Individuals' Memories (individual + memory)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


,I Saw a Nightmare . . .': Violence and the Construction of Memory (Soweto, June 16, 1976)

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 4 2000
Helena Pohlandt-McCormick
The protests on June 16, 1976 of black schoolchildren in Soweto against the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in their schools precipitated one of the most pro-found challenges to the South African apartheid state. These events were experienced in a context of violent social and political conflict. They were almost immediately drawn into a discourse that discredited and silenced them, manipulating meaning for ideological and political reasons with little regard for how language and its absence,silences,further violated those who had experienced the events. Violence, in its physical and discursive shape, forged individual memories that remain torn with pain, anger, distrust, and open questions; collective memories that left few spaces for ambiguity; and official or public histories tarnished by their political agendas or the very structures,and sources,that produced them. Based on oral histories and historical documents, this article discusses the collusion of violence and silence and its consequences. It argues that,while the collusion between violence and silence might appear to disrupt or, worse, destroy the ability of individuals to think historically,the individual historical actor can and does have the will to contest and engage with collective memory and official history. [source]


Ambiguity and Remembrance: Individual and Collective Memory in Finland

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 3 2000
Karen Armstrong
In this article, I explore the complicated relationship between individual experience and national events, the way this relationship is narrated, and how individual memory becomes part of a collective memory. By looking at memoirs written by the descendants of Thomas Rantalainen, and focusing on personal correspondence, I show how the contents of letters written 60 years ago relate to events in Finland's history that are still being discussed today. In the narrative practices of the correspondence, the individuals themselves ,through the use of a narrative We,mmerge their personal experiences with those of the community. Two themes in the letters,war and family life,illustrate how the processes of replication and analogical thinking work in bringing the past into the present. [Finland, history and analogical thinking, personal correspondence, domestic life] [source]


Managing memories in post-war Sarajevo: individuals, bad memories, and new wars

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 1 2006
Cornelia Sorabji
In the wake of the 1992-5 war in Bosnia a number of anthropologists have written about the role of memory in creating and sustaining hostility in the region. One trend focuses on the authenticity and power of personal memories of Second World War violence and on the possibility of transmitting such memories down the generations to the 1990s. Another focuses less on memory as a phenomenon which determines human action than on the ,politics of memory': the political dynamics which play on and channel individuals' memories. In this article I use the example of three Sarajevo Bosniacs whom I have known since the pre-war 1980s in order to propose the merit of a third, additional, focus on the individual as an active manager of his or her own memories. I briefly consider whether work by Maurice Bloch on the nature of semantic and of autobiographic memory supports a strong version of the first interpretative trend, or whether, as I suggest, the conclusions of this work instead leave room for individual memory management and for change down the generations. [source]


Reality monitoring and the media

APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 8 2007
Marcia K. Johnson
The study of reality monitoring is concerned with the factors and processes that influence the veridicality of memories and knowledge, and the reasonableness of beliefs. In thinking about the mass media and reality monitoring, there are intriguing and challenging issues at multiple levels of analysis. At the individual level, we can ask how the media influence individuals' memories, knowledge and beliefs, and what determines whether individuals are able to identify and mitigate or benefit from the media's effects. At the institutional level, we can ask about the factors that determine the veridicality of the information presented, for example, the institutional procedures and criteria used for assessing and controlling the quality of the products produced. At the inter-institutional level we can consider the role that the media play in monitoring the products and actions of other institutions (e.g. government) and, in turn, how other institutions monitor the media. Interaction across these levels is also important, for example, how does individuals' trust in, or cynicism about, the media's institutional reality monitoring mechanisms affect how individuals process the media and, in turn, how the media engages in intra- and inter-institutional reality monitoring. The media are interesting not only as an important source of individuals' cognitions and emotions, but for the key role the media play in a critical web of social/cultural reality monitoring mechanisms. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]