Communitybased Art Projects as Commemorative Practices

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Community-based Art Projects as Commemorative
Practices

• link

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Theories Methods (Sites and Sources for
Studying Discourse about Commemoration and
Silencing)

• Professor
• Jan Marontate

Visitors to The wall, The Vietnam Veterans
Memorial designed by Maya Lin in Washington D.C.
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Presentation Dates for First Short Report
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Presentation Dates for Second Short Report
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Readings

• Zelizer, Barbie. Finding aids to the past
  bearing personal witness to traumatic public
  events Media Culture and Society 2002 24 697
• Schudson, Michael. Lives, Laws and Language
  Commemorative versus Non-Commemorative Forms of
  Effective Public Memory, The Communication
  Review, Vol 21(1) pp. 3-17.

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Todays Class

• student presentations
• Short lecture Collected Personal Memories vs.
  Collective Memory, Methods
• If time Film Screening

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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
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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)

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Recall Site of Memory Social Frameworks of
Memory?

• "where cultural memory crystallizes and
  secretes itself" (Nora 1989 7)
• Places
• Concepts practices
• Objects

Doorway of No Return. Gorée Island. Sénégal.
House of Slaves
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Next Topic Varieties of Personal Memory
Collected vs. Collective Memory

• What do we become aware of when we remember and
  how do we do it? (David Gross Lost Time, 2000)
• Semantic memory (words)
• Propositional memories (kinds of Info.)
• Implicit memories (ex. How to play an instrument)
• Episodic memory (beginning end, aura)
• Other kinds
• Projects (Odysseus and faithfulness to project of
  returning home)
• Revisionist (confessions)
• Happy/sad episodes, feelings emotions (ex.
  Proust)
• Amnesia (deliberate, unconscious etc..)

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How does the past shape the present future?

• Schudson Lives, Laws Language. Commemorative
  vs. non-commemorative forms of effective public
  memory
• Personally (lives, lived experience, oral
  history)
• Socially (laws, institutions, codes of ethics
  etc.)
• Culturally (language, symbolic systems)

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The person as a carrier of public memory

• 1. Manifestations personal careers and life
  histories as devices for accessing tracking
  changes
• Processes
• Prompting as context
• Disappearance of older generations
• familiarity of new generations with new
  paradigms rather than conversion
• Commitments to old paradigms vs. revisionism

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Lessons Learned Observing change in
Collective memory

• personal experience as guide (avoidance)
• Example Change in language has potential to
  alter meaning
• Observation of shifts in collective
  representations through changes in language
• Importance of temporal, spatial, group
  affiliations of individual testimonies as
  contexts

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Dynamics of Collective memory (Schudson)

• Pre-emptive Metaphors Devices (avoidance
  technique), ex. Trauma designations like
  holocaust, genocide
• Demonstration effects (interaction of personal
  experience experience of others)
• Ex. Nazis anti-racism
• Accidents as models for risk avoidance (ex.
  tsunami victims)
• Coordinative, conjunctive serial effects (ex.
  the right to vote working class white men in
  different places)
• Cultures of memory (diverse) (ex. Different uses
  of collective identity in different national
  contexts, ex. Post WWII fascist countries,
  attitudes towards elders as carriers of public
  memory, etc.)

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Cultures of collective memory (Olick)

• Different ontological orders, different
  epistemological methodological implications
• Collective memory as
• Aggregated individual recollections?
• Official commemorations (or silencing)?
• Constitutive features of shared identity?

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Collected Memory

• based on individualistic principles (aggregated
  individual memories of members of a croup)
• Assume only individuals remembers
• Different rememberers may be valued differently
• Publicly available symbols
• Methods assign same values to all rememberers
  OR redistributively (ex. To include previously
  disenfranchised)

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Advantages of Individualist approaches
(Collected Memory)

• Potential to reduce political bias embedded in
  existing representations of collective memory by
  recognizing many different kinds of collective
  memory in different places in society
• Bearing Witness (Zelizer)

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Posture of Neutrality?

• Should we
• assume a collective memory or identity exists?
• assume a collectivity exists that shares a
  memory?
• Consider ideology, will?
• ex. Survey of Germans about their identity
  effects on politics
• Ex. I am Canadian beer commercial

A screen capture of Joe Canadian from an I am
Canadian commercial, with the maple leaf of the
Canadian flag projected on the background
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Collective Memory (vs. collected)

• Patterns of socialization not reducible to
  individual psycho-social processes?
• groups provide conditions and distinctions
  through which particular events are defined as
  consequential
• Symbols, institutions, technologies etc.
  considered somewhat autonomous
• Memory performed through language, narrative,
  dialogue, genres, shared practices
• Collective memory AS communication

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Film Screening Rabbit-Proof Fence
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Themes

• Methods for conducting research on collective
  memory
• Archives and other documentary sources
• visual images living traditions innovations and
  the culture of the new events and non-events
  material culture (objects, artefacts, memorials,
  built heritage, reconstructions)
• Memories as mediation communication
• creation, selection, contextualization,
  interpretation, reception

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Todays Class

• Handout 3 and website link
• Discussion of ways of doing research on
  collective memory public private discourse
• A few case studies as examples
• Discussion of ideas for projects planning term
  project
• Film screening An oral history of SFU the
  excitement of the early years

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Possible Sources for Research (Short Reports)

• Main types of sources
• Scholarly studies (ex. Published in refereed
  journals, academic presses or by researchers in
  government or institutions) of phenomena or
  experiences of it
• Popular media (ex. press coverage, documentaries,
  fictionalized representations)
• First-person accounts
• Other records (often in archives) such as
  documentation generated for other purposes

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Conducting research

• Seek other information on the phenomenon
  represented.
• facts, opinions, attitudes, experiences
• Critically analyze the fit between the
  depiction and documentation about the subject
  represented.
• What does the depiction include and what is left
  out?
• Connections between current/past?
• What factors may have influenced the
  representation?
• Be sure to discuss both the object of remembrance
  and the depiction of it in context.

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Tracking Changes in Collective Memory An
empirical approach (Schwartz 1982)

• Study of events and persons commemorate in a
  National Capital
• Theoretical question how the organization
  needs of social groups affect collective
  representations
• Methods
• Define Measures
• Describe Research site
• Data collection analysis
• Another

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Notion of Mnemonic consensus

• Rethinking Halbwachs forgetting as a function
  of disappearance of groups which sponsored
  memories
• hot moments (Claude Lévi-Strauss)
• Magic prestige of Origins (Mircea Eliade)
• Great moments, great deeds as indicators of the
  character of a people
• But origins impos discontinuities (Zerubavel)

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Relations of Past (Memory) Present (Schwartz
1982)

• Reality of past in Present
• sanctification of past only if sustained by
  societys subsequent interests, needs
• BUT problematic
• Does that mean there is no Objectivity in
  records of the past
• Two opposing views
• Noting contingent about our understanding of the
  past?
• Past is contingent on our understandings of it
  today?

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Schartzs Methods Sources

• Iconography as a way of commemorating people
  events, ex. Abraham Lincoln Memorial in
  Washington DC.
• Icons
• Signs
• Sacred
• Method classified commemorative monuments by
  type (pp. 378), period commemorated etc to
  identify period most commemorated

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Case Study of changing place of events and
individuals in commemoration public discourse

• Barry Schawrtz Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of
  National Memory link

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Public Discourse, Controversy Commemoration

• Article by Robin Wagner-Pacifici Barry Schwartz
• Objective study processes by which cultural
  meaning is produced by analyzing a specific case
  Vietnam Veterans Memorial
• Official site
• Other sites ex. Search the Wall

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Other Methods

• Article by Anna Lisa Tota
• Ex. Bologna Massacre in 1980 in Italy
• Interviews with survivors (first person accounts)
  and their families
• Study of victims family association
• Study of other activities local institutions
  pressure groups become memory authorities

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Changes in Discourse activities within Mnemonic
Communities

• Bologna case transition from mourning to moral
  testimony
• Merging of family, individual and public memories

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An Different Approach in Locating Memory
Photographic Acts (McAllister)

• Archival research (Japanese Canadian National
  Archives Museum
• Photos of internment camps
• Personal scholarly perspectives combined in
  semiotic analysis of photos

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Case Studies of Museum Exhibitions

• Ex. Amy Fried (September 11 exhibition) or Vera
  Zolberg (Enola Gay)
• Sources news media, interviews, congressional
  records etc
• Critical analysis of the role of history museums
  in construction / representation of the past
  (creation of memories as model for society)
• Interaction of various stakeholders political
  opposition to museological reflecting the real

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Film Screening

• An Oral History of SFU TheExcitment of the
  Early Years
• SFU Retirees Association
• Media Resource Centre
• Call Number LE 3 S82 072 2005.

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