes downward gesture with fingers together in the direction of the pit, as in Fig. 7.5b). Hmmm. It is kind of ominous in a way. Just like you can’t see the bottom (gestures downward again with hands) and it is kind of like the water just slowly goes over the edge. I think it is cool. I like it, but it has something (pause), to me it reflects some of the darkness that happened in addition to being a nice place. It reminds me of like the gravity of it all. It also reminds me of in my hometown there are some man-made lakes and they have, I don’t know what you call it, it is a drain basically, and it is called the waterhole. When I was young and the lakes were full the water would flow into it. It was always terrifying (laughs). It has like little buoys that make like don’t swim or take your boat past this. It was like terrifying. What if someone somehow slipped down there, it would be awful. You’d see somebody in a little tin boat just outside the buoys and think oh my goodness.

The participant transitions from a description of the significant physical features of the memorial to an interpretation of what it stands for (in the line “it reflects some of the darkness that happened”). In the language of ecological psychology, we can say she shifted from a direct perception of the environment to an indirect perception of it as a symbol representing something else. Most interestingly, the participant relates to this “darkness” through personal place memories from her childhood, which mix nostalgia with fear. In Brown and Reavey’s (in press) terms, the participant was discovering invariances in her life experiences (i.e., the two water sites with voids at their center and the combined feelings of serenity and fear they evoke), folding together her life space through the setting of the memorial site. Although a surprising result for us, it was by no means a singularity within our sample. The memorial pools seemed to powerfully afford making these kinds of experiential connections with familiar water spaces from the participants’ past and in some cases present spaces of daily life. Thus, we found participants relating to the collective event through significant personal memories. In this way participants not only bring together events of their own life trajectory but also connect them to events with collective importance. As Halbwachs (1992) brilliantly described, people position their personal memories within a social framework; in this case the memorial can itself be considered a spatial social framework for individuals to take perspectives within. In short, the form of the pools and movement of the water there created an affective site for collective and individual memory to coalesce, and as such its architecture appeared to be successful in setting up the right conditions for deep feelings of grief and memory.

Names as an Art of Memory

Memorials operate as an art of memory (Yates 1966), whereby images of the things to be remembered are spatially organized within a significant place. One particularly powerful form of image included in many contemporary memorial sites is names of the dead. Although rather abstract we know all too well that each name written on the memorial represents a deceased person, whose many relations are affected by the loss. This was one of the key features of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. As she described in the documentary film A Strong Clear Vision
:

These names, seemly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals into a whole… Brought to a sharp awareness of such a loss it is up to each individual to resolve or come to terms with this loss. For death is in the end a private matter, and the area contained within this memorial is meant for private reckoning.

As noted above, the names on Lin’s memorial were organized chronologically according to the day they died. In contrast, the 9/11 memorial groups them according to association—for example, whether they died in one of the airplanes (e.g., “m56” mentioned by the participant above) or in one of the towers. Besides this, there is little information about the victims on the memorial itself. This leads us to ask “what strategies do people use to relate to the names and familiarize them?”

One of the most recognizable strategies is to physically make contact with them through touch. All but the two oldest participants did this. Figure 7.6 shows one participant looking at the names and gently moving her finger over a letter. The memorial site itself promotes touching the names through signs posted around the memorial pool (though not widely read) as well as the appealing nature of the materials used and texture of the letters. One can, for example, in many places see the shine made on the metal from previous people touching the letters. From a cultural psychological approach, this is a clear example of signs guiding action toward affective relating (touch) and simultaneously prohibiting other actions like sitting on the names (Tateo and Marsico 2019). The touching of names is also a key feature of Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, though in that case the surface is made of reflective black granite to create the feeling of a screen or interface with the dead. The eventually cancelled memorial in Utøya island,[4] which was to commemorate those killed in the 2011 terrorist attack on the Norwegian island, played with our desire to touch the names of the dead by creating a gap in the island: visitors can see but not touch the names on the other side. In this way, the past becomes in a sense sealed off from actions in the present. By contrast, we make affective contact with the past at the National 9/11 Memorial.

Fig. 7.6

Participant touching the names etched into the metal

Another way of relating to the names was to leave flowers and other objects on them, a practice common to burials and other memorial sites. Although none of the participants in this study did this while we were with them, all of them noticed the objects left by others. These included both those left by site personnel (e.g., white roses are placed on the deceased name on their birthday) and by visitors (e.g., flowers, pictures, rocks). Similar to the shine created by touch, leaving objects shapes others’ experience and action on-site. This is also true of observing the behavior of other’s vis-a-vis the names and memorial more generally. Ecological psychology describes how our action on the environment changes it such that others and ourselves interact with it differently on the basis of the traces left: People notice objects left as well as the shine on the metal from others touching the names, encouraging us to do likewise. Furthermore, norms of behavior established on-site changes the feeling of being there and can be transmitted across time through subtle forms of social influence (cf. Sherif 1936). A critique of both the ‘Ground Zero memorial’ and ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’ is that they have become dominated by touristic norms of behavior (e.g., taking selfies), over and above solemn commemoration norms.

Finally, at the most psychological level, people create connection with the names through imaginative identification. In the following quotation, a participant describes her way of relating to the names as she walks around the first memorial pool, while observing the names:

I find myself looking at the names to see if perhaps there was someone I knew. It’s interesting (pause). I don’t even know why that would be an actual desire (pause). Maybe it is a desire to feel more connected to them. I’ve seen names that look familiar but no one that I knew. And also when my friends visit they look to see if “oh that person has my first name,” “oh that person has my last name.” I think people are just trying to find some connection. It’s somewhat unconscious.... There’s a difference between those people that take a selfie and those that take a picture of the name. I think that’s interesting... It would be interesting to see how people’s experience is different closer to the memorial day. All the names are called... that must be a family that has lost someone (looking at a family in front of the names).

After having said this, she reaches out to touch the names (as can be seen in Fig. 7.6). In the quotation, we hear how the participant developed specific practices of making the names meaningful through connecting them to familiar names (e.g., one’s own), a practice found among other participants as well. This participant later described how she would stop in front of a familiar sounding name and say a prayer to the deceased person with her friends. Halbwachs (1992) long ago described how first names of family members carry a certain aura that helps create affective ties within a social framework and thus begins an integral part of family memory. “When it comes to first names, we must think of something that they symbolize beyond the material sign, something to which they are moreover inseparably attached” (p. 72). Thus, by finding names that link to one’s close social ties (including oneself), they bring the names into a set of personal and affectively charged relations. Much like the imagination of other place memories (described above), this practice of imaginatively appropriating names in this way creates an emotional link between individual and collective memory.

Conclusion

Ranging from Durkheim’s (1915) studies on aboriginal funeral rites to the erection of monuments and memorials in the wake of the two world wars (Winter 2014), the Holocaust (Young 1993) or the Vietnam War (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991), scholars from different fields have examined how collectives respond to a communal loss. Memorials are historically situated material artifacts that create possibilities and constraints for people to engage in different practices of remembering. This chapter has aimed to explore collective memory through how people experience and interact with counter-memorials which unlike classic ones do not deliver a straightforward message with regard to how one should remember a collective loss. The study shows how the abstract and minimalist style of counter-memorials opens up a range of interpretations and ways of interacting with them. We have seen how people do so by anchoring their experience in familiar categories and personal episodes of their life.

By connecting collective events to their own individual stories and intimate social networks, people can appropriate and personalize memorials in a way that makes sense to them, thus establishing a more affectively charged relationship with the collective past. This appropriation not only happens individually but also through the patterns of behavior enacted and expressed by other people on-site, some of which leave durable material traces (e.g., gloss on the metal around the name) while others are used as immediate normative points of reference (e.g., a family grieving or tourist taking a selfie). In short, remembering is both a personal and a socioculturally situated process: personal in that it expresses a unique life history and concerns and it is sociocultural in that it is deeply enmeshed in social relationships and meanings provided by cultural artifacts and groups. Memorials provide a crucial material setting for connecting individuals and collectives. While they contribute to commemorating a collective loss in the first-person plural, they also allow for a variety of individual meaning-making processes and personal ways of remembering and relating to the shared past.

As a final note, the process-ecological methodology was successful in bringing us close to participants’ stream of experience on-site. If we had simply interviewed them after a visit, we would have likely missed the many imaginative spaces that opened up for participants when interacting with particular features of the memorial site. It also allows us to analyze the experience as a totality in its unfolding and eventual consummation (Dewey 1934). The subjective camera glasses enhanced this by allowing us to coordinate their description in language with what features of the site they were looking at. Moreover, the first-person videos reveal participants’ hands and arms as we normally encounter them in our visual field (see Figs. 7.5 and 7.6). Hands are, of course, a principle means of interacting with the environment, but they are also used expressively, as when the participant above commented on the water hole in the memorial pool. All these characteristics of the subject camera allow for tightly coupling the person to the environment through a number of different channels, some more physical and others psychological.

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Footnotes

1

It is noteworthy that these memorials also draw on the Christian symbolism of redemption through sacrifice (see Rowlands 1998).

2

This is not to say, as Koselleck (2002) points out, that the official sense conferred to memorials cannot change over time. Due to their historicity, memorials are susceptible to being reappropriated and re-signified in the future.

3

Participants were recruited through a local university and through previous contacts in NYC.

4

After winning the government competition in 2014, the proposal of the Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg, Memory Wound, was eventually cancelled due to the strong opposition both by island local residents and family victims.

Appendix I

Memory material: pro-Irish and pro-British versions set side by side and divided into 47 meaning units. Original versions were written in Spanish and adapted from Edwards and Ranelagh (1993).

Pro-Irish version

Pro-British version

History of the struggle for Irish independence from the British Empire

History of the formation of the British state and the Irish issue

Intro.

Brief account of the Irish nation, from its Celtic and Catholic origins to the recovery of its independence and freedom following a long struggle against occupation by the British Empire

Brief account of the process whereby the United Kingdom was formed, from the creation and modernization of its institutions to their action against Irish terrorism and, ultimately, the achievement of peace

Pre-Norman period

1

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Irish nation managed to keep its independence and Celtic roots intact, as it was not affected by the Germanic invasions that did, however, reach England

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the island of Great Britain (but not the island of Ireland) saw the arrival of various Germanic peoples, mainly Angles and Saxons

Norman period

2

In the twelfth century, Ireland was partially invaded by the Normans after they had seized the English throne

In the twelfth century, the accession of the Normans to the English throne gave rise to the joint occupation of both islands

3

After forcibly establishing the English and Irish parliaments

And the establishment of the first English and Irish parliaments, which lay the groundwork for the future state formation process

4

The Normans controlled the island, availing themselves of a series of pacts and alliances with various Irish chieftains

To consolidate these institutions, the Normans pursued an alliance policy with the various Irish factions

5

Despite this strategy, acts of resistance by the Irish people, aimed at recovering their independence against the occupiers, spread throughout the island

Who occasionally tended to rebel against the legal system that had been established

Tudor dynasty

6

Following the rise of the Tudor dynasty to the throne, Henry VIII (considered to be the true creator of the British monarchy) provoked a religious schism by causing the separation of the Church of England from Roman Catholicism in all the territories belonging to the monarchy, including Wales and Ireland

Following the rise of the Tudor dynasty to the throne, Henry VIII (considered to be the true creator of the British monarchy) provoked a religious schism by separating the Church of England from Roman Catholicism in all the territories belonging to the monarchy, including Wales and Ireland

7

This event marked the beginning of a lengthy and difficult period for the Irish population, who refused to abandon their Catholic roots in the face of pressure from the English monarchy to politically unify the kingdom and impose Anglicanism as the only official religion

Just like other European monarchs (such as the Catholic Monarchs), Henry VIII fostered a political and religious unification and homogenisation policy, establishing the foundations of what would, in time, be one of the most developed states in Europe

8

In fact, those who refused to recognise the king of England as the head of the new Church of England were considered to be traitors and were dispossessed of their land and excluded from public office

In this sense, policies such as the prohibition against holding public office or the expropriation of land from those who refused to recognise the new religious authority were collateral with respect to the consolidation of the State

9

During this period, the Tudor dynasty achieved effective control of Ireland and established Anglicanism as the official religion of the kingdom

During this period, the Tudor dynasty achieved effective control of Ireland and established Anglicanism as the official religion of the kingdom

10

All this happened despite the strong resistance put up by the Irish people and the help of Spanish troops sent by Philip II, who were cruelly exterminated

As in the case of other European countries, this caused a number of ethnic minorities, opposed to the progress made by state institutions, to rise up

Stuart dynasty

11

In the seventeenth century, the ascent of the Catholic Stuart dynasty marked the commencement of a period of clashes between the Anglican-dominated parliament and the new monarchy

In the seventeenth century, the ascent of the Catholic Stuart dynasty marked the commencement of a period of clashes between the Anglican parliament and the new absolutist-oriented monarchy

12

King Charles I of the House of Stuart, in search of allies against parliament, promised to restore the privileges formerly enjoyed by the Irish

King Charles I of the House of Stuart, in search of allies against parliament, promised to restore the privileges formerly enjoyed by the Irish

13

Who were ultimately defeated by the new leader of the English parliament, Oliver Cromwell

Who were ultimately defeated by the leading advocate of parliamentary rights and freedoms, Oliver Cromwell

14

The subsequent defeat of James II of the House of Stuart to the Protestant William of Orange constituted a definitive setback for both the Stuarts and the Irish cause

The subsequent defeat of James II of the House of Stuart to the Protestant William of Orange constituted a definitive setback for both the Stuarts and the Irish separatists

15

Thus, the return to power of Protestantism implied the resumption of the previous period of repression, in addition to a new law that prevented Catholics from ever again acceding to the throne

From then on, in order to avoid further religious clashes, it was established by law that both monarchs and parliamentarians had to profess the official religion of the Kingdom

16

Moreover, the British institutions were strengthened during this period due to the fact that the Scottish parliament joined its English counterpart

Moreover, the state institutions were strengthened during this period due to the fact that the Scottish parliament joined its English counterpart

17

All these repressive measures ultimately affected Irish Gaelic culture, which was virtually reduced to rural areas

Additionally, these reforms coincided with the decline of the Gaelic culture in Ireland, which was virtually reduced to rural areas

Formation of the United Kingdom

18

In 1801, the British expansionist policy gave rise to the formation of the United Kingdom, i.e. to the formal union of Great Britain and Ireland and the ensuing annexation of the Irish parliament to the English parliament

In 1801, the state formation process was concluded. The United Kingdom was proclaimed, i.e. the constitutional union of Great Britain and Ireland, with the resulting merger of the parliaments of both islands

19

Later, as a result of notions arising from the French Revolution, some of the restrictions imposed on Irish Catholics disappeared, such as the bar to holding public office

Moreover, as a result of notions arising from the French Revolution, another step was taken in the modernisation of the state laws, and the latest political restrictions on religious dissidents were lifted

20

However, the situation barely improved, since in addition to the crisis affecting the Gaelic culture there arose an economic crisis, caused by the lifting of trade tariffs by England and the resulting eruption of British capitalism in the modest Irish rural economy

At the same time, due to the demands arising from industrial development, the trade tariffs between Great Britain and Ireland were removed to the detriment of the latter, due to its greater degree of economic backwardness

21

All this also coincided with the so-called potato blight, which affected a number of harvests and caused over half a million Irish people to die of hunger due to the passivity of the British government

This period of development also coincided with the failed harvest in Ireland, which caused the death of half a million inhabitants. The government was overwhelmed by the crisis

Irish nationalism and autonomy

22

It was in the middle of the nineteenth century when the frustration that had built up over hundreds of years awakened Irish patriotic sentiment, giving rise to the first political groups focused on restoring independence and freedom to the island

In the middle of the nineteenth century, despite the reform process and the increase in civil rights, the first Irish nationalist parties entered the political arena, demanding the total independence of the island

23

Meanwhile, Anglican parties decided to mobilise to ensure the continuity of Protestant domination

Against this backdrop, the state parties began to join forces to neutralise the nationalist advance

24

In 1886, the government led by Gladstone (renowned for his progressive policies) recognised the seriousness of the situation and decided to submit the “First Home Rule Bill” to parliament, but it was strongly rejected

In 1886, Gladstone’s liberal government, renowned for its reformist policies, attempted to resolve the nationalist issue by submitting a “First Home Rule Bill”, which did not have sufficient parliamentary backing

25

In parallel, new Irish parties emerged. These parties, in particular Sinn Féin (“Ourselves” in Gaelic), were increasingly organised and prepared to make a stand against the British Empire

In the meantime, the independence movements became increasingly radicalised, in terms of both their proposals and actions. Sinn Féin (“Ourselves” in Gaelic) was a clear example of this

26

The growing public support of these parties gave them a stronger voice in parliament, which was dominated by Protestant forces

The entry of these parties into the parliamentary institutions meant that their vote occasionally even decided matters affecting the whole of the Kingdom

27

They therefore managed to submit, with the help of the British liberals, a second Home Rule Bill

In this way, thanks to the support of the British liberals, they managed to submit the controversial Home Rule Bill to parliament a second time

28

In view of which the conservative members of parliament, who identified more closely with the ideology of the Empire, threatened to support army intervention if the bill was passed

In view of which the members of parliament who were most committed to maintaining the institutions gave their support to the army which, as the ultimate guarantor of the unity of the State, expressed its readiness to intervene if the bill was passed

Fight against the government

29

The fact that it was impossible to address the issue by taking the parliamentary route led a group of patriots to take up arms on Easter Monday 1916 (during the First World War) and seize the post office building and other locations in the city of Dublin

On Easter Monday 1916, taking advantage of the fact that most of the army was fighting against the Germans in the First World War, a group of Irish separatists seized the post office building in Dublin at gunpoint

30

In view of the immense disproportion in forces, the Irish were crushed by the British army, which ended up shooting some of their leaders

The army’s reaction was swift and effective, reducing the rebels and executing the ringleaders

31

When the war in Europe ended, the English parliament approved a law whereby men aged 21 and over and women aged 30 and over won the right to vote

Despite this coup, the parliament continued with its reform policy once the war had ended, approving the Representation of the People Act, whereby all men aged 21 and over and women aged 30 and over won the right to vote

32

With respect to the Irish political problem, the government tried to get round it by means of the so-called “Government of Ireland Act”, which sought to partition the Irish nation into two subdivisions (the south of Ireland, on the one hand, and the north of Ireland, on the other), granting them limited self-government

Moreover, to tackle the separatist issue, the “Government of Ireland Act” was drafted, whereby it was decided that a certain degree of self-government would be granted to two separate political entities, namely, the south of Ireland, on the one hand, and the north of the island, on the other

33

However, whilst the north folded to the terms and conditions of the new Act, the south of the island flatly rejected them, since they did not satisfy their desire for freedom from the British Empire

However, whilst the northern Irish counties approved the Act by a democratic referendum, the southern counties flatly rejected it, since it did not fully satisfy their aspirations of independence

34

In the meantime, a group of Irish patriots, led by Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera, decided to form the IRA (Irish Republican Army), a national liberation movement that managed to challenge the British army (one of the most powerful at that time)

What is more, the most radical sectors of Irish nationalism, led by Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins, formed the IRA (Irish Republican Army) terrorist group, which undertook a bloody and unprecedented campaign of attacks

35

Whose reaction was extremely violent and often completely indiscriminate

The law enforcement authorities reacted to this in a forceful and sometimes indiscriminate manner

Truce and treaty

36

The government’s ability to deal with the problem was ultimately overwhelmed by the events that took place, and it was forced to request a truce

The government’s ability to deal with the problem was ultimately overwhelmed by the events that took place, and it was forced to request a truce

37

A treaty arose from that truce, establishing the Irish Free State in the south of the island and giving it its own government and parliament. This treaty was the first step towards independence, since it granted a certain degree of autonomy. In exchange, however, it carried the obligation to swear an oath of fidelity to the British Crown

This truce gave rise to a treaty in December 1921, whereby the Irish Free State was established in the south of the island with a high degree of autonomy (with its own parliament and government). At the same time, however, it was required to swear an oath of fidelity to the British Crown

38

Under the threat of war by England, the treaty was approved by both the recently formed Irish parliament (Dáil) and the British parliament

This treaty, by which the structure of the British state would be altered, was approved by both the English parliament and the recently formed Irish parliament (Dáil)

39

However, former veterans of the fight against the empire did not accept the terms and conditions of the treaty. This was the case of Éamon de Valera, who abandoned the Dáil, accusing his ex-brother-in-arms, Michael Collins, who held a more complacent stance vis-à-vis England, of being a traitor

However, the leader of the most radical sectors of the IRA, Éamon de Valera, who was opposed to anything that did not lead to the full and immediate independence of the island, considered the approval of the treaty to be an act of high treason

40

The latter, as provisional head of the Irish government, held swift elections to remain in power, validate the treaty as soon as possible and avoid discontent in London, attaining the support of the population

All this was despite the widespread support of the Irish people of both the treaty and its main advocate, the then provisional head of the Irish government, Michael Collins

Civil war in Ireland

41

However, the profound division in respect of the treaty prompted a civil war in Ireland between the De Valera-led republicans (who were against the handing over of the north of the island to the British state) and those who followed Collins

De Valera’s stance in favor of continuing on the path of violence (now directed against Michael Collins’ democratically elected government), ended up plunging Ireland into a bloody civil war,

42

Who ended up dying in a shooting

In which Collins himself ended up being murdered during an ambush by a group of gunmen sent by De Valera

Independence

43

In 1937, with De Valera as Prime Minister, a new constitution ultimately removed the obligation to swear an oath of fidelity to the English Crown, and the legal effects of the former treaty were thus repealed

In 1937, with De Valera in power, a new constitution which unilaterally removed the oath of fidelity to the British Crown and rendered the former treaty invalid was approved

44

It was nevertheless in 1948, upon the signing into law of the Republic of Ireland Act, when over ten centuries of struggle and oppression came to an end: the Republic of Ireland was born as an independent sovereign state

In 1948, the Irish government, without consulting England, passed the Republic of Ireland Act, achieving the full independence of the south of the island

45

The following year, Great Britain ultimately recognised the new Irish state, despite retaining control of the six counties constituting Northern Ireland

On being presented with this fait accompli, England recognised the new state but nevertheless assured the population of Northern Ireland that it would not surrender sovereignty of that part of the island unless it were so agreed peacefully and democratically by the majority of its inhabitants

Final

46

This is precisely the main obstacle to the definitive consolidation of peace in Northern Ireland where, until recently, the IRA continued their armed struggle in response to the harsh actions of the British army, such as the event tragically known as “Bloody Sunday”

However, the IRA, refusing to recognise the legal framework agreed upon with the United Kingdom, had until recently continued with its campaign of attacks and murders, causing many civilian victims and even making it necessary for the army to intervene. The action taken by the army has not been free from controversy, such as in the case of what is known as “Bloody Sunday”.

47

A political solution to the conflict currently seems uncertain, despite the signature of the “Good Friday Agreement” (1998), whereby the main political parties in Northern Ireland, including Sinn Féin, undertook to pursue peace and allow the Irish in Northern Ireland to freely decide their future. However, the fact of the matter is that Ireland continues to be a divided nation, with the north remaining under the control of the British state

Currently, however, the Irish issue is drawing to a close, particularly since England encouraged the “Good Friday Agreement” (1998), whereby the main political parties in Northern Ireland, including the political wing of the IRA (Sinn Féin), undertook to definitively disarm and to respect the legal framework in force and the rules of democracy

Appendix II

Table with 23 journalistic documents covering the truce period from 22 March 2006 to 13 January 2007: 5 pictures, 10 broadsheet headings, and 8 brief statements by the main political actors involved.

Date

Reported news

Source

22 March 2006

Television [Declaration of truce by ETA]

22 March

“It was what ETA was expected to do given all Zapatero’s concessions”

MA San Gil, (member of the People’s Party)

24 March

“The main priority is to reach an agreement aimed at normalizing the political panorama in the Basque Country. Such an agreement should be ratified by a referendum to be held in the Basque Country”

Ibarretxe (Basque Nationalist Party leader and President of the Country Basque Autonomy)

25 March

“The People’s Party’s cooperation is key to achieving the end of violence”

Zapatero (Spanish Prime Minister and Socialist Party leader)

31 March

“Batasuna is the only one who is putting everything into this peace-process”

Otegi (leader of the illegalized Batasuna)

2 April

Television [Demonstration in San Sebastian (Basque Country) in support of the peace-process]

22 April

Arson is committed on a hardware property of José Antonio Mendive [a People’s Party member]

La Vanguardia (Catalan newspaper)

2 April

More detentions, reports of torture and prohibitions of Batasuna’s demonstrations

Diario Gara (pro-Batasuna newspaper)

4 June

Otegi boasts about the Socialist Party’s willingness to discuss with Batasuna, but demands more compromises

Diario El Mundo (right-wing newspaper)

5 June

“Zapatero’s project is ETA’s project”

Acebes (member of the People’s Party)

6 June

The People’s Party breaks all links with the government

El País (centre-left wing newspaper)

11 June

Television [Demonstration in Madrid against the socialist government]

29 June

Zapatero states in the Congress that he will respect the decisions adopted by the Basque citizenry provided they conform to the legal framework

El País (centre-left wing newspaper)

7 June

Television [Meeting between members of Batasuna and Socialist Party]

10 July

The Spanish Government and ETA reach an agreement with mutual compromises

Diario Gara (pro-Batasuna newspaper)

29 July

A handcrafted bomb explodes in front of the Basque Government buildings

Diario ABC (right-wing newspaper)

21 September

Home Office falsified documentation in order to conceal some links between the March 11th Madrid bombing attacks and ETA

Diario El Mundo (right-wing newspaper)

23 October

ETA steals 300 guns with large amounts of ammunition in the southeast of France.

Diario ABC (right-wing newspaper)

30 December

Television [Terrorist attack on Madrid airport, Barajas]

2 January 2007

“ETA has destroyed the peace-process. They has ruined it”

Rubalcaba (Home Secretary of the Socialist cabinet)

3 January

“There is no explicit proof which certifies that the ceasefire is broken as ETA has not stated so in any communiqué”

Barrena (member of Batasuna)

4 January

“We are not going to permit ETA to spoil the trust made by all the people who have been supporting this process”

Imaz (member of the Basque nationalist Party)

13 January

“Pretty soon the government will go back to its bad ways and will negotiate with ETA again”

Acebes (member of the People’s Party)

Index

A

Accuracy
in constructive remembering

Acts of meaning

Argumentative context

Articulated memories

Art of memory

A Strong Clear Vision

Atmospheric conditions

Authority

Autodialogue

Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM)

B

Bartlett’s methodology
conversational remembering
conversation task
repeated reproduction
SeeRepeated reproduction
self-observation
think aloud protocol
turning around upon schema
War of the Ghosts

Bartlett’s social-cultural theory
characteristics
conceptualization
conservative tendency
construction
constructive vision
conventionalization
cultural dynamics
cultural shift
dialogical processes
Ebbinghaus
effort after meaning
experiments on remembering
flexibly
methods of repeated reproduction
methods of serial reproduction
mixing and blending
Native American community
personalization
psychological functioning
quantification of errors
rationalization
re-conceptualizing
remembering
simplification
social constructiveness
socially situated activity/practice
social stability and change
The War of the Ghosts

Basque conflict
Blue definition
Green’s definition
Red definition
Reddish definition

Basque country

Basque Country University (UPV)

Basque identity

Basque issue
complex and personal account
nationalist conflicts
positions
truce period

Behavior setting

Billboards

Biological maturation

Block of wax in the mind

Bloody Sunday

C

Cairo City Space 2011–2019

Chinese whispers

Chunking information

City signs
army/government
graphic images
Muslim Brotherhood
revolution
structures
verbal signs

Civilizations

Cognitive ecology

Cognitive psychology

Collective memory

Commemoration themes

Community
self-determination

Conceptual history
art of memory
history of psychology
storage metaphor

Conceptualization of memory

Conflicts
Basque
SeeBasque conflict
definition
dialogicality
multivoiced dimension
nationalist
Northern Ireland
positions
voices

Conformity

Conservative tendency

Construction
accuracy
Bartlett’s social-cultural theory
concept
description
operationalization
in psychology
remembering
Vygotsky’s theory

Constructive memory

Constructiveness

Constructive remembering
accuracy

Contaminating effects

The content of the form

Context transcends
concept

Conventionalization
hunting seals

Conversational remembering

Conversation task

Counter-memorial

Creativity

Cultural artifacts
collective memory
counter-memorial turn
figurative representation
foreign country
funerary monuments
Maya Lin’sVietnam Veterans Memorial
memorial
and mourning rituals
Murdered Jews of Europe
psychological processes
psychology
secularization process
sociocultural environment
Valley of the Fallen memorial

Cultural psychology

Cultural technologies

Culturally mediated memory

Vygotsky’s theory

D

Dante’sDivine Comedy

Data analysis

Dead memory

Deindividuation

Democratic process

Dialogicality

Dialogical process

Dialogical self theory

Direct to indirect perception

Discursive domains

Disjunctive story

Documentation

E

Ebbinghaus’s approach

Ebbinghausian model

Ecological psychology

Education system

Effort after meaning

Egypt

Emergent process
constructing narrative coherence
conventionalization of hunting seals
Hollywood Films
microgenesis of memory

Experimental pedagogics

Experiments on remembering

External memory

F

Fine-grained analysis

Flashbulb memories of 9/11

Foreign country

Foreign place names

Funerary monuments

G

Gas molecules

Gesture

Good Friday Agreements

Graffiti

Graphic images

Ground Zero National 9/11 Memorial

H

Heterodialogue

Hidden dialogism

History of psychology

Hollywood Films

Holocaust

Human kinds

Human memory

Hunting seals
conventionalization

I

Imagined community

Information processing framework

Invariances

Irish Republican Army (IRA)

Irrational behavior

L

Language structuring

Logic of writtenvs. oral communication

Looping effects of human kinds

M

Magistrate’s house

Maya Lin’sVietnam Veterans Memorial

Mead’s theory
self-reflection

Mediated action

Mediating memory
suggestion

Mediation
narrative templates

Medieval books

Memorials
art of memory
cultural artifacts
SeeCultural artifacts
Ground Zero National 9/11 Memorial
mnemonic environments
process-ecological methodology
senses and symbols

Memories
accurate and inaccurate
art of memory
concept
conception
conceptualization
distortion
Ebbinghausian model
errors
and experiences
in history of psychology
mediating
metaphorical/analogical modes
microgenesis
and representations
storage metaphor

Metaphors
characteristics
computer
fill in gaps
interacting associations
language structuring
in social sciences
storage
theoretical models

The method ofloci

The methods of repeated reproduction

The methods of serial reproduction

Microgenesis
atmospheric conditions
Bartlett’s methodology
foreign place names
suggestion

Misinformation effect

Mnemonic environments

Mnemosyne

Mourning murals

Mubarak’s long-standing regime

Multivoiced process

Murdered Jews of Europe

Muslim Brotherhood group

N

Narrative forms
the content of the form
conventional
cultural psychology
historical accounts
imagined community
mediation
mediational role
pro-British version
repeated reproduction
SeeRepeated reproduction

Narratives
indispensable tools
meaning-making tools
mediation
and positions
2011 revolution in Egypt
set of documents
structure

Narrative templates

Nationalist conflicts

Native American community

Nonsense syllables

Norman period

Northern Ireland conflict

Nuanced approach

O

Obedience

Orientation metaphor

P

Peace process in Basque country
Blue
definition
democratic process
dialogical process
Green
multivoiced process
narrative mediation
permanent ceasefire
presentation of news sources
Red
Reddish
truce-trap
writing a story

Permanent ceasefire

Person’s environment

Poetry

Political actors

Positioning

Positions

Preliterate societies

Pro-British version

Process-ecological methodology

Pro-Irish version

Psychological process

Psychological theories

Pure memory

Q

QDA Miner ®

Qualitative interviews

Qualitative transformations

Quantification of errors

Quantitative data processing

The quest for freedom

R

RAL

Rationalization

Reconstructive remembering

Bartlett’s social-cultural theory

Reflecting absence

Remembering
microgenesis
SeeMicrogenesis
social practices

Renaissance memory

Repeated reproduction
data analysis
distribution, participants
dominant elements
meaning units
mediation
memory material
participants
primacy and recency effects
pro-British condition
pro-British version
progressive conventionalization
pro-Irish condition
pro-Irish version
quantitative data processing
questionnaire
rationalization
recall profiles
recall session
retention
selection and omission
simplification
UAM
UPV

Revolution

S

Self-determination

Self-observation

Self-proclaimed national identity

Self-reflection theory

Sign’s social life

Simonides

Simplification

Sixth Sense andThe Others

Social act

Social actors

Social constructiveness

Social-cultural theory

Bartlett’s

Social frameworks

Socialist Party

Social life

Social life of signs
in city space

Social mobilization

Social process

Social psychological principles

Society of mind

Sociocultural approaches

Sociocultural environment

Sociocultural psychology

Solar system

Spanish media

Spatial framework

Storage metaphor
abstract and intangible notion
block of wax in the mind
confessions
constructive memory
contextual relationships
Mnemosyne
organizing
public speaking
transformation and mixing
valuation
wax tablet and stylus

Street art

Street names

Stylus

Subjective camera

Suggestion
character
mediating memory
Michael’s
mutual

T

Telephone

Think aloud protocol

Transformation
conventionalization
participants’ previous positioning on conflict
qualitatively examine
rationalization
repeated reproduction
SeeRepeated reproduction
simplification
units of meaning

The triumph over alien forces

Triumph over foreign aggression

Truce-trap

Turning around upon [one’s] own schemata and constructing them afresh

U

Urban images

Urban memory
exposure
pedestrian experience
pedestrian interviews
social life of signs
SeeUrban space

Urban space
authority
Cairo City Space 2011–2019
collective memory
SeeCollective memory
interventions
methodological approach
signs and narratives
social action
social life of signs
social product

V

Valley of the Fallen memorial

Valuation

Verbal signs

Vietnam War

Voices

Voluntary memory

Vygotsky’s theory
analogy
attention component
chunking information
cultural environment
cultural line
developmental story
development of memory
fine-grained analysis
imaginative component
instrumental component
learning process of familiarizing
mediation
narrative templates
natural line
profits
sign mediation
structures
unmediated and mediated memory relationship
voluntary memory

W

Walk-along interview method

War of the Ghosts

Wax tablet

Weather scheme