Social Mindscapes An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology I I I Eviatar Zerubavel Harvard University Press Cambridge, Miissnrliusotl.s London, England »0 / Soefal meanings doorknob, a feather, or a laptop computer if we so wish. By them token, we can designate mere pieces of otherwise-useless paper: being worth $100 (or even thousands of dollars in the cW< cnecta; precisely because, unlike milk or eggs, for example, moneyi valuable only as a means of exchange and is therefore intrinsic) worthless!" Such cognitive flexibility, in fact, is one of the great advantages * IZhZ °'KT ;""'ma'S' wbkh> be,n« serio"^ constricted to ZZ T mem''m °fthe theY ^e, are clearly am./* «o a ,scene/ therr strictly indicative tU(lt,loll. A }ion cmmot decide ce2 'C i ''>' thinking pro- tntial of symbols i "* "'"'^ l",,i""'k,<' "*nilyi"6 y human em, , , '"ei",s ;' ,cm'We of our distinc-Y nnman capacity to think creatively. 6/ Social Memories Not only does our social environment influence the way we mentally process the present, it also affects the way we remember the past. Like the present, the past is to some extent also part of a social rarity that, while far from being absolutely objective, nonetheless transcends our own subjectivity and is shared by others around us. As evident from the u m" versa list ic tendency of those who study memory today to focus primarily on the formal aspects of the processes of organizing, storing, and accessing memories which we all share, they are largely interested in how humans remember past events. And yet, when they come to examine the actual contents of those memories, they usually go to the other extreme and locus on the individual. Nowhere is this individualistic bent more glaringly evident than in psychoanalysis, which deals almost exclusively with our distinctly personal memories. Once again one can identify a relatively unexplored intellectual terrain made up of various "remembrance environments" lying somewhere between the strictly personal and the absolutely universal. These environments (which include, for example, the family, the workplace, the profession, the fan club, the ethnic group, the religious community, and the nation) arc all larger than the individual yet at the same time considerably smaller than the entire human race. Admittedly, there are various universal patterns of organizing, a i H2 I Social Memories storing, and accessing past experiences that indeed characterize w human beings and actually distinguish human memory from that of dogs, spiders, or parrots. At the same time, it is also quite clear that we each have our own unique autobiographical memories, made up of absolutely personal experiences that we share with nobody else. Yet we also happen to have certain memories which we share with some people but not with others. Thus, for example, there are certain memories commonly shared by most Guatemalans or art historians yet only by few Australians or marine biologists. By the same token, there are many memories shared by nearly all Beatles fans, stamp collectors, or longtime readers of' Mad Magazine, yet by no one else besides them. The unmistakably common nature of such memories indicates that they are clearly not just personal. At the same time, the fact that they are almost exclusively confined to a particular thought community shows that they are not entirely universal either. Such memories constitute the distinctive domain of the sociology of memory, which, unlike any of the other cognitive sciences, focuses specifically on the social aspects of the mental act of remembering. In doing so, it certainly helps us gain a finer appreciation of the considerable extent to which our social environment affects the way we remember the past. I lie work on memory typically produced by cognitive psychologists might lead one to believe that the act of remembering takes place in a social vacuum. The relative lack of explicit attention to the social context within which human memory is normally sitiuited tends to promote a rather distorted vision of individuals as "mnemonic J obinson Crusoes" whose memories are virtually free of any social influence or constraint. Such a naive vision would be quite inappro-pi 'ate even within the somewhat synthetic context of the psycholog-, ,aboratoiy> where much of the research on memory today (with "0tab,e option of "ecologically" oriented work)1 typically Social Memories / Jt.'i takes place. It is even less appropriate, however, within the context of real life. Consider the critical role of others as witnesses whose memories Help corroborate our own.2 No wonder most courts of law do not give uncorroborated testimony the same amount of credence and official recognition as admissible evidence that they normally give to socially corroborated testimony. After all, most of us tend to feel somewhat reassured that what we seem to remember indeed happened when there are others who can verify our recollections and thereby provide them with a stamp of intersubjectivity. The terribly frustrating experience of recalling people or events that no one else seems to remember strongly resembles that of seeing things or hearing sounds which no one else does.3 Furthermore, there are various occasions when other people have even better access to certain parts of our past than we ourselves do and can therefore help us recall people and events which we have Somehow forgotten. A wife, lor example, may remind her husband about an old friend of his which he had once mentioned to her yet has since forgotten.1 Parents, grandparents, and older siblings, of course, often remember events from our own childhood that we cannot possibly recall. In lact, many of our earliest "memories" are actually recollections of stories we heard from them about our childhood.1 In an odd way, they remember them for us! Yet such social mediation can also assume a somewhat negative form, since such "mnemonic others" can also help block our access to certain events in our own past, to the point of actually preventing some of them from becoming memories in the first place! This is particularly critical in the case of very young children, who still depend on others around them to define what is real (as well as "memorable") and what is not. A 35-ycar-old secretary whose boss tells her to "forget this ever happened" will probably be psychologically independent enough to store that forbidden memory in her mind anyway. However, a five-year-old boy whose mother flatly «1 / Social M« denies that a certain event rhey have just experien^^ ^jjtfai ^ took place will most likely have a much harder en< pressure to suppress it from Jiis consciousness a repressing it altogether. feas0n* ^ Such instances remind us, of course, tnai . be inter*1' , times tend to repress our memories may not always ^ ^ j^pl that our social environment certainly plays a maj° ^ ^r eV us determine what is "memorable" and what fte should) forget. Needless to say, they further demon* uity of sociomental control. The notion that there are certain things that one 5 ^^]$0^f underscores the normative dimension of memory, w ^ ^tiC*1*1' ignored by cognitive psychology. Like the curricular I ^ ^lt ization of required history classes in school, it renj ^ ^ .(,,JS0 remembering is more than just a spontaneous persona at > ^]0]v happens to be regulated by unmistakably social rules ' ^tfO brance that tell us quite specifically what we should reniei what we must forget. % jn il]C Such rules often determine how far back we reruem^.^fld same way that society helps delineate the scope of our atten {Q concern through various norms of focusing, it ",so ^ affect the extent of our mental reach into the past by setting ^ historical horizons beyond which past events are regarded as how irrelevant and, as such, often forgotten altogether." f ^ The way society affects the "depth" of individuals' memory >) ^ egating certain parts of the past to official oblivion is often ant> and the K t0triCal>' past mat is considered legally irrele-j°n^nature0f0mc*a% forgotten. The unmistakably conven-1 'S VerV often St3tUte ot imitations, of course, reminds us that bygone SO(:,ety tnat determines which particular bygones we Yet lhe exte 01 °Ur memontt° Which our social environment affects the "depth" We G°ftVenf ^,S 0 manifested somewhat more tacitly in the way ^Onient in V^aUy b°gin historical narratives.7 By defining a certain llin,'iUive b • ^ as tnc actual beginning of a particular historical ines for us everything that preceded that Us> for ev< mCre C for example, offers its readers a brief his->ortugue 0l IVlozamDiclue that begins with its "discovery" by the moment ^ 1498 antl (ails t0 rcmind mern tnat mat particular history it^T me beginning of the European chapter in its eia] obijv" °^ates mat country's entire pre-European past to offi-'s the w similar example of such "mnemonic decapitation" thc Book (?,andeis DeSin the official history of their island. Both r/slt,''^'nLb'?eUlementS (Landndmabdk) and Book of Icelanders n o*J mention in passing the fact that when the first tor 1 6 ' Social If.-,,,,,,.,,., írish monks lhlZd?n 'he island ''" '»'«"> oenturfi 'hey!0"!i'< **»*WWtii /dc^"'ere, ye, their commitment to ****' ",0"- Norweg/*"''^ fand 'Wore origins) leads them »ff* COn<*°l the ^ "4 ,"S "s>" * W While not trying to **** ;°vcvy. b 2 I Celts prior to fefart ««*' * ° "s "«»n»2"aVm"S' th£y WrLless treat them * Consider als I '"counter withVnZ we co"™tionally regard Columbus's 0 tbe memory " *» °ffi™' "disco Jy» thereby s>PP«* ,ft l492»«dtZ"Írh the idei< 'hat America history begf 8Zhearare^Pmo1rSm'»«*« MÉ*™ Hemisphere Pri*.<° "ex'W » ",e N°rse vov ropean encounters mf/> if, ť'evc'"'/> anJP°**/y CT* 'he Athmtic (to Greenhnf t,ve °fnei ai* stffl not a) ''" ",e /ate ten", and cad)' "* n'Hy J Ve,y of Ameri C°"1'deredPM of the official narrt-s,,0'« or,/,,,'1-''" ^e indisD.nl, De$pite the l:M that most of* ;e«a'" hist?:'?"'" NO,SC « —BB O*"**" hi J,, '""df>Hin ,he he fore Columbus, we if'" '° ^fixr; ate can *— • ormative convention. One Social Memories / «7 ^pe-Columui< ^c us*a\ly learn what wc should remember and *^^lly takes ,part of our mnemonic socialfeatw* a process mem% suCh as ^ when wc enter an altogether new social en _ reUgion, or Hcn get married, start a new job, convert to an ^ u8U.aUy to another country.1' (It is a subtle pi» nt ashared naPpens rather tacitly: listening to a family mem ^ conSidered exPerience, for example, implicitly teaches one ^ acquamting us memorable and what one can actually forg *L te in that environ-the specific rules of remembrance that ope ^ remembering. mer»t, it introduces us to a particular wtradttio► ^ remcm_ * mnemonic tradition includes not only Wtia ^ ^ how We as members of a particular thoughtcomm* (Q remember" is ^member it. Alter all, much of what we se hroUgh a process o< dually RHered (and often inevitably distot tea* ^ facts we subsequent interpretation, which affects no ^ happen to recall r*eall but also the particular "light" in Whic ^ ^ -n a ^em. Thus, it is hardly surprising that a * and romanti- %hVy traditionalistic family which tends to t-grandfather as a cixe the past would come to "remember ne^ ^ ,§ ^ /vmeri-Wger-than-life, almost mythical figure. In nomesuremem-cans who grow up today in liberal and cons ^ ^ ^ u)70s ber" so differently the great social upheava s ^ ^ interpret As the very first social environment m w ■ 1 ^ ^ Qur mnemonic our own experience, the family plays a ci 11 tat.ons Df early "rec-socialization. In fact, most subsequent Jnter^ q , reinterpretations ollections' of particular events in ones h e ar ^ xmtm\itxtA within of the way they were originally experience . 0ften spend a lot the context of one s family! That explains wny 88 / s . , of mental effort . I ■^flection* frcl WCgr°W UP tr^g to 'Yedaim"ourown p**"? °ften experience ? °Ur Parents or oider siblings. Indeed, what is kabk bet^en r.mnenS,Ve *e almost Mnemonic lem*< retaJ,,ng cer^in people and events (inough w th°Se wme peo, ,PrOV:t/ed by our immediate fami/v and recall d<*per layers of ' , CVCnts ^ gradually regaining contact Vet mneni seives-Can% by pro!nonI?'aditions affect our memory even more sigf' ,eads *tof!SS? US f° ad°Pt a Wtoihr cognitive "bias"" ** body of re ' >Cr Certai" mings but not others. As an hicTe*^ br<*ds memorable seems t0 familiarity an* can somehow fit imn " 7 tCnd to Member information thai * tUres ftat "make sen ? y""made> famiJiar schematic mental struc a,ready seen, affect f° L" (the sam« structures that, as we have exPerience).Thatiswh-^ ^ mentj% Process our percept tlcu/ar character in 7 " " USmlly nnich «M«r to recaii that a pa'" W,lcn is a S we bave read happened to wear gia^ "Urse- Tms tendenrv? than when sh* " ■ wain-ess or I °njy <° actual /acts I ° .remembef mings schematically applies Cwhfcb is often » (° lhe W^ *e recall the general "gist"0* the »*Y we interpret th WC Ca" remernber of them)'6 as well as to rlb further apprmemories'J7 Ceed accordlng toTcert *** !mdency to remember events that pro-Slder »&0 the formula! "i*^ SCt rfP«or expectations, C0fl< t° narrate tbe past ,C" Scyt-Me "plot structures"'8 we often use rZlo"fet view of the hi,^ r fXample °' which is the traditional S:ael a'most exclusive ,7, "CXi/'c",ife outtfcte the Land of *nd » quite interests °f^rSe^ion and victimization/' ;,d 1 fi«t realize that ^,n/h,s regard, that only in my late thirties r^embered" lan J hin! ?M Dre^ / had always ""'// <*W fallen I g ,thc penal ^ony on Devil's island Wro"gJy convicted for? lnt»™°™ 1894 trial at w/uVh he was ,ti'*'» again*. France;, was actually exoncr- &m oi tvamt\n% European ) ^ ctio ^cb Mosa. of \\ve«\ ate eftVvet , "nation Tl • • — — n'<*l det 'L ' we tenc* 10 remember so much better situa-^ostlv u 1 8 are salient in our own culture or subculture,21 it is S°ciaUXat: e Something we acquire as part of our mnemonic ^OStly b °ncortv' L'USC S° many of our Pre-existing expectations are based °nce antl0,VdUzed> s^ial typifkations." UitoUs 8ai.n We arc seeing indisputable evidence of society's ubiq-0\vn experts* V°le as a me WaS something 1 had already "seen" on the cover when 1 waT Concert' by Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi (where an* ^ en' And wnen 1 saw the infamous "Lion's Mouth" °nynious accusers once dropped their denunciations of 90 ' S'"i',l M,;,„,ri,.s ivZtlT™ "le P"«ceJ in the Paiac* of ^ iy See'n8 1 remembered from a book I grands ,'ny are rath« v/vkl ■•,ecoilect;onS"o/'»y SS'I rH"'° ' "ever e™ ™t and about ' ^5 film 77,*V C'uc'fi«on (the way I first W it in H«*°Us \L „,,,„;', f »W when J was twelve,, and the first £J S ioT'!" '** Way ' —J it when / read M and Gcnthh",en,<"'«" of the fnca Empire, the PW* W j noneo2m ' '',s'>ik' tne fac< ">»' ' personally exper****0 "mi;,?1"'" are "'>' recollections of most of the "history What I n«„ ,n " P'ace in mY own lifetime entirely P«s°'fj by othe„ 1 re"'e'"'>cr of *« events is how they were descry mediated me exPerience them personally! They arc sock"> of others Tl °''tS tha' "re based ent're'y on secondhand accoiif from Algeria TexamP,e> ' "remember" the French p""°u Way they w.V" SOV'"el '"vasion of Prague mainly through tl* "reeairthepTl WPOIted *' ,he »> 'he newspapers. I of Apolfo ,, ,"" tn'ai- ",c Cut»an missile crisis, and the feu"** reports.* moon mainly through radio and tclcvis*"' expcr/en^"^0' ,7'"" Wc ^ w "remember" we did not actuals ,'i,es- organfeatf °"a °"'y do so as '"embers of particular ftm-w'"'d' we hapcen , T",'""S' °"lcr mnemonic communities" to """ ' "recall"*, ', ,, ,Thus>'<»' example, it is mainly as a le* P,e /crusa/em m ,C ""''Woman destruction of the First Tern-BY the same token u ,wenty-five centuries before I was born. mv great-great. era„ , asainemoerofmy family that r "remember" Car"'ed by a„yo„e'„^ er (whosc mem°ry is probably no longer 8 goal against Brazil in the 1950 World Cup f 4>* •^Parlse*! ^ the sPedal PliKC of the Stonewall riots and oi ^ respc^ S Carly gigs with Dizzy Gillespie at Mintons Play I louse llHWd, l^llVe mem°nes of homosexuals and jazz aficionados. • . ^aPpciT?5 S0Cia* presuPP°ses tnc ^^ility 10 experience events !oinedthem .t0 8rouPS and communities long before wc even Uy s° perfe T lf l^Cy Wer€ somehow part of our own past, an abil-rePeatec| e caPtured by the traditional Jewish claim, explicitly andQ0V Communi^s to which one belongs is an indispensable Morta °ne>S unmista^ably social identity as an anthropologist, a the IJ c*!' 3 ^'lUivc American, a Miami Dolphins fan, or a member of ^ Marine Corps. $oc'lQr a eCCn *n dccnnc- Consider also the long tradition of dam^f Sl1^er*n^ carried by many present-day American descen-sharn °i n*neteenth-century African slaves, or the great sense of ma Pei'vades the experience of many young Germans born Indeed S ^ ^ C°lla^se wf lhc Nazi reSime" 1 .)„t . 6 * ldQUUIying with a particular collective past is an imnor- uuu part of ii me process of acquiring a particular social identity 92 / Social Memories (hence the appeal for some students of African-American and Women's Studies programs in universities, for example). Familiarizing new members with their collective past is an important part of groups'and communities*general efforts to incorporate them. Business corporations, colleges, and army battalions, for example, often introduce new members to their collective history as part of their general "orientation." Children whose parents came to the United States from Ghana, Ecuador, or Cambodia are likewise taught in school to "remember" Paul Revere and the Mayflower as part of their own past. From Poland to Mexico, from israel to Taiwan, the study of national history plays a major role in the general effort of the modern state to foster a national identity." At the same time (and for precisely the same reasons), exiting a group or a community typically involves forgetting its past. Children who are abandoned by one of their parents, for example, rarely carry on the memories of his or her i\mYily. Children of assimilated immigrants likewise rarely learn much Írom their parents about the history of the societies they chose to leave, both physically and psychologically, behind them. Given its highly impersonal nature, social memory need not even be stored in individuals' minds. Indeed, there are some unmistakably mipersonal "sites" or memory. II was the invention of language that first freed human memory -on, the need to be stored in individuals' minds. As soon as it became technically possible for people to somehow "share" their personal experiences with others, those experiences were no longer exclusively theirs and could therefore be preserved as somewhat impersonal recollections even alter they themselves were long gone, n fact, with language, memories can actually pass from one person to another even when there is no direct contact between them, through an intermediate. Indeed, that has always been one of the mam social functions of the elderly, who, as the de facto custodians 01 the social memories of their communities, have traditionally Social Memories / served as "mnemonic go-betweens" essentially linking historically separate generations who would otherwise never be able to mentally "connect" with one another. Such "mnemonic transitivity" allows for the social preservation of memories in stories, poems, and legends that are transmitted from one generation to the next. One finds such oral traditions in practically any social community—from families, churches, law firms, and college fraternities to ethnic groups, air force bases, basketball teams, and radio stations. It was thus an oral tradition that enabled the Marranos in Spain, for example, to preserve their secret Jewish heritage (and therefore identity) for so many generations. It was likewise through stories that the memory of their spectacular eleventh-century encounter with America was originally preserved by Icelanders, more than a century before it was fust recorded in their famous sagas and some 930 years before it was tust corroborated by actual archaeological finds in Newfoundland. Furthermore, ever since the invention of writing several thousand years ago, it is also possible to actually bypass any oral contact, however indirect, between the original carrier of a particular recollection and its various future retrievers. Present-day readers of Saint Augustine's Confessions can actually "share" his personal recollections of his youth despite the fact that he has already been dead for more than fifteen centuries! Doctors can likewise share patient histories readily, since the highly impersonal clinical memories captured in their records are accessible even when those who originally recorded them there arc not readily available for immediate consultations That explains the tremendous significance of documents in science (laboratory notes, published results of research), law (affidavits, contracts), diplomacy (telegrams, treaties),business (receipts, signed agreements), and bureaucracy (letters of acceptance, minutes of meetings), as well as of the archives, libraries, and computer files where they are typically stored.36 It also accounts for the critical role of history textbooks in the mnemonic socialization oi present and future generations. 94 ' s , 1 nor ^m Yet preserving social memories requires neither oU ^^ts aJ transmission. Given the inherent durability of "J*^ i0irne^' well as the fact that they are mnemom'cally evocative in a^ ^uS ate, "tangible" manner, they too play an important role in ^.j^gS retain memories.37 Hence the role of ruins, relics, and o p0J0gy as social souvenirs. A visit to the National Museum of An .^pjl-in Mexico City, for example, helps "connect" modern Mf* ^ t|ie grims" to their Toltec, Maya, and Aztec origins. A walk t » _ ^, old neighborhoods of Jerusalem likewise allows present-quasi-personal "contact" with their collective past. y) ^ As evident from the modern advent of preservationist Qfp as from the modern states political use of archaeology as P ^ general effort to promote nationalism,40 we are certainly "l0.^ t0 just passive consumers of such quasi-physical mnemonic ^ ^ our collective past. Numerous medals, plaques, tombston^^^ memorials, Halls of Fame, and other commemorative mom ^ (and the fact that we make them from stone or metal rat ^ paper or wood)11 serve as evidence that we purposefully des# future sites of memory well in advance. Like souvenirs, C aS ^jye books, and antiques,'1' such objects have a purely commemo^^ value for us, and we design them strictly for the purpose Ol a ^ ^ future generations mnemonic access to their collective pas • ^ entire meaning of such "pre-ruins" derives from the fact t 13 fg are mnemonically evocative and will therefore help us in the to recover our past. ^ The self-conscious effort to preserve the past for posterity t ■ ^ ifested even more poignantly in the statues, portraits, stunip^^ and paper money we produce as social souvenirs. The visua I ^ so vividly captured on them represent an ambitious attemp ^ somehow "freeze" time and allow future generations the fu,leSt^if sible mnemonic access to major individuals and events from ^ collective past. National galleries that try to offer posterity a co^ prehensive visual encapsulation of a nation's history (the col ec of paintings displayed in the U.S. Capitol building," 0\C%0 RlVC ' Social Memories / 9* . the culmination of at ft* national PaUce in Mexico aT c SIK* artistic endeavors. u s Us two major off- Sm<* the invention of the camera Us wei ^ese moVe tra- motion-picture ana television came . way lo *J*N means of "capture me past have gra ^ tekvis\on and hW5 The ferity V>hoto f „ Ls of social mem-*tc^e, indeed, are among the major modern moVies, and °7« * fact, it is primarily through snapsno^ v M natives, ^Vkvon footage that most of us nowadays i «mWy weddings, or the Gu\f War. recording technol- k evident horn the rapid evolution ot au" ecoVder, m out ftortv the phonograph to the portable cas ^ c.apluve not only '^mpUo somehow "freeze" ume we acUv^vy y reCord-v^ual images but also the very sounds ot wj V Uovovv\txs con-of Winston Churchill's speeches and via ncance 0f tapes, eevts, tov example, underscore the gtov;mg mcmoVy. c*ssettes,and compact discs as modern sites Q(kTn attempt to Video technology, of course, represents rvc the past. The totegvate such graphic and some efforts P h>luc camcorder ultimate progeny of the camera and the ptio * ^ wat are virtually generates remarkably vivid audio-visual "^mous v\dcotapedbeat-mdependent of any individual carrier. 1 ^L tes po\ice, for exam-vng of KodneyKingby members of the U* bodied and therefore pie, is the epitome of such absolutely ense atea use in court, truly impersonal memory, Ks evident U^m.|KVCasU^\y common use it may very well represent (not unlike the m^e uU\mate victory of of instant video replay in televised sports) metnory. social and therefore "ofneial* over purely pet onal they are often Nov only arc many of our recollections im?^1 evet ^.UYV under four also collective. My memory of the first mi cnme track world, minutes, for example, is actually shared by fie^ sociologists, lews, So are some of the memories 1 shave with ot Cnese cases my own or Rutgers University employees. In each o V"vese 96 / Social Memories recollections are part of a collective memory"' shared by an entire community as a whole. The collective memory of a mnemonic community is quite different from the sum total of the personal recollections of its various individual members,18 as it includes only those that are commonly shared by all of them (in the same way that public opinion, for example, is more than just an aggregate of individuals' personal opinions).19 In other words, it involves the integration of various different personal pasts into a single common past that all members of a community come to remember collectively. America's coll memory of the Vietnam War, for example, is thus more th ■ IV€ aggregate of all the war-related recollections of individual cans inct ic ierttfrVs mMpctwe memorv nf tha T I „ ^ men. cans, just as Israel's collective memory of the Holocaust than the mere sum of the personal recollections of all the I \ ^ m°re survivors living in Israel. D*°Cail$t We must be particularly careful not to mistake personal' ■Testations of a mnemonic community's collective mCm ' n^uv-uinely personal recollections." When asked to list the fV^ 8er»^ that come to their minds in response to the prompt "An-/1 ^ narneS tory from its beginning through the end of the Civil W^^11 nis~ cans usually list the same people—George Washing,^ ^**leri-Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert* Al)|'uhani Adams, and Ulysses S. Grant.52 The fact that so many *'°e> John viduals happen to have the same "free" associations Cnt »nd* nation's past shows that their memories are not as in\ ^HnH tj ! we might think but merely personalized manifestatio ^^^m^ common collective memory. In so doing, it also u _,S °( o si *S tremendous significance of mnemonic socialization rSco,-e n^e s the Yet the notion of a "collective memory" implies a . ........ ------ ' r --^o ii p-, °nJy commonly shared but also jointly remembered ****** memorated"). By helping ensure that an entire rnnem ^m is n[ty will come to remember its past together, as 0tUc c ' Co- y Social Memories / *)1 affects nol only what and who we remember but also when we remember it! Commemorative anniversaries such as the 1992 Columbus quin-centennial, the 1995 fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, and the 1976 American bicentennial are classic manifestations of such mnemonic synchronization. Yet we also "co-remember" past events by associating them with holidays and other "memorial days' which we jointly celebrate on a regular annual53 (or even weekly, as in the case of both the Sabbath and the Lord's Day)31 basis. Fixed in a mnemonic community's calendar, such days ensure members' synchronized access to their collective past. Indeed, keeping certain past events in our collective memory by ensuring their annual commemoration is one of the main functions of the calendar." Thus, on Easter, millions of Christians come to remember their common spiritual origins together, as a community. By the same token, every Passover, lews all over the world jointly remember their collective birth as a people. The annual commemoration of the French Revolution on Bastille Day and of the European colonization of New England on Thanksgiving Day play similar "co-evocative" roles for frenchmen and Americans, respectively. That also explains various attempts throughout history to remove certain holidays from the calendar in an effort to obliterate the collective memories they evoke. The calendrical dissociation of Easter from Passover, for example, was thus part of a conscious effort by the Church to "decontaminate" Christians' collective memory from somewhat embarrassing Jewish elements,56 whereas the calendar of the French Revolution represented an attempt to establish a mnemonically sanitized secular holiday cycle that would be devoid of any Christian memories/'7 Given all this, it is also clear why the recent political battle over the inclusion of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday in the American calendar was actually a battle over the place of African Americans in America's collective memory. ?°Ueht 'IZ'1'" An'^Z °!"jk"y incl"de Martin Luther KinSl>'< »u'h^'uS We"»* »£ndar i$ °"e of numerous W*» r7cr "^erZepast- Thl """"oak communities o*f * thc,?C co, "'e Z?'^'ofsud> mnemonics -c,' "/;«'"-e or* e oil ■ AS We devd°P » '""^ offft. „ esP°nsible In,, 01 ">e mod* , """y he remembered """"'or °' and the B*- '"'^blTy^ticof'bers *re Vo£°°°e*mpkryheraicevents, fa'»neSs that result 'fa. incite caln*m- 0 ""'.'/,v« „■ '' '"""a,/,,-, 'r conventional Se"evidenl Zjbmorical narrative ■ Mer all, even people Soč"*1 .tB-íed«**f 'ust^^ cht to ■«trying to recount an event <^ ^ ° ^ ^ disagree on tne precise point ^üiev .c shouh S' I» W not at all dear, for ^f^ohnson o. ^ lead>ng of Ac Vietnam War dur.«8 *«of the cv inVäded *it absolutely dear v*«** the «* ^ ^n£^es l" the Gulf War ought to begin «« veľSion),o> * , pottUcd *** (which is the standard A»«c. J« ^ und** eaffe, when both were Still part „tango*1*? Múch is the -standard Iraq' v«*^ lotal«««< „as*** , ^ might expect, such narrateW a), Harbor i« *-v,l ,-apan and the United »«^W °n ^icbomb^ b«tW overthe inclusion of the W - „ t„e ^m Va c **» in the narrative of the evenute eJ Slates ft ^ . fan <* Hiroshima and Nagasak, by the ^ po n 0l the Consider also the /Uab-lsraehk ougl* "> ic dep«c«°n nation of the history of the ^ (he ^rocu f(, anyone ^ objection of Native Amenc*^ ^ Mt fove it " Of as the beginning of ^"^nds <* 1* ,fl«rc of •« «hose ancestors lived in MW^ yin\y const-'discovered" by Europe, that date ^ discord ending than a beginning. (he fact »ha „vively o J hike Akira Kurosawas lbe past.■ «« wine way. * at all reminds us that our memory 0 ber >t the bat c„u the, since we evidently do no a . < ^ (&ueh mnemonic battles usually mvo « |hc pulw *»11 * communities, and are typically fej )f which B fe m0t£ v an newspaper editorials and ra K ^ JUjJ-J past is not entirely subject** the fo** lWuy to iust a personal act is also ejg* ^ g^^rf ^£ the way we view the past (su^n ^y inlues. cuhuMist historiographVc S£ **** " social changes that affect cnt« c ^t^ again, underscores the inters sion of human memory.