Ties That Remind: Known Family Connections to Past Events as Salience Cues and Collective Memory of Stalin’s Repressions of the 1930s in Contemporary Russia

2021 ◽  
pp. 000312242110237
Author(s):  
Theodore P. Gerber ◽  
Michael E. van Landingham
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Vast Number ◽  
Moral Relevance ◽  
Mass Trauma ◽  
Family Ties ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cohort Differences ◽  
Family Connections ◽  
Moral Valence

Building on ideas of Halbwachs and others regarding how families shape collective memory, we argue that known family connections to past events serve as salience cues. Due to kin preference (humans’ tendency to empathize with family members more than strangers), awareness that a relative participated in a specific past event increases its visibility, moral relevance, and emotional resonance, compared to that of the vast number of other historical occurrences, with intuitive consequences for whether and how the event is remembered in the present. We illustrate this effect of known family connections to the past by analyzing whether and how contemporary Russians recall a controversial episode from the Soviet period: Stalin’s repressions of the 1930s. We use qualitative data from focus groups and unusually detailed survey data, collected in 2010, to illustrate this property of recognized family connections to a past mass trauma. We also propose four distinct components of perceptions of past events: awareness, knowledge, importance, and moral valence. Our findings confirm the strong influence of known family ties to victims, which exhibit more consistent connections to memories of the repressions than do other factors, although family socialization through childhood discussions, cohort differences, education, and exposure to official narratives also matter.

Of Saints, Shrines, and Tractors: Untangling the Meaning of Islam in Soviet Central Asia

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-405
Author(s):  
Paolo Sartori
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Memory Space ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Continuous Interaction ◽  
Historical Sites ◽  
Soviet Central Asia

Abstract In this article I suggest that in the Soviet period Central Asians cultivated and conceptualized Islam as an episteme. They did this by reaching beyond alienating (and often ephemeral) categories offered to them by the state. I argue that the constitution of an Islamic culture was made possible, among other things, by Central Asians’ encounters with the past, most notably with what they perceived as an Islamic past. We observe the curious phenomenon of Central Asians’ continuous interaction with the Islamic historical sites that escaped the bulldozers of the Soviet campaigns of religious repression. For some, encounters with the past might be accidental. For many others, the exploration of the past represented a purposive, self-conscious, and reiterated emotional act. I show that Central Asians in the Soviet period—even if at school they were taught little about, and were usually offered a distorted vision of, the Islamic history of their region—were still able to access their past through the surviving architectural presence of Islam. Monumental sites, however, were not enough for Muslims to understand the past and use it to construct their own identity. Such artifacts acquired meaning through an interpretive framework provided by Sufi narratives about saints and their miracles. Therefore, shrines represented for Central Asia a collective memory space, i.e., a place in which the past was preserved for mobilization in the present through narrative.

The Palestinian Refugee Camps In Jordan: Between National Identity and Socio-economic Integration

2004 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ala Al-Hamarneh
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Economic Integration ◽  
Refugee Camps ◽  
Spatial Integration ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Distinct Character ◽  
Palestinian Refugee

At least 50 per cent of the population of Jordan is of Palestinian origin. Some 20 per cent of the registered refugees live in ten internationally organized camps, and another 20 per cent in four locally organized camps and numerous informal camps. The camps organized by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) play a major role in keeping Palestinian identity alive. That identity reflects the refugees' rich cultural traditions, political activities, as well as their collective memory, and the distinct character of each camp. Over the past two decades integration of the refugees within Jordanian society has increased. This paper analyses the transformation of the identity of the camp dwellers, as well as their spatial integration in Jordan, and other historical and contemporary factors contributing to this transformation.

Collective Memory: Between Values and Historical Knowledge

2020 ◽  
pp. 124-142
Author(s):  
VICTOR BURLACHUK
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The State ◽  
Main Element ◽  
Rapid Decline ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

At the end of the twentieth century, questions of a secondary nature suddenly became topical: what do we remember and who owns the memory? Memory as one of the mental characteristics of an individual’s activity is complemented by the concept of collective memory, which requires a different method of analysis than the activity of a separate individual. In the 1970s, a situation arose that gave rise to the so-called "historical politics" or "memory politics." If philosophical studies of memory problems of the 30’s and 40’s of the twentieth century were focused mainly on the peculiarities of perception of the past in the individual and collective consciousness and did not go beyond scientific discussions, then half a century later the situation has changed dramatically. The problem of memory has found its political sound: historians and sociologists, politicians and representatives of the media have entered the discourse on memory. Modern society, including all social, ethnic and family groups, has undergone a profound change in the traditional attitude towards the past, which has been associated with changes in the structure of government. In connection with the discrediting of the Soviet Union, the rapid decline of the Communist Party and its ideology, there was a collapse of Marxism, which provided for a certain model of time and history. The end of the revolutionary idea, a powerful vector that indicated the direction of historical time into the future, inevitably led to a rapid change in perception of the past. Three models of the future, which, according to Pierre Nora, defined the face of the past (the future as a restoration of the past, the future as progress and the future as a revolution) that existed until recently, have now lost their relevance. Today, absolute uncertainty hangs over the future. The inability to predict the future poses certain challenges to the present. The end of any teleology of history imposes on the present a debt of memory. Features of the life of memory, the specifics of its state and functioning directly affect the state of identity, both personal and collective. Distortion of memory, its incorrect work, and its ideological manipulation can give rise to an identity crisis. The memorial phenomenon is a certain political resource in a situation of severe socio-political breaks and changes. In the conditions of the economic crisis and in the absence of a real and clear program for future development, the state often seeks to turn memory into the main element of national consolidation.

Justice, Acknowledgment, and Collective Memory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Valls
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Truth Commissions ◽  
Place Names ◽  
The Past ◽  
Regime Transitions

In regime transitions, a number of mechanisms are utilized to memorialize the past and to reject the ideas associated with human rights abused of the prior regime. This is often done through truth commissions, apologies, memorials, museums, changes in place names, national holidays, and other symbolic measures. In the United States, some efforts along these lines have been undertaken, but on the whole they have been very limited and inadequate. In addition, many symbols and memorials associated with the past, such as Confederate monuments and the Confederate Battle Flag, continue to be displayed. Hence while some progress has been made on these issues, much more needs to be done.

The Art of Mythical History and the Temporality of the Athenian Epitaphioi Logoi

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 312-340
Author(s):  
Avi Kapach
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
The Past

AbstractThis essay examines the use of myth and history in the Athenian public funeral speeches (epitaphioi logoi), concentrating specifically on temporality implied by the impulse to “mythologize” recent memories through speech, logos (Dem. 60.9; cf. Pl. Menex. 239b7-c7). While Loraux and other scholars are correct that the epitaphioi endowed Athens with a certain eternity by construing the present through the timeless lens of myth, the prevailing tendency to suspend the Athens of the epitaphioi outside of time leads to difficulties. As I argue, the chronological organization of the epitaphioi grants these speeches an important temporal element and situates them in the same continuum as the present – a move further reinforced by the tendency of the orators to rationalize the Athenian myths much as historians might; accordingly, I propose an adjusted taxonomy with which to approach the temporal status of Athenian epitaphic encomium: the epitaphioi are “mythical” less because of their eternalizing perspective than because of the malleable and pluralistic way in which they conceived of the past and molded it to their ideological purpose. Borrowing from anthropological and cognitive psychological frameworks, I further suggest that by routinely reconsolidating the past in the collective memory of the polis the epitaphioi positioned themselves in opposition to historiography.

Remains of a Picnic: Post-Transition Hungary and Its Austro-Hungarian Past

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 255-291
Author(s):  
Márton Dornbach
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Transition Process ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
The Past

It is difficult to imagine how collective memory might function without the watershed dates that structure our stories about the past. Almost by definition, however, such familiar milestones fail to capture the complex dynamics of the transition from one era to the next. A case in point is the dismantling of the Iron Curtain. As the anniversary commemorations of 2009 showed, this development came to be epitomized by the tearing down of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. One does not need to doubt the importance of this event to see that its sheer symbolic weight tends to obscure the intricacies of the Eastern European transition process. More often than not, accounts that foreground this turning point marginalize some sixty million Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks who embarked on the transition process well ahead of the citizens of East Germany.

Common Sense Propositions

Philosophy ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 48 (186) ◽  
pp. 363-379
Author(s):  
A. C. Ewing
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Physical Object ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Vast Number ◽  
Know How ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Right ◽  
Past Experiences

Philosophers have not been sceptical only about metaphysics or religious beliefs. There are a great number of other beliefs generally held which they have had at least as much difficulty in justifying, and in the present article I ask questions as to the right philosophical attitude to these beliefs in cases where to our everyday thought they seem so obvious as to be a matter of the most ordinary common sense. A vast number of propositions go beyond what is merely empirical and cannot be seen to be logically necessary but are still believed by everybody in their daily life. Into this class fall propositions about physical things, other human minds and even propositions about one's own past experiences based on memory, for we are not now ‘observing’ our past. The phenomenalist does not escape the difficulty about physical things, for he reduces physical object propositions, in so far as true, not merely to propositions about his own actual experience but to propositions about the experiences of other human beings in general under certain conditions, and he cannot either observe or logically prove what the experiences of other people are or what even his own would be under conditions which have not yet been fulfilled. What is the philosopher to say about such propositions? Even Moore, who insisted so strongly that we knew them, admitted that we did not know how we knew them. The claim which a religious man makes to a justified belief that is neither a matter of purely empirical perception nor formally provable is indeed by no means peculiar to the religious. It is made de facto by everybody in his senses, whether or not he realizes that he is doing so. There is indeed a difference: while everyone believes in the existence of other human beings and in the possibility of making some probable predictions about the future from the past, not everybody holds religious beliefs, and although this does not necessarily invalidate the claim it obviously weakens it.

Symbolic Figures of the Decembrists in the Memorial Space of Irkutsk (Early 20th Century - 1991)

2021 ◽  
pp. 129-138
Author(s):  
Yekaterina I. Krasilnikova ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Regional Identity ◽  
100Th Anniversary ◽  
The State ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Memorial Space

The author explores the problem of reflecting the collective memory of Siberians about the exiled Decembrists in the memorial space of Irkutsk at different historical stages. The aim of the article is to characterize the developing dynamics of a segment of the memorial space system that includes Irkutsk's memorial places associated with the Decembrists in the chronological framework of the Soviet period of Russian history. The study is based on the principle of historicism. The methodological reference point of the research is the problem field of memory studies; the concepts of the places of memory of P. Nora and cultural memory of J. Assmann and A. Assmann are used. The author also employs historical-genetic and historical-comparative methods. Within the framework of the Soviet period, three stages of forming the segment of the Irkutsk memorial space associated with the memory about the Decembrists were identified. The first stage, from the 1910s till 1925, reflects the general weakness of Irkutsk city residents' collective memory about the Decembrists, which was manifested in neglecting memorial sites, and the beginning of the awakening of interest in the Decembrists among the local liberal-minded intelligentsia. At the second stage, from 1925 (the 100th anniversary of the Decembrist uprising) till the 1960s, under the influence of the state politics of memory that recognized the Decembrists as the first generation of Russian revolutionaries, the intelligentsia of Irkutsk were actively forming the locus of the Decembrists' memorial space in their city. Based on the memory about the Decembrists, the intelligentsia was constructing their social identity. But the local authorities did not provide the intelligentsia with the desired support, which significantly complicated achieving the memorialization tasks. At the third stage, in the 1960s-1980s, the memory about the Decembrists' stay in Irkutsk was in demand among the local authorities, who used it especially actively during celebrations dedicated to the anniversaries of the city. Many memorable places were designated, and their protection was improved. The sharply increased attention of Irkutsk local administration and city residents to the exiled Decembrists reflected the growth of their regional identity. The author revealed the dependence of reflecting the collective memory about the Decembrists in the Irkutsk memorial space on the state and regional politics of memory, as well as on the local intelligentsia initiatives, for which the memory about the Decembrists served as one of the foundations for constructing their social identity.

scholarly journals The Kosovo memory book as an example of the recording of war victimisation: Methodology and importance for establishing the facts about the past, collective memory and reconciliation

Temida ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 117-133
Author(s):  
Vesna Nikolic-Ristanovic ◽  
Una Radovanovic ◽  
Milica Popovic
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
The Past ◽  
People First

The aim of this paper is the presentation and analysis of the data collection methodology and content of the first volume of the Kosovo Memory Book 1998-2000, as an example of collecting and displaying data of war victimisation from the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Analysis of the Kosovo Memory Book is done in the context of so far development of methodology of data collection about war casualities, with examination of effects that data presented in the book may have on both victims and restoring of broken relationships among people. First, it provides an overview of the methodology used and data obtained, and then the methodology and data, as well as images of conflicts that established data provide and their consequences are discussed and analyzed.

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