Death, Commemoration and Memory: an Exploration of Representation, Concept and Change

Call for Papers: Death, Commemoration and Memory: an Exploration of Representation, Concept and Change

Thursday 24 and Friday 25 June 2010

The Death, Commemoration and Memory (DCM) Research Group is based within the School of Arts, Culture and Environment at the University of Edinburgh. Founded in 2008, DCM provides a forum for postgraduates and staff whose research engages with any aspect of the Group’s remit, attracting junior and senior scholars from a variety of academic disciplines. Building upon the Group’s success, a two‐day conference is planned in Edinburgh for June 2010 to provide a platform for further interdisciplinary discussion and to create new networks between researchers across the world.

Topics for discussion may include, but are not limited to:

- Acts of commemoration, mourning practices and rituals

- The social aspects of individual memory, collective memories and cultural attitudes towards memory

- The ethics and etiquette of death studies: the treatment of human remains in archaeology, pathology and museum practice

- Death in the visual arts: commemoration through architectural and artistic practices

- Poetic, literary and musical interpretations of death

- The dichotomy between history and memory

- Psychological and sociological studies of bereavement

We welcome abstracts of 300 words on any aspect of the conference’s themes, accompanied by a short academic resume of 200 words maximum. Applications should be sent to dcm.ed@hotmail.co.uk with ‘DCM CONFERENCE’ as the email’s subject. Submission deadline: 12 March 2010.

In memory of all members of any religious order who were victims of

state terrorism. Buenos Aires.

Family conversations: everyday cases of collective remembering

The act of sharing memories is often realized in practices of collaborative remembering within social groups in everyday verbal interactions. Recent studies in collaborative remembering in psychology (Harris, Paterson & Kemp, 2008; Harris, Barnier, Sutton & Keil, 2009) have demonstrated that practices of collaborative remembering are beneficial in terms of the quantity and quality of information recalled. In other words, the evidence shows that some people remember more information more efficiently together than they do alone (Harris et al., 2008: 225).

The type of the material asked to be recalled also exerts a strong influence on processes of joint remembering. Nevertheless, one basic condition must be given beforehand in order to reach this positive scenario: social groups must be established and long standing. In other words, social groups involved in practices of collaborative remembering must be cohesive in terms of shared autobiographical knowledge. Each member should be endowed with the ability to make a vast amount of inferences about other members’ cognitive and emotional states with little overt information. That is why each member’s presupposed knowledge of other members and the group as a whole plays a central role in processes of collaborative remembering. Now the question is: what kind of social group has a long-standing shared memory system that enables members to interact and work as sociocognitive system? Without doubt, families represent a privileged example of such a group. Thus, I believe that family conversations may be considered as an outstanding instance in which practices of collaborative recall (Harris, Paterson & Kemp, 2008) take place. Fivush claims that reminiscing is part of everyday interactions within virtually all families (2008:52). Practices of storytelling in everyday family conversations are usually about events of the day experienced by each member of the family alone depending on their family roles (e.g. how hard work was today; what the teacher explained about the causes of poverty, etc.). These practices may also refer to events the family experienced together (e.g. the last holidays in France) or to familiar past (e.g. the parents’ engagement; the grandparents’ adventures, etc.). Family conversations play a central role at the time of constructing and structuring autobiographical memory and self development throughout childhood (Fivush, 2008; Fivush, Bohanek & Duke, 2008).

Narrative & Memory Research Group 10th Annual Conference

Narrative, Memory and Investigation

Keynote speaker :

Professor David Canter

(Director- International Research Centre for Investigative Psychology, University of Huddersfield)

"Personal Narratives of Crime"

Abstracts and Programme of events

Abstracts of no more than 250 words by e-mail only (Word.doc or .rtf please) to conference.presentations02@hud.ac.uk Deadline for abstracts to be submitted is Friday, 12th March 2010. Further details will be circulated later.

About the Conference

The Narrative and Memory Research Group's tenth annual conference entitled 'Narrative, Memory and Investigation' will be held at the University on Saturday, 17th April 2010.

Call for papers

Submissions for papers are requested for the above day conference. Each session will comprise of 25 minutes for the presentation of the papers with 5 minutes for questions

Details on the Conferences and other information on the Group can be found on the Group's website at http://www2.hud.ac.uk/hhs/nme/index.php

About the venue

Huddersfield is the largest town in Britain and nestles at the foot of the Pennines. This former heavy woollen industry town combines urban and rural with its vibrant town centre and sprawl of satellite villages. The town offers a wide range of attractive and conveniently located accommodation. Huddersfield is close to junctions for the M1 and M62, and in easy reach of junctions for the A1 and M6. It is linked by direct rail services for Manchester, Leeds and Wakefield for regular London services. There are direct rail links to Manchester Airport, and Leeds/Bradford Airport is close by.

New issue of Memory Studies available now

Contents:

Wulf Kansteiner, Memory, Media and Menschen: Where is the individual in collective memory studies?

Harald Welzer, Re-narrations: How pasts change in conversational remembering

Christopher J. Hewer and Malgorzata Kut, Historical legacy, social memory and representations of the past within a Polish community

Neil Narine, Film sound and American cultural memory: Resounding trauma in Sophie's Choice

Ana Margarita Ramos, 'The good memory of this land': Reflections on the processes of memory and forgetting

Jens Brockmeier, Robyn Fivush, and Patrick H. Hutton, Book Review: Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds) Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008, 441 pp. $118.00 ISBN 978 3110188608. Reviewed by Jens Brockmeier, Robyn Fivush, Patrick H. Hutton

Memento: a case of extended memory?

Current debates on Philosophy of Mind or so called Philosophical Psychology (Carruthers, 1996), are based on a relatively new hypothesis that came strongly to light by 1998 as a result of Andy Clark and David Charlmers` paper “The Extended Mind”. The extended mind or distributed cognition hypothesis claims that while some mental states and some experiences can be defined internally, there are many others in which the meaning attribution processes are highly influenced by external factors (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). That is, some environmental elements can exert a crucial influence in guiding cognitive processes (Clark, 2006). According to the extended mind hypothesis, cognition depends on multiple connections between the brain, the body and the world, both the physical and the social world. Therefore, in some circumstances, things can have a cognitive life (Sutton, 2006a, 2006b, 2009a).

The extended mind or distributed cognition hypothesis (Clark & Chalmers, 1998) came to displace the mind/body Cartesian dualism by fuelling debates between externalists (e.g. Clark & Chalmers) and internalists in Philosophy of Mind. Jerry Fodor (1983, 2009), an overtly internalist, argues for an architectural and modular approach to the human mind. Fodor (1983) claims that the mind has two parts: input systems and cognition or central systems. The input systems are a series of discreet modules with dedicated architecture that govern sight, hearing, touch, etc. Language is also regarded as an input system. However the cognitive or central system has no architecture at all – this is where “thought”, “imagination” and “problem solving” happen and “intelligence” resides. Each input system is based on independent brain processes and they are quite different from each other, reflecting their different purposes. These systems are localized in specific areas of the brain. The input systems are mandatory: if, for example, somebody sits behind you on the bus and spends the entire journey gasbagging away on their mobile, you cannot switch off the hearing module. However this has the advantage of saving time that would otherwise be spent on decision-making. Fodor believes that the input systems are “encapsulated”, which means that they do not have direct access to the information being acquired by other input systems. In short, what one is experiencing at a given time in one sensory modality is not experienced in any of the others.

In terms of debates about memory, these debates within the Philosophy of Mind are reflected in the way philosophers understand issues such as the malleability of memory, processes of collaborative remembering within small groups, etc. Processes of remembering, considered as situated and goal-oriented action, unfold in real interactions with the immediate environment, cultural tools and other persons. They usually depend on emotional states shaped by mood, motivation, perceived environmental circumstances in terms of cultural models, and so on. Now the question is, how can internalists explain the complexity of the ever changing situated reconstructions of memories in real-world settings? No doubt, they cannot for the simple reason that in an individual internal (mind/brain) and external (body and world) resources create extended memory systems which imply much more than the active involvement of a central processor that matches information from different perceptual systems (vision, smell and language comprehension autonomous modules) stored in memory. For internalists, such as Fodor, the external memory resources (body and world) would need a direct wiring to the neural systems in order to be considered as part of an individual’s memory (Clark, 2009).

Let me give you an example -from Hollywood- in order to better explain how the extended mind/distributed cognition hypothesis is helpful to understand processes of remembering not only within small groups but also at individual levels. The example is a brief analysis of Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000).

Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000) is the story about Leonard, an insurance investigator who suffers from anterograde amnesia, which means he cannot create new memories following a head injury he sustained after intervening on his wife’s murder. Leonard is desperately seeking revenge for this wife’s murder, but due to his memory impairment, this task becomes quite complicated. However, Leonard designs a cognitive system based on tattooing notes on himself and taking pictures of things with a Polaroid camera. This system plays a central role in the story. It works as an embodied GPS driving Leonard’s behavior towards the achievement of his ultimate goal: revenge for his wife’s murder. Leonard’s attempts to create an extended cognitive system based on tattoos and photos, to counterweight his episodic memory impairment, is a striking example illustrating the complexity of memory (Sutton, 2009b). Leonard’s external memory system shows us why memory is much more of and integrative ability, but one that is also entangled and twisted, than the picture given by the architectural approach. Leonard’s case undermines the rationalist distinction between the mind and the body because the mind or the brain is in the body, but the body also inhabits the mind.

To conclude, it is important to point out that my autobiographical memories of having watched Memento (2000) would have probably been left in the darkness of the forgetful brain, if I had not had the opportunity to undertake this writing project. In other words, remembering is situated, goal-oriented and, as expected, due to the influence exerted by the previous two features, usually a cognitive process caused by the interplay of our brains, bodies, and the immediate environment. That is why memory and remembering needs to be thought as a cognitive activity distributed not only between individuals and cultural tools (me and my laptop), but also across individuals and a multiplicity of artifacts with which we continually interact in our everyday lives.

The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism: The Politics of Memory in Europe and Beyond

Date: 11 March 2010 Time: 09:30am - 17:00pm

Venue: Institute of Advanced Studies, MR 2, Lancaster University, UK.

Interdisciplinary Workshop

The Rise of Rightwing Extremism: The Politics of Memory in Europe and Beyond

March 11, 2010

Much research in the Social Sciences provides ample evidence for the current rise of rightwing extremism and rightwing populism in most European Union member states. On the one hand, neo-Nazi movements are to be observed; on the other, these times also witness the spread of more electorally viable, and therefore perhaps more virulent, forces of so-called Haiderization, which tries to disguise the face of extremism under a mask of populist respectability. The elections for the European Parliament (June 2009) illustrate this claim well: the shift to the far right across almost all EU member states can be explained only very partially through global social and economic developments. The specificities have to be related to the histories and collective experiences in each member state.

In Britain, for example, the British National Party (BNP) attracted 943,598 votes (6.2% of the total), and achieved a sufficient percentage in two constituencies to elect two people as MEPs - the party leader and convicted Holocaust denier Nick Griffin for North West England (132,094; 8.0%), and veteran fascist and ex-member of the National Socialist Movement Andrew Brons for Yorkshire and the Humber (120,139; 9.8%). The election of Brons, in particular, indexes an unbroken ideological continuity between the contemporary BNP and open Nazism and Hitler-worship in the 1960s. In Austria, the extreme right-wing populist party, FPÖ (the Austrian Freedom Party), attracted 12.7% and thus doubled their votes and MEPs (currently standing at two, one of them being Andreas Mölzer, the editor of the extreme right-wing newspaper Zur Zeit); the BZÖ (the second extreme right wing party in Austria) achieved 4.6% and thus failed the 5% benchmark. In Hungary, the openly anti-Semitic and anti-Roma party Jobbik, which employs a paramilitary organisation dressed in black with emblems resembling the Nazi Swastika, attracted 14.77%; their salient slogan is 'Hungary First', echoing slogans like 'Germany First' ['Deutschland Zuerst'] or 'Austria First' ['Österreich Zuerst'], all of which connote beliefs and ideologies about who is to be considered as a 'real Austrian, German or Hungarian', and who is not, based on traditional, latent and sometimes manifest, nativist and racist views.

Current socio-political developments are therefore influenced by conflicts among the many versions of the national past to which different social groups and political movements subscribe, and these developments frequently are only to be understood in their entirety if the range of competing narratives is taken into account - something Reinhart Koselleck has so rightly pointed to in his seminal book 'Vergangene Zukunft'[Futures Past]: present and future are always influenced by the immediate past; indeed there is no present or future without taking the past into consideration (Koselleck 1972, 1985).

Memories of the Holocaust have served as a moral and intellectual touchtone at the very centre of the study of memory as a social phenomenon. The genocide against Europe's Jews, while demanding to be understood in its specificity and uniqueness, has also become a paradigm of a historical experience that must not be forgotten. Yet if the memory of the Holocaust has carried such weight in the official discourses of international institutions, in the legal codes of various states, and in the consciences of liberals and democrats, how are we to understand the resurgence of right-wing extremism in relation to the memory/ies of the past? Casual references to the concepts of repression or denial that model socio-political processes on the structure of the human psyche will not account for the relevant phenomena: how do narratives of denial achieve their purchase on the minds of human subjects?

To theorize the extreme right's version of the past as an exercise of repression and denial is, in any event, to remain snared in something like Foucault's "repressive hypothesis". Right-wing extremists' relationship to the past cannot be thought about as mere avoidance, neglect or negationism; instead, this workshop will also attempt to understand the uses to which the far right puts the past as a 'positive and politically generative' force: What narratives of the past set the course for the current vectors of right-wing extremism? What mythic pasts do they venerate and wish others to mourn? Which remembered injuries do they wish to salve? What forms of nostalgia do they wish to stimulate and exploit for present ends? The seeming lack of collective memory when it comes to even recent authoritarian and illiberal political pasts demonstrates a continuing need for historic contextualisation of discourse and for the rigorous analysis of the modalities through which processes of denial and confabulation advance the goals of political movements and colonize the minds of human subjects.

The interdisciplinary workshop, organized by the Research Cluster Dynamics of Memory and the Research Group Language, Ideology, and Power, Lancaster University, will take place March 11, 2010. Specific historical developments will be discussed which impinge on current rightwing extremist ideologies and policies across European member states. Local activists and NGOs will report some of their experiences in counteracting the rise of rightwing extremism. Throughout, the effort will be to understand these political developments as phenomena related to memory: the dynamic interaction of denial and creation in right-wing extremists' mobilization of the past.

Keynote speaker:

Professor Jens Rydgren (Stockholm University).

http://people.su.se/~rydgr/

Professor Rydgren holds a Chair in Sociology at Stockholm University. He is a specialist on rightwing movements and is currently sponsored by the Swedish Reserch Council for his work on Radical Right-wing Populism in Western Europe.

Professor Ridgren will talk about memory and the rise of the extreme right across Europe today (title to be confirmed).

Contact: dom@lancaster.ac.uk

Who can attend: Anyone

Source: Dynamics of Memories: Re-membering in the Plural

Memory Share

BBC Memoryshare is a living archive of memories from 1900 to the present day. You can contribute, share and browse memories of life experiences and see them in the context of recent and historical events. Memoryshare is of value to people across the UK and internationally, and may be used as a source of programme content for the BBC. Anyone registered with bbc.co.uk can contribute to Memoryshare.

The majority of content on Memoryshare is created by Memoryshare contributors, who are members of the public. The views expressed are theirs and unless specifically stated are not those of the BBC.

source: BBC Memory Share

Moral Justification of Immoral Acts

The cognitive reconstruction of the evil/immoral act is the most effective kind of moral disengagement (Bandura 1999). This is due to the fact that by legitimizing the act one not only makes an unacceptable act acceptable, one also goes a step further and turns the previous immoral and self-condemning acts into a source of positive self-evaluation. The term ‘moral justification’ means a cognitive reconstruction of the act, so that it is interpreted as serving a purpose that is in accord with socially and morally acceptable norms. Utilitarian thinking often plays a role in the moral justification: one acts contrary to moral standards, but one does it for a greater good. An illustration of moral justification is a police officer who justifies torturing an alleged terrorist, adducing that the ultimate goal of the immoral act is to obtain information in order to prevent potential terrorist attacks. Other strategies of justification rest upon highlighting the comparative advantages of the immoral acts in relation to the consequences of actions carried out by others, which are categorized as more harmful. For instance, a passive bystander may argue that his lack of intervention is much less harmful than the immoral act itself.

The New School Psychology Bulletin: The Memory Issue

Vol 6, No 2

The Memory Issue

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Memory Issue
Evangeline Lehr

Articles
Virtual memory: The blog as technological prosthetic
Carlo Scannella

A procession of shadows: Examining Warsaw Ghetto testimony
Mark Celinscak

Forgetful "sites of memory": Immigration museums and the uses of public memory
Tamar Blickstein

Are museums sites of memory?
Lorena Rivera-Orraca

Stalinism, memory, and commemoration: Russia's dealing with the past
Christian Volk

The Holy Jester: A story of martyrdom in Revolutionary Mexico
Marisol Lopez-Menendez

Cultural memory and communicative memory

The distinction between communicative and cultural memory was introduced by Jan Assmann (1992, 2008) in order differentiate different types of collective memory (Halbswachs, 1992) that we treated more or less in the same fashion in the social sciences. According to Assmann (2008) communicative memory is shared and conveyed within a social group defined by common memories of personal interaction through the means of verbal communication over a time span of only 80 to 100 years (p. 117). Due to the interactive nature of this kind of memory, social emotions such as hate, love, shame, etc play a central role in what is handed down from one generation to the next. Based on a traditional paradigm in linguistics that used to place everyday communication and interaction aside as an object of study because of its ‘chaotic’ nature (see Saussure’s Course of General Linguistics), Assman defines communicative memory as an unstructured type of memory due to the fact that everyone is allowed to be a part of the interaction in which autobiographical memories are being communicated (p. 111). Taking into account the communicative memory’s unstructured and individual nature, Assmann also adds that communicative memory can be thought of as a private interpretation of a person’s own past and, therefore, as a sort of unwarranted everyday memory. According to Assmann, the other side of that unstructured and individual memory-coin is cultural memory. Based on a folk definition of culture sustained in 19th century English Romaticism (see Arnold, Hobbes, etc.), Assmann defines cultural memory by a more differentiated and exclusive character. In other words, not every member of the community is endowed with the legitimacy to influence the content of cultural memory. In Assmann’s terms, cultural memory is intrinsically related to power and tradition. Hence it covers a much longer period of time in comparison with communicative memory. National archives are the most illustrative example of reservoirs of cultural memory. In short, according to Assmann, cultural memory begins where communicative memory ends.