Brady Wagoner - Remembering as a Cultural Process

This small book makes a major contributionshowing how the seemingly personal act of remembering is implicitly guided by its preexisting ideological positioning. That positioning may be internalized by a person during ones life course, or suggested by externally situated cultural objects that are encountered peripherally in everyday life (Lyra and Pinheiro 2018; Marsico and Tateo 2019). A monument to a particular event in the past, or the struggle for the visual space where commentaries on the present are painted, whitewashed, and re-painted (political graffitiChap.) are all guidance devices for affective relating that the person is expected to undertake to the society. It is notwhatis remembered buthow one shouldremember that is being socially negotiatedthrough history textbooks, parades of public commemorations, and monuments. It links socially privileged meaning systems with the personal life-worlds. Orat the leastit makes an effort in that direction.

Such guidance for how one is to remember events that one has not, and could not, directly experienced has unique properties. It isaffectively directed,catalytic, andpersistently episodic.

First, human acts of remembering are directedone should remember A (Napoleon as a hero) and not non-A (Napoleon as a mass murderer), and it has to happen in an affectively differentiated way. A hero is to be appreciated, a murderer is to be condemned. It is not coincidental that one of the first casualties of political revolutions are monumentsa hero story of the previous political regime has to be removed from the public view as quickly as possible. The capture of Baghdad by the American forces started from tearing down the huge monument of Saddam Hussein; likewise, after the end of communist-led states in Eastern Europe, the many statues of Lenin ended up in scrap yards.

Second, the suggestions for remembering are nonbinding. They do not determine what is being remembered but create the context for which direction of feeling the act of remembering could take. A popular narrative about Michael Collins as a hero of Irish independencerepeated in families, schools, or pubsis a catalytic device that does not lead to inquiry about who Michael Collins was, but rather to the generalized halo about him; whoever he was, he was a positive actor in history. However, that is the Irish point of view and not one necessarily shared by the British.

Third, the guidance is episodic. It is not part of a specific educational agenda in a here-and-now setting, but a transient moment where some comment about the particular nature of a historical event is made. Thus we all by-passingly refer to velvet revolutions or great warseach of such epithetic mentions is an affect marker that is discursively attached to the meaning of the actual event, and thus distances our remembering efforts from the reality. In the Great War (as World War I was then labeled), an estimated 1519 million people were killed. An occasional remark of it as great gives an episodic suggestion for its remembering. Likewise we all episodically pass by a monument of a general who distinguished himself in a particular warnot thinking of the actual events of the war and about the many people killed who led to the glory of this particular general. Memory is socially suggested to be fragmented, superficial, and affectively accepting the hegemonic message encoded in the words of the parents (about ones great-great-grandparents), school history textbooks, and public monuments.

The innovative solution to the problem of how human memory is socially guided is introduced in this book by re-focusing research on the adaptability and forward-oriented character of memory. Instead of documenting how good (or bad) human memory is in one domain or another, the authors of this book undertake