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Collective Memory: History, Memory, and Community

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Collective Memory: History, Memory, and Community COLLECTIVE MEMORY: HISTORY, MEMORY, AND COMMUNITY Abigail V. Aldis TC 660H Plan II Honors Program The University of Texas at Austin May 5, 2020 _______________________ Dr. Jarrod Lewis-Peacock Departments of Neuroscience and Psychology Supervising Professor _______________________ Dr. Judith Coffin Department of History Second Reader ABSTRACT Author: Abigail V. Aldis Title: Collective memory: history, memory, and community Supervising Professor: Dr. Jarrod Lewis-Peacock Memory, defined as a representation of the past, is at the core of what it is to be human. Memory of the self defines a person’s identity, because when we remember, we remember ourselves. Memory ranges from holding information in our brain for a few seconds to storing information for an entire lifetime, from memory of the immediate past to childhood memories to memory of events only experienced through second-hand storytelling. Memory is an individual phenomenon, but it is inherently collaborative. People do not physically share memories; memories are held in the minds of individuals. However, memories are shared, reinforced, altered, and forgotten largely through conversational interactions. Shared memories define what it means to be a community. Through conversation and societal structures, memories become collective in communities. Thus far, collective memory has largely been studied in a fragmented way, which I argue is detrimental to the field and to real-world applications. There have been two main approaches to collective memory: one is the psychological approach, and the other is the sociological approach. These approaches both have important components but leave other essential components out of the discussion. I argue that the best approach to studying collective memory and other collective phenomena is the social-interactionist approach, which starts with relevant cognitive phenomena, looks at how those cognitive phenomena are modified in social settings, and studies how the phenomena propagate across large social networks. I argue for an extension of this approach to include societal context variables such as educational standards and norms within communities because those factors also have large influence on the collective memory of a community. This thesis first gives a review of relevant cognitive processes, then moves to a discussion of the study of collective memory. I use a case study to demonstrate a modified, qualitative version of the social-interactionist approach to collective memory, then conclude with a discussion of the possibilities for real-world solutions using this method. Acknowledgements: I am extremely grateful to Dr. Lewis-Peacock and Dr. Coffin for working with me and coaching me through the writing of this thesis. They pushed me, encouraged me, and gave me new perspectives. Thank you for sticking with me through this process. 2 Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………2 Part I: Individual Cognitive Phenomena………………………………..4 Early Memory Studies……………………………………………………………………………4 Types of Individual Memory……………………………………………………………………..6 Models of Individual Memory……………………………………………………………………6 Problems with Individual Memory………………………………………………………………13 Summary…………………………………………………………………………………………17 Part II: Collective Memory…………………………………………….18 Background on Collective Memory……………………………………………………...………18 The Two Cultures of Collective Memory……………………………………………………..…22 Social-Interactionist Approaches……….…………………..………………………………...….25 Part III: Case Study…….……….……………………….……………..33 Southern Civil War Memories: Generational Shifts and False Memories………………………33 Part IV: Implications of Collective Memory Studies………………….35 References……………………………………………………………...42 Biography………………………………………………………………49 3 Part I: Individual Cognitive Phenomena Oftentimes when observing group or sociological phenomena, one notices that a process that happens on a cellular level or on an individual organism’s level can be generalized to much larger social processes. For example, in his essay Social Behavior as Exchange, George Homans discusses "dynamics of exchange" that "generate the static thing we call 'group structure'" (Homans, 1958, p. 606). The material and immaterial things being exchanged between people eventually create a state of equilibrium that is the group structure. A very similar process can also be observed on the cellular level. In neurons, ions cross back and forth across the cell membrane, creating an electrochemical gradient. This dynamic movement creates a resting membrane potential that stays relatively static until an action potential comes along. The ions are always moving back and forth, but an equilibrium state exists simultaneously. In this thesis I argue that another example of individual-level phenomena that can inform broader group patterns is individual memory. To follow a social-interactionist approach to studying collective memory, we first must understand the individual-level cognitive phenomena; only then can we investigate the way memory becomes collective in social networks. This section gives a brief overview of the scientific study of memory, guided by Michael Jacob Kahana’s book Foundations of Human Memory. This book gives an excellent overview of memory of events experienced in a specific context, or episodic memory, which is the type of memory relevant to our study of the way historical memory becomes collective in communities. Early Memory Studies Memory has been studied since ancient times. Aristotle thought deeply about memory and conceptualized it in terms of associations. Association is the phenomenon in which thinking 4 of one thing leads to thinking of another thing. In other words, if two events are related, they consistently occur at the same time in our thoughts. Aristotle said that two things are generally associated when the two things have similar or opposite meanings, such as the concepts of hot and cold, or were learned in the same context (Aristotle, De Memoria et Reministia). In the simplest terms, context is the place, time, or situation in which learning occurs. The concept of associations will be central to our discussion of both individual and collective memory. The scientific study of memory began in 1885 with Hermann Ebbinghaus’ work On Memory (Kahana, 2014). Ebbinghaus wanted to study memory and associations experimentally and created methods for doing so. The doctrine of remote associations developed from Ebbinghaus’ work, which states that associations are strongest between items close together in time and become progressively weaker for items that are further separated in time (Ebbinghaus, 1885). After Ebbinghaus laid the groundwork for experimental study of memory, many laboratories began studying memory. These early labs mainly studied “the rate at which performance improves with practice,” “the rate at which performance declines with disuse or interfering activity,” and “the ways in which different factors influence the rates of learning and forgetting” (Kahana, 2014, p. 9). Müller studied associative learning and developed the concept of interference, which is the idea that forgetting is actually the interference of newer learning with previous learning (Müller, 1900). There are actually two types of interference: proactive interference and retroactive interference. Those concepts will be discussed more in detail later in this section. 5 Types of Individual Memory There are many types of memory that are often studied in different ways. The main division in memory types is between short-term and long-term memory. Short-term memory is often called working memory because it is memory for information that a person is immediately aware of. An example of working memory is remembering a phone number that someone just told you. On the other hand, long-term memory is held in the brain for longer than the immediate present. Long-term memory is divided into explicit and implicit memory; memories are conscious in explicit memory and unconscious in implicit. An example of implicit memory is a person’s ability to remember how to perform a skill such as riding a bike. Explicit memory is conscious memory for facts and events, also known as declarative memory. The focus of this thesis is declarative memory, which can be divided into episodic memory, which is memory of events and experiences, and semantic memory, memory of facts and concepts. The term episodic memory was coined in 1972 by Endel Tulving and defined as “the form of memory that allows us to associate the many different types of information constituting an event into a spatio- temporal context and to later use the content of the event to retrieve its context” (Tulving, 1972, p. 385). It is important to remember that episodic memory does not represent an objective account of an event. Episodic memory represents an individual person’s subjective experience; the memory is part of a person’s timeline. When an episodic memory is retrieved, it is a kind of time travel; in remembering something, one remembers oneself. Models of Individual Memory There is a wide array of methods used to study declarative memory and a wide variety of theories about how sensory information is represented, stored, and retrieved in memory. There is 6 no unified or comprehensive theory for memory, but decades of experimental research lend some insights into how the human memory system works. We will focus on attribute and neural network models of memory. Attributes are the various factors contributing to a memory; the information that makes up a single memory is “distributed
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