Discursive Remembering: Individual and Collective Remembering as a Discursive, Cognitive and Historical Process

If you want to order your copy (or ask your university library to do it) please visit De Gruyter or Amazon 

New publication: Discursive Remembering: individual and collective remembering as a discursive, cognitive and historical process (De Gruyter)

More details coming soon

If you want to pre-order your copy, please visit De Gruyter or Amazon 

New publication: How history shapes memories in autobiographical narratives

Bietti, L & Medina, R. (2012). How History Shapes Memories in Autobiographical Narratives. Social and Education History, 1(3), 222-247.doi:10.4471/hse.2012.15

Abstract. This article examines the interaction between the processes of autobiographical memory in relation to the military dictatorship of 1976-1983 in Argentina and the narrations constructed and communicated by these practices. In this context the article goes over the experiences of a former political dissident in 1970s in Argentina and constructs a self-narration which leads to a sense of this life in history. The results of the connection and synchronization of the autobiographical experiences in a much broader social context made them much more meaningful. Thus, these autobiographical narratives also indicate the ways in which significant historical events mold individual subjectivities.

Workshop/Conference: Emotion - Violence - Memory

When: July 4-6

Where: Cluster of Excellence ‘Languages of Emotion’, FU Berlin

This workshop invites contributions that explore how people in societies of past and ongoing conflict overcome, communicate, and remember experiences of collective, political and gendered violence. It does so with a core focus on the emotions that are evoked, articulated, and/or regulated in these processes. By bringing together scholars from different disciplines we aim to break new ground in the emerging field at the intersection of emotion, collective memory and violence.
Recent studies on memory have revealed the dynamics between the individual and the social, emphasizing how individual and collective memory is mutually constitutive. The individual enters the collective and the collective shapes what is individually remembered. While highlighting these processes as both psychological and social, the role of emotions in processes of collective memory has been underexplored. Yet, research over the last decades has shown that emotions as bio-cultural processes are pivotal aspects of social relations, often embedded in relations of power. They constitute political and social resources that are crucial for the construction and reconstruction of communities.
We thus turn our attention to the linkages emotions articulate with various forms and practices of remembrance of violent experiences. Our vantage point is the assumption that all forms and acts of remembering are inseparable from emotions shaped by the social, cultural and political contexts in which they occur. This workshop discusses these processes and opens new avenues of thought.

Please find the complete program here (PDF).

Please note that registration is required for the workshop (reynaud@zedat.fu-berlin.de). The keynote address by Veena Das is open to the public.

Talk on cultural memory at the TV show 'Agenda' on the Deutsche Welle

Guest at the TV show 'Agenda' on the Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany's international broadcaster. Click here to have access to the video online [in Spanish].

When: May 8th, 2012

Where: Berlin

New publication: Memorias compartidas, conversación de familia e interacción

Bietti, L. (2011). Memorias compartidas, conversacion de familia e interaccion [translation by Amanda Vallejo Morales]. Discurso & Sociedad 5 (4), 749-794.

New publication: The commemoration of March 24th, 1976: Understanding the exceptionality of the present political discourse about the “Dirty War” in Argentina

Bietti, L. (2011). The commemoration of March 24th, 1976: Understanding the exceptionality of the present political discourse about the “Dirty War” in Argentina. Journal of Language and Politics 10 (3), 347-371. [Doi. .1075/jlp.10.3.03bie]

Abstract

In December 2001, Argentina underwent the worst socio-economic crisis in its history. Strong criticisms were raised by society against almost all the social injustices encouraged by the policies promoted by the former governments. Forgiveness of the crimes committed by the dictatorship during the “Dirty War” which took place in the late 70’s, and reconciliation between the members of the dictatorship and society, was the position held by the post-dictatorship governments. However, the official discourse has radically changed since 2003, because of the administration of elected president Nestor Kirchner (2003–2007). The aim of this paper is to explore some of the changes in relation to the creation of two time-frames (TF1/TF2) to represent actors from the past and the present, and reinforce the current exceptionality of Néstor Kirchner’s political stance. To do this, I will analyse four political speeches given by ex- president Néstor Kirchner to commemorate the anniversary of the coup d’état of March 24th, 1976, the date which marks the beginning of the 1976–1983 military dictatorship.

Keywords: Argentina, collective memory, dictatorship, discursive strategies, Néstor Kirchner, time-frames

New publication: Joint remembering: Cognition, communication and interaction in processes of memory-making

Bietti, L. (2011). Joint remembering: Cognition, communication and interaction in processes of memory-making. Memory Studies, doi: 10.1177/1750698011404986

Abstract

This article provides a new cognitive- and discourse-based theory to memory research. Despite the fact that a large proportion of studies in memory research are based on investigations of (interactional) cognitive and discourse processes, neither linguistics nor cognitive and social psychologists have proposed an integrative, interdisciplinary and discursive-based theory to memory research. In this article I explore how groups of people who did not know each other jointly coordinate the interlocking of their individual experiences during a period of dictatorship and their self-positioning in the here and now. The interlocking of autobiographical memories is performed by discourse strategies such as agreements and corrections, which are dependent on the participants’ shifting representations of the communicative interaction. The conversations were about personal experiences related to the 1976–83 military dictatorship in Argentina.

Cultural memory studies and discourse analysis

Special issues of the Journal of Language and Politics (2006) and Critical Discourse Studies (2009) featured articles investigating the relationship between traumatic pasts, history, memory and discourse. Except for one article on the military dictatorship in Uruguay, these studies were specifically focused on the Nazi past, right-wing politics in Austria and the United Kingdom, and several issues related to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. The article which analyzes discourse practices of remembrance in Uruguay (Achugar, 2009) is part of a wider and more detailed investigation of the public discourse about the Uruguayan dictatorship (1973-1985). This investigation was published in the monograph What We Remember: the Construction of Memory in Military Discourse (Achugar, 2008). In this study, Achugar explores aspects of commemorative speeches in relation to the Uruguayan dictatorship.

In regards to Argentina, the ways in which language and ideology are interwoven in political speeches delivered by political leaders and the military in recent Argentinean history have been explored in numerous studies (Lavandera, 1985a, 1985b; García Negroni, 1988; García Negroni & Zoppi Fontana, 1992; García Negroni & Raiter, 1988; Montero, 2007, 2008, 2009; Pardo & Lorenzo-Dus, 2010). Several of these studies are in line with the increasing politicization of memory research in the social sciences. They were focused on examining how public memories of political events are strategically constructed in accordance with specific political interests. These public memories are shaped and reproduced in a range of different textual genres: political speeches, military speeches, editorials, textbooks, etc.

In a recently published article on discourse and commemoration of the Malvinas (Falklands) War in the Journal of Multicultural Discourses, Pardo and Lorenzo-Dus (2010) explore the British and Argentinean war hero constructions in Argentinean and British TV shows broadcasted for the 25th commemoration of the war in 2007. The authors conclude that the Argentinean constructions of war here are driven by a ‘modern’ archetype of lone here willing to die for this country, whereas the British are more based on a ‘postmodern’ archetype of the hero as someone who merely does his job as part of team work. This is the first comparative study on paradigms of commemoration in relation to the Malvinas (Falklands) War in discourse analysis and media studies, and may represent a first step to new interdisciplinary research programs on ‘collective memory’ and commemorative practices on Argentinean recent history.

Montero (2007, 2008, 2009) has specifically investigated the new discourse about the military dictatorship introduced and maintained by Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007). In these studies, she explores the tensions and complexities of the current process of collective memory-making in Argentina (Montero, 2008: 27). She investigates the role of authority and political decisions in the speeches of Kirchner. In doing so, she provides arguments about the ideological mechanisms underlying the discursive construction of the political identity of the administration in Kirchner in by means of its way of revisiting the traumatic past (Montero, 2009).

The systematic and detailed linguistic analysis of Argentina’s violent past have shown that the public narratives about the military dictatorship are not mechanically determined by the objective facts about the past, but are rather socially mediated by ideologies in the present. The main aim of those studies was to explore the ideological traits underpinning public speeches about the past by disentangling the strategic relationships between social and textual structures in political discourses. Consequently, little attention has been paid to the key role that the cognitive mechanisms underlying discourse processing (e.g. the role of presupposed knowledge in commemorative speeches in driving inferential processes) play by interconnecting those social and textual structures, with reference to the military regime. I argue that the lack of a cognitive theory of discourse has prevented discourse approaches from providing an exhaustive and integrative picture of the socio-cognitive complexity of discourse processes within the creation of memories.

References

Achugar, M. (2008). What We Remember. The Construction of Memory in Military Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Achugar, M. (2009). Constructing the past and constructing themselves: the Uruguayan military’s memory of the dictatorship. Critical Discourse Studies 6 (4), 283-295.

García Negroni, M.M. (1988). La destinación en el discurso político: una categoría múltiple. Lenguaje en Contexto 1 (1/2), 85-111.

García Negroni, M.M. & Raiter, A. (1988). Vers l'Analyse de la Dynamique du Discours. Le Discours du Dr. Tróccoli. Mots 17. October.

García Negroni, M.M. & Zoppi Fontata, M.G. (1992). Análisis Lingüístico y Discurso Político. El Poder de Enunciar. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina.

Lavandera, B. (1985a). Curso de Lingüística General para el Análisis del Discurso. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina.

Lavandera, B. (1985b). Intertextual Relationships: 'Missing People' in Argentina. In D. Tannen (ed.), Languages and Linguistics: The Interdependence of Theory, Data and Application (pp.121-139). Washington D.C: Georgetown University Press.

Montero, A. S. (2007). “¡Claro que estoy en campaña!”: Exclamación, oposición y verdad en el discurso presidencial (Argentina, 2003-2006). Análisis semántico-argumentativo del marcador claro que. Revista Oralia: Análisis del Discurso Oral 10, 193-212.

Montero, A.S. (2008). Justicia y decisión en el discurso presidencial argentino sobre la memoria (2003-2007). CONfines 7, 27-41.

Montero, A. S. (2009). Puesta en escena, destinación y contra-destinación en el discurso kirchnerista (Argentina, 2003-2007). Discurso & Sociedad 3 (2), 316-347.

Pardo, L. & Lorenzo-Dus, N. (2010). The Falklands/Malvinas 25 years on: a comparative analysis of constructions of heroism on Argentinean and British television. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 5 (3), 253-270.

Memory studies in the social sciences and the humanities in Argentina

Memory research in the social sciences has mainly focused on investigating practices of social and collective memory of the 1976-1983 military dictatorship. Social-scientific studies of memories of political violence have mostly been carried out by sociologists (Calveiro, 1998; Crenzel, 2008; Feierstein, 2005, 2007; Jelin[i], 2001, 2002, 2007; Jelin & Lorenz, 2004; Jelin & Longoni, 2005), anthropologists (Guber, 2001; Robben, 2005a, 2005b, 2006; Vecchioli, 2005), communication scientists (Feld, 2002, 2006; Kaiser, 2005), historians ( Carnovale, Lorenz & Pittaluga, Franco & Levin, 2007; Lorenz, 2009), cultural theorists (Sarlo, 2005; Vezzetti, 2003, 2009), and political scientists (Roniger & Sznajder, 1998, 2009; Sznajder & Roniger, 2005).

Several years before the political changes introduced in Argentina by the administration of Néstor Kirchner in Argentina (2003) and in Uruguay by the administration of Tabaré Vázquez (2005), Roniger and Sznajder (1998) put forward the following argument in a comparative study about the politics of memory in the two countries:

A major trend in these societies’(Argentinean and Uruguayan) confrontation with the legacy of human rights violations has been the almost complete absence of physical lieux de mémoire (tombs, mausoleums, public monuments) which could help to encapsulate and frame the past. Indeed, the creation of lieux de mémoire is sometimes perceived as an intention to separate the sites of commemoration from the living society. This poses a challenge for those who are trying to sustain the memory of their loved ones, as well as presenting problems for society at large. The absence of specific and contained lieux de mémoire is extremely painful for the relatives of those missing victims whose burial sites are unknown and prompts some of them (especially the Argentinean Mothers and associations of victims’ relatives) to claim an ever-present role as a living collective memory and ethical collective consciousness. For society at large, the absence of lieux de mémoire keeps the memory of unfulfilled justice and past human rights violations as an open wound and projects the basic disagreements about the past into the public sphere as periodic crisis. (Roniger & Sznajder: 1998: 161)

In sum, these studies were theoretically grounded in the hypothesis that memory is mainly a socio-cultural and political construct. That is, memory is a special type of shared political experience that is shaped by social frameworks of remembrance which enable these experiences to come to light.

Just as many European and American sociologists, historians and anthropologists (Connerton, 1989; Halbwachs, 1992; Levy & Sznaider, 2005, 2006; Misztal, 2003; Olick, 2003, 2007, 2008; Olick & Robbins, 1998) are investigating how social differentiation and political power shape narratives of the past, Argentinean social scientists have also been interested in the roles of the media, politicians, and cultural resources such as memorials and rituals in the processes of legitimizing certain social and collective memories in detriment to others[ii]. These cultural products, e.g. archive, memorials, museums, films, books and photographs, may be thought of as vehicles of memory (Jelin, 2002, 2007), which may be operating to create sites of memory (Nora, 1989) and, thereby, shape collective narratives of the past.

The place of memory, therefore, is the place of political struggle, a struggle which is commonly represented as a struggle against forgetting due to the fact that societies which remember their mistakes in the past tend not to commit the same errors in the present or in the future. Remembering, as opposed to being silent or forgetting, obscures what is actually a contest between rival memories, each with their own oblivions. In the case of the military dictatorship in Argentina, Jelin (2002) states that the erasing and forgetfulness of the past were products of the will or a policy of silence and forgetting on the part of actors who elaborate strategies to hide and to destroy proof and all traces of their crimes, thus impeding people’s ability to remember the military dictatorship in the future. In these instances, there were voluntary political acts of destruction of proof and traces of crimes committed during the dictatorship (e.g. pardons and policies aimed at ‘national reconciliation’), carried out with the intention of promoting selective forgetfulness. However, the memories of the witnesses could not be manipulated in the same way (except through the physical extermination of the latter).

On the other hand, Jelin points out that all policies of conserving memories have an implicit will to forget when selecting traces to preserve, conserve, or commemorate. However, she does not present any specific cases of selective forgetting in the present politics of memory in Argentina. As I indicate in chapter four, these cases of selective forgetting within the Argentinean context may be related to the consequences of the violent acts (e.g. terrorist attacks) committed by former members of armed, political organizations. This underlies a struggle between competing memories, rather than a struggle against forgetting.

Jelin (2007) maintains that the constitution, the institutionalization, the recognition and the strength of the memories and of the identities feed each other. There are, as much for individual people as for groups and societies, ‘peaceful’ periods and periods of crisis. In the peaceful periods, when memories and identities are formed, instituted and tied, the questions that may be asked are not urgent enough to cause any reordering or restructuring of memories. Social forms of memory perform a central role at the time of defining social identities. This feature is crucial after periods of mass violence, such as dictatorships involving mass political repression of dissidents. In these social contexts, collective memories form social identities whose cohesion – most of the time – is based on only one goal: the attainment of reparative justice (Levy & Sznaider, 2005, 2006).

Although the majority of these scholars do not deny that memories must be stored in people’s minds most of their investigations are centered on exploring the cultural products arising from processes of societal remembering. In other words, despite the fact that they do not deny that individuals are responsible for retrieving collective memories (Halbwachs, 1992; Jelin, 2002; Olick 2008), they argue that those memories are always shaped and re-shaped by means of social frameworks that allow the emergence of some memories, while leaving others in the dark. Hence, collective memories are not the sum of individual memories or the outcome of sharing autobiographical memories in a specific social setting. This perspective is focused on exploring the social processes which form and legitimate public representations of the past. In other words, collective memories can be thought of as a group of ideas, images and feelings relating to the past and which emerge from the influence exerted by the cultural resources that people share. Hence, it is important to analyze both the way in which societies use their cultural resources of memory, narratives about the past, rituals, memorials, etc. (e.g. Cromañón), and the processes that make collective memories generate, legitimate, convey, and transform society.

According to Jelin (2007), power relations and hegemony are always present in memories because of the struggle to appropriate meaning and interpretations of the past (2007: 141). This struggle against silence or forgetting lies at the heart of why memory has become such an emotionally and ideologically loaded concept in Argentina. This struggle is crucial after periods of mass violence, such as the 1976-1983 military. In this social milieu, social frameworks of remembrance (Halbwachs, 1992) facilitated the emergence and consolidation of vehicles of memory – many of them considered to be identity projects – which were aimed at the attainment of reparative justice for human rights abuses in the past[iii]. In Argentina, the new social framework of remembrance, explained in the first sections of this chapter, have put recent history into the memory of both individuals and ‘society’ and, in so doing, made the past a living force for designing a new positioning, attitudes, and polices according to specific political interests (Roniger & Snajder, 1998: 134).

The studies referred to above highlight the importance of analyzing practices of social remembrance in Argentinean society. By disentangling how products of social memory work as vehicles of remembrance (Jelin, 2007), these investigations aim at stressing the necessity of remembering the past in order to construct a more democratic society, condemn the traumatic past, and learn from the mistakes committed. Revisiting a past marred by conflict in order to better understand the present and construct a society’s future by strengthening the bonds of solidarity and promoting social justice.

References

Calveiro, P. (1998). Poder y Desaparición. Los Campos de Concentración en Argentina. Buenos Aires: Ed. Colihue.

Carnovale, V., Lorenz, F. & Pittaluga, R. (eds.) (2006). Historia, Memoria y Fuentes Orales. Buenos Aires: CEDINCI.

Crenzel, E. (2008). La Historia Política del Nunca Más. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI editores.

Feierstein, D. (2007) El Genocidio Como Práctica Social. Entre el Nazismo y la Experiencia Argentina. Buenos Aires: FCE.

Feierstein, D. (ed.) (2005). Genocidio, la Administración de la Muerte en la Modernidad. Buenos Aires: EDUNTREF.

Feld, C. (2002). Del Estrado a la Pantalla: Las Imágenes del Juicio a los ex Comandantes en Argentina. Madrid/Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.

Feld, C. (2006). Quand la televisión argentine convoque les disparus. Modalités et enjeux de la représentation médiatique d’une expérience extrême. Les temps des médias, 6.

Franco, M. & Levín, F. (eds.) (2007). Historia Reciente. Perspectivas y Desafíos para un Campo en Construcción. Buenos Aires: Paidós.

Guber, R. (2001). ¿Por qué Malvinas? De la Causa Nacional a la Guerra Absurda. Buenos Aires: FCE.

Jelin, E. & Longoni, A. (eds.) (2005). Escrituras, Imágenes y Escenarios Ante la Represión. Madrid/Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.

Jelin, E. & Lorenz, F. (eds.) (2004). Educación y Memoria: La Escuela Elabora el Pasado. Madrid/Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.

Jelin, E. (2001). Fechas de la memoria social. Las conmemoraciones en perspectiva comparada. Voces recobradas: Revista de Historia Oral 3, (10). Buenos Aires: Instituto Histórico de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires.

Jelin, E. (2002). Los Trabajos de la Memoria. Madrid/Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.

Jelin, E. (2007). Public memorialization in perspective: truth, justice and memory of past repression in the Southern Cone of South America. The International Journal of Transitional Justice 1 (1), 138-156.

Kaiser, S. (2005). Postmemories of Terror: A New Generation Copes with the Legacy of the "Dirty War”. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Lorenz, F. (2009). Malvinas: Una Guerra Argentina. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana.

Robben, A.C.G.M. (2005a). Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press.

Robben, A.C.G.M. (2005b). How traumatized societies remember: the aftermath of the Argentina’s Dirty War. Culture Critique, 120-164.

Robben, A.C.G.M. (2006). Combat motivation, fear and terror in twentieth century Argentinean warfare. Journal of Contemporary History 4 (2), 357-377.

Roniger, L. & Sznajder, M. (1998). The politics of memory and oblivion in redemocratized Argentina and Uruguay. History and Memory 10 (1), 133-169.

Roniger, L. & Sznajder, M. (2009). The Politics of Exile in Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sarlo, B. (2005). Tiempo Pasado. Cultura de la Memoria y Giro Subjetivo. Una Discusión. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.

Sznajder, M. & Roniger, L. (2005) From Argentina to Israel: Escape, evacuation and exile. Journal of Latin American Studies 37 (2), 351-377.

Vezzetti, H. (2003). Pasado y Presente. Guerra, Dictadura y Sociedad en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.

Vezzetti, H. (2009). Sobre la Violencia Revolucionaria: Memorias y Olvidos. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.

Notes

[i] Elizabeth Jelin is one of the key scholars in social memory studies in Latin America. She was a board member and former director of the United Nations Research Institute for Human Development. Elizabeth Jelin is the head of the Núcleo de Estudios de Memoria at the Institute for Economic and Social Development in Buenos Aires (IDES). Between 1999 and 2001 Jelin was the principal investigator and coordinator of a large research program ‘Memoria Colectiva de la Represión: Perspectivas Comparativas sobre los Procesos de Democratización en el Cono Sur de America Latina’, which was funded by the Social Science Research Council, NYC. This program awarded 60 research grants to researchers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and the United States. The results of this project came out in a collection of 10 volumes published in Madrid and Buenos Aires by Siglo XXI editores ((http://www.ides.org.ar/grupoestudios/memoria/VolColeccion.jsp).

[ii]Social memory research in Argentina tends to be more ideologically loaded than the above mentioned studies undertaken by American and European social scientists mostly because of the current changes in the Argentina’s cultural and political dynamics in relation to the 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

[iii] A good example of remembrance and commemorative practices as identity projects is the human rights association HIJOS, which is an acronym for Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice in the Face of Silence and Forgetting). For more information see: http://www.hijos.org.ar/.

Psychological approaches to memory research on political violence in Argentina

Apart from the studies that have been conducted since the mid 80’s (Kordon & Edelman, 1986, 2007; Kordon, Edelman, Lagos & Kersner, 1995, 2005) by El Equipo Argentino de Trabajo de Investigación Psicosocial (the Argentinean Team of Psychosocial Research Work) analyzing, in clinical settings, both the individual and social psychological effects (e.g. both individual and social trauma) of the police and military repression, the sciences of the mind have contributed little to the better understanding of the influence of political events in the development, consolidation, and transformation of memories within society.

In 1986 Kordon and Edelman published Efectos Psicológicos de la Represión Política (The Psychological Effects of the Political Repression), which was the first book on this topic in Argentina. Kordon and Edelman elaborated hypotheses that allowed them to meditate on the effects of the traumatic situations in both the identifying processes and the individual and collective memories. In this sense, Kordon and Edelman held that memories of the political repression were linked to individual and collective identity and to the possibility of a future. Thus, they pointed out the fact that the memories of the dictatorship were not a neutral playing field, but rather a battlefield in which collective identity was legitimated and modeled. They developed some clinical investigations that included interviews with the children of the missing people within this framework. As a result of these interviews and clinical investigations, they concluded that the disappearance of the parents produced specific effects in the constitution of the identity of the children. Among other effects, they found that the interference of the support, the concealment within the family environment of the disappearance of the parents, and the denial emerging from the social context produced different levels of affectation in those children. The cases of illegal appropriation of babies by the perpetrators aggravated these levels of affectation. Kordon and Edelman maintained that the creation of association by children of the desaparecidos may play a central role in coping processes and may thereby mitigate the negative effects provoked by the illegal appropriation of babies.

References

Kordon, D. & Edelman, L. (2007). Por-venires de la Memoria. Buenos Aires: Editorial Madres de Plaza de Mayo.

Kordon, D. & Edelman, L. (eds.) (1986). Efectos Psicológicos de la Represión Política. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana-Planeta.

Kordon, D., Edelman, L., Lagos, D. & Kersner, D. (2005). Efectos Psicológicos y Psicosociales de la Represión Política y la Impunidad. Buenos Aires: Editorial Madres de Plaza de Mayo.

Kordon, D., Edelman, L., Lagos, D. & Kersner, D. (1995). La Impunidad: Una Perspectiva Psicosocial y Clínica. Buenos Aires: Planeta.

New publication: 'Piercing memories': Empty spaces in the histories of Argentinean families

Bietti, L. (2011). 'Piercing memories': Empty spaces in the histories of Argentinean families. Memory Studies 4 (1), 83-87.

Abstract. This brief article particularly focuses on my ‘piercing memories’ of the 1976—83 military dictatorship when visiting a photography exhibition about the missing people. As an Argentinean born in Buenos Aires 30 years ago, I do not have many personal recollections of the period of dictatorship, yet the photographs of the exhibition act as external memory devices, enabling me to reconstruct and re-encounter both the largely forgotten and unarticulated personal experiences as well as the socially shared memories about what happened under the dictatorship. Despite the lack of first-hand knowledge and direct suffering — I do not have a missing relative - my ‘piercing memories’ of this traumatic period in Argentinean history are still very emotionally loaded and play a central role in defining my identity and personal motivations.

New publication: Sharing memories, family conversation and interaction

Bietti, L. (2010). Sharing memories, family conversation and interaction. Discourse & Society 21 (5), 499-523.

Abstract. Shared memories play a central role in everyday communications. They are usually based on interpersonal and cultural knowledge of a shared past among group members (e.g. family, friends, partners, etc.). These memories are verbally conveyed in everyday conversations in real-world settings. Shared memories are also utilized to create a feeling of connection and maintain a consistent feeling of identity among group members. In family conversations, shared memories function to structure and synchronize the shareable life story of the family as a group. Family members are strategically engaged in processes of remembering and forgetting, which are modelled according to the specific goals of a particular interaction. In these cases, family members construct a sociocognitive system shaped by the physical and social environment in which they are located. This system operates by connecting autobiographical knowledge, which is distributed among family members, but forms part of shared past experiences. By interrelating distributed episodic memories, this sociocognitive system endows family members with the ability to manage distributed autobiographical knowledge. In order to perform this cognitive task, they make use of a wide set of discursive epistemic strategies such as presuppositions and implicatures, justifications, rejections and reminders of shared knowledge of the past. The aim of this article is to show the ways in which a shared past is managed, communicated and negotiated in an everyday family conversation by means of discursive epistemic strategies. The conversation was about five historical dates linked to Argentinean political history.