Time Maps

1
Time Maps Framing/Containing Memory
origin
prehistory
history
2
Presentation Dates for First Short Report
3
Readings for This Week

• Required
• Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Culture and Meaning in
  the Museum Museums and the Interpretation of
  Visual Culture, Florence, KY Routledge,2000,
  pp.1-19 (on-line resource)
• Johnson, Nuala C. Mapping monuments the
  shaping of public space and cultural identities,
  Visual Communication. 2002. 1(3), pp. 293-98.
• Olick, Jeffrey. Collective Memory The Two
  Cultures, Sociological Theory. 17(3), pp.
  333-348.
• Recommended (basis for Todays Lecture)
• Zerubavel, Eviatar, excerpts from Time Maps
  Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the
  Past. (Chicago University of Chicago Press,
  2003), pp. 1-2, 8-10, 11-36.

4
Todays Class

• Lecture Discussion Themes
• Time Maps Collective Memory
• If time begin thinking about Collected Personal
  Memories vs. Collective Memory
• Film Screening
• Guest Presentation by Sylvia Roberts about
  Library Resources

5
Time Frames in Collective Memory Studies

• Assumptions about mnemonic traces
• Cognitive vs. unconscious processes
• History vs. representations of the past
• mental structures

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931
6
Processes Forms for Framing Memory in time

• Sociomental topography of how communities
  remember the past
• Unconventional approach to links between
  conventional ideas of history
  public/collecctive memory
• mnemonic traditions
• recalling the past together synchronizing
  attention on particular moments
• social norms of remembering
• Mnemonic transitivity (allows memory to pass from
  one person to another even when there is no
  directe contact)

7
Communication of memories

• Mnemonic go-betweens (ex. Old people)
• Oral or written accounts
• visual resources (ex. Photo albums, books)
• Material culture (monuments, Halls of Fame,
  artifacts, art)
• Practices (pageants, anniversaries)
• Laws

8
Triggers, memory retrieval (types of Mnemonic
devices)

• Words, facts, skills, events
• Ideals, goals, intentions, promises
• Feelings, states-of-mind, earlier selves etc
• Things, odours, ex. Madeleine (Proust,
  Remembrance of things past, triggered by smell
  and taste of Madeleines, a style of French
  cupcake)

9
Time Maps the Social Shaping of Memory

• Questions of relevance
• Long and short term
• Eventful and uneventful periods
• Connections
• Discontinuities

10
Analyzing the Structures of Socio-Mental memory
traditions

• conventional ways of stringing memories together
  into culturally-meaningful narratives
• strategies to create the illusion of historical
  continuity (bridges)
• genealogical structures of ancestry descent
• watersheds that separate one period from the
  next inflating mental divides
• The social construction of beginnings (origin
  myths and the legitimation of claims about the
  past)

11
(1)Plotlines Narrative Forms

• Establish connections in narratives,
• scenarios, plotlines
• Mental historical outlooks,
• Selective use of history,
• Often anticipate future
• Progress narratives

12
Plotlines Narrative Forms

• Decline narratives
• Both imply single direction

13
Zigzag Narratives

• Conversion
• Recovery
• Rise fall

14
Evolutionary narratives

• Unilinear (deterministic)
• Multilinear
• (ex. Cladograms--branching)

15
Circles (Cycles),

• recurrence

16
Cycles (Rhymes)
17
Density Variations --Mountains and valleys

• eventful vs. uneventful moments in the past
• Unevenly distributed

18
Commemgram example

• Eventful times,
• Multiple pasts

19
Tasbaski Preparations-Senegal
20
Historical Phrasing in Narratives

• Musical terms
• Legato (connected)
• Staccato (breaks)

21
2-Creating Historical Continuity by bridging gaps

• Linking noncontiguous points in time or place to
  establish continuity
• Same place
• Same things (relics memorabilia)
• Imitation of the past (ex. Courtroom etiquette
  religious ritual)
• same time (commemorative holidays,
  reenactments, seasonal identity

22
3--Mapping connections with the past through
ancestry descent (models for contact chains)

• Not always based on consanguinity
• historical contact chains
• continuous structures

23
Mnemonic pasting
24
Interconnectedness

• Genealogical Distance (consanguinity)
• Ancestral depth ( of generations)

25
Time and Social Distance

• Not just people
• Can be practices, things, events

26
Cousinhood Ancestral Depth
27
Monogenist Polygenist Models of Human Descent

• Socio-mnemonic dimensions of ancestry

28
Another look at Phylogeny
29
Divergence Modelling
30
4-Discontinuities Mnemonic Cutting Shaping
Memory

• Conceptualizing Discontinuities (breaks)

31
Assimilation Difference

• Periods, epochs as mnemonic transformation of
  historical continuum

32
History Prehistory in Mnemonic
Traditions--decapitation
33
History Prehistory in Mnemonic Traditions

• Example Pre-contact and Post contact history of
  N. America

34
Lumping Splitting in Narratives
35
5-Beginnings and Claims based on the Past
36
Film Clip Screening (Goodbye Lenin)

• Guest presentation by Sylvia Roberts