Under Attack

First Vision ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 219-228
Author(s):  
Steven C. Harper

Drawing on newly discovered accounts (1832, 1835) and lots of contextual research, James Allen and Milton Backman added an alternative memory to the buffer on which the saints could draw for memory resources. Believing historians formed a faithful, complex understanding of Smith’s vision that accounted for the incongruity the critics saw in the historical record. The believing historians selected and related new items to old ones. They showed how new elements could be integrated recursively with the long-established story. The laity hardly noticed, however. Compared to the expanding number of Mormons whose conversions were often tied to the canonized account of Smith’s first vision, Mormon historians were a tiny minority. Publishing their findings did almost nothing to alter the Mormon collective memory or make it more resilient to critics. The disruptive potential of the newly discovered records and ways of interpreting them remained latent, waiting for an information age to unleash it.

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 327
Author(s):  
Sonale Diane Pastro de Oliveira ◽  
Maria Gabriela Silva Martins da Cunha Marinho

<p><strong>Resumo:</strong> Superado o regime militar, o Brasil tornou-se signatário de acordos internacionais de defesa e promoção dos direitos humanos. Apesar disso, até recentemente, o país negligenciou princípios e fundamentos da justiça de transição previstos pelo Sistema Interamericano de Direitos Humanos, entre eles, o direito à verdade, fato que o coloca à margem daquele Sistema. O artigo pontua aspectos políticos da transição-redemocratização política que podem explicar o adiamento da instalação da Comissão Nacional da Verdade no país, criada somente em 2011, e acentua também o caráter contraditório do processo. Especificamente, a análise assinala o fato de que ao transitar da memória para a história, como pretensamente fazem as comissões da verdade, os indivíduos que se aventuram no registro histórico estarão manejando e interferindo na memória coletiva, na percepção e na identidade da qual fazem parte, o que transforma memória em poder.   <br /><strong></strong></p><p><strong>Palavras-chaves:</strong> Comissão da Verdade; Memória; Relações de Poder; Direitos Humanos; Democracia.  </p><p><strong>Abstract:</strong> Overcoming the military regime, Brazil has become signatory of the international defense agreements and promotion of human rights. Yet, until recently, the country has neglected to foundations of transitional justice provided for the Inter-American System of Human Rights, between them, the right of truth, fact that stands aside that system. The article points out political aspects of transitional policy re-democratization which may explain the setting up progress of the National Truth Committee in the country, created only in 2011, and also emphasizes the contradictory procedure. Specifically, the analysis indicates the fact that going through memory to history, the way supposedly the Truth Committees do, the individuals who venture into a historical record will be managing and interfering in the collective memory, perception and identity from which they take part and change memory into power.  <br /><strong></strong></p><p><strong>Keywords:</strong> The Truth Committee, Memory and Power Relations, Human Rights, Democracy.<strong> </strong></p>


Author(s):  
Dr. Anju Mehra

An attempt has been made in the present paper to study and analyse the troubled and traumatized self of Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. A psychoanalytic thinker says “trauma places the relation between external reality and psychic reality in focus. A person’s personal experiences are represented in one’s own psyche and gets personalised. The internal world of wishes, conflicts and deficits, resulting from trauma, is negotiated in human interaction”. Here, Sethe felt affected both by physical and emotional trauma caused by the institution of slavery.The institution of slavery not only repressed the maternal bond betweenSethe and her children but alsoher own individualization and the development of her consciousness as a normal human being. Here, an attempt has also been made to explore how much she was affected by the repression of the memories of the trauma she had endured in her life and how much she was victimized and traumatized that she felt unable to nurture her own child Beloved. Under the oppressive conditions of slavery she found herself unable to form a maternal bond between herself and her beloved daughter. Morrison also tried to restore the historical record of the atrocities on the blacks during the period of slavery and give voice to the collective memory of Afro-Americans by depicting the trauma faced by Sethe


Author(s):  
Steven Harper

Joseph Smith, the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, remembered that his first audible prayer, uttered in spring 1820, resulted in a vision of heavenly beings who forgave him and told him Christianity had gone astray. “The Mormon narrative,” according to a 2012 blog post, “seems to always start with a young boy who asked God a question one spring morning in 1820.” That is true if one qualifies the always, for it has not always been so. When and why and how did Joseph Smith’s “first vision,” as Latter-day Saints or “Mormons” know the event, become their seminal story? What challenges did it face along the way? What changes did it undergo as a result? Can it possibly hold its privileged position against the tides of doubt and disbelief, memory studies, and source criticism—all in the information age? First Vision tells how Joseph Smith—by remembering his past in various present contexts—opened the way for alternatives, how saints chose the collective memory they did, and what difference it has made for them and their critics. This book is the biography of a contested memory and how it was born, grew, changed the world, and was changed by it.


1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-625 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlo Caballero

Even though Gabriel Fauré's contemporaries championed his music as quintessentially French, Fauré distanced himself from policies of national exclusion in art, and his own construction of French musical style was cosmopolitan. This essay summarizes Fauré's political choices during the Great War, explains his motives, and indicates how some of his decisions affected French musical life. Fauré's outspoken preface to Georges Jean-Aubry's La Musique française d'aujourd'hui provides one key to the composer's position. Jean-Aubry, following Debussy, reckoned as authentically French only musical styles attached to pre-Revolutionary traditions. Fauré felt that such a narrow characterization of French music falsified the diversity of the historical record. His preface therefore takes issue with Jean-Aubry's book and insists that German composers had played an irrefutable role in the formation of modern French music. We may understand Fauré's-and other composers'-wartime decisions in terms of a distinction between patriotism and nationalism. Composers such as Fauré, Bruneau, and Ravel emerge as patriots. Debussy, who sought to purify French music of foreign contamination, emerges as a nationalist. Both nationalism and patriotism call on collective memory and experience, but nationalism exercises its power protectively and tends toward exclusion, while patriotism, favoring political over ethnic determination, tends toward inclusion. Fauré's patriotism emerges through the evidence of the preface; charitable activities; his refusal to sign a French declaration calling for a ban on contemporary German and Austrian music; and his attempt to unite the Société Nationale and the Société Musicale Indépendante. Fauré's wartime music, in contrast to his writings and activities, evades connections with historical events and raises methodological questions about perceived relations between political belief and artistic expression.


First Vision ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 77-82
Author(s):  
Steven C. Harper

Orson Pratt continued in the roles of selector and relater and repeater throughout his life. As far as the historical record shows, he wrote and spoke more on the topic of Smith’s first vision than any of his contemporaries. He shaped the saints’ collective memory of the vision. Pratt’s many recitals of the first vision were memorable, whereas others’, such as Tullidge’s poem, did not endure. Pratt enjoyed status and authority among the saints, but that alone hardly accounts for his success. His discursive choices brought Joseph Smith back to life and evoked his vision as reassurance that God still favored the Latter-day Saints. Because of his role in the church and his former personal relationship with Joseph Smith, Pratt was more able than others to reach people emotionally and thus memorably.


2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-78
Author(s):  
Sophie Richardot

The aim of this study is to understand to what extent soliciting collective memory facilitates the appropriation of knowledge. After being informed about Milgram’s experiment on obedience to authority, students were asked to mention historical or contemporary events that came to mind while thinking about submission to authority. Main results of the factorial analysis show that the students who do not believe in the reproducibility of the experimental results oppose dramatic past events to a peaceful present, whereas those who do believe in the reproducibility of the results also mention dramatic contemporary events, thus linking past and present. Moreover, the students who do not accept the results for today personify historical events, whereas those who fully accept them generalize their impact. Therefore, according to their attitude toward this objet of knowledge, the students refer to two kinds of memory: a “closed memory,” which tends to relegate Milgram’s results to ancient history; and an “open memory,” which, on the contrary, transforms past events into a concept that helps them understand the present. Soliciting collective memory may contribute to the appropriation of knowledge provided the memory activated is an “open” one, linking past to present and going beyond the singularity of the event.


Author(s):  
Angela A. Manginelli ◽  
Franziska Geringswald ◽  
Stefan Pollmann

When distractor configurations are repeated over time, visual search becomes more efficient, even if participants are unaware of the repetition. This contextual cueing is a form of incidental, implicit learning. One might therefore expect that contextual cueing does not (or only minimally) rely on working memory resources. This, however, is debated in the literature. We investigated contextual cueing under either a visuospatial or a nonspatial (color) visual working memory load. We found that contextual cueing was disrupted by the concurrent visuospatial, but not by the color working memory load. A control experiment ruled out that unspecific attentional factors of the dual-task situation disrupted contextual cueing. Visuospatial working memory may be needed to match current display items with long-term memory traces of previously learned displays.


Author(s):  
Wim De Neys ◽  
Niki Verschueren

Abstract. The Monty Hall Dilemma (MHD) is an intriguing example of the discrepancy between people’s intuitions and normative reasoning. This study examines whether the notorious difficulty of the MHD is associated with limitations in working memory resources. Experiment 1 and 2 examined the link between MHD reasoning and working memory capacity. Experiment 3 tested the role of working memory experimentally by burdening the executive resources with a secondary task. Results showed that participants who solved the MHD correctly had a significantly higher working memory capacity than erroneous responders. Correct responding also decreased under secondary task load. Findings indicate that working memory capacity plays a key role in overcoming salient intuitions and selecting the correct switching response during MHD reasoning.


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