Cultural memories and their re-actualizations
A narrative perspective
Memory studies has, in only a few decades, produced insights in two inter-related processes. First, memory
scholars theorized how representations of the past become socially shared. Secondly, they theorized how these cultural and
collective memories circulate and are being re-actualized in different contexts. But critiques of the field have targeted the
metaphorical and reified nature of cultural memory concepts. This article argues that some concepts developed in social scientific
narrative studies could provide cultural memory scholars with a precise and less metaphorical vocabulary to understand how people
make sense of non-autobiographical pasts in different interactional contexts. In particular, the article focusses on how
positioning theory and unexplained events in narrative pre-construction assist analysis of the flexibility of the remembering self
in everyday interaction. The examples in this article concern narrations of the Second World War and Holocaust gathered during
fieldwork in the contemporary town of Auschwitz in Poland.
Article outline
- Introduction
- Cultural memory, normativity and interactional narrative studies
- Positioning and narrative pre-construction as concepts for memory scholars
- Methodology
- Case studies: Narrating 1939–1945 in Auschwitz/Oświęcim
- Conclusion
-
References
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Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Van de Putte, Thomas
2022.
“Let me tell you what we already know”: Collective memory between culture and interaction.
Memory Studies 15:4
► pp. 751 ff.
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