Collected Memory, Collective Memory, and the Role of Institutions in Mnemonic Studies

By Anonymous

The other day in class we all brought in a sample of our work to share with a few of our peers in exchange for feedback. I read my classmate Phoebe's research in which she compared the commemoration of the My Lai Massacre in her home country of Vietnam to its commemoration in the United States, the country that committed the mass killings. Phoebe did not learn about the Massacre in Vietnam. Instead, she learned about it in American media. In her early findings she found that the government had tried to create a Memory Museum for the victims. However, the museum received intense criticism as being geared towards American tourists, since few people in Vietnam actually talk (or even care according to Phoebe) about My Lai. The villagers who survived commemorate the Massacre by inviting family and friends over for dinner and spending quality time together. Phoebe’s work fascinated me, and so did the actions of the villagers.

The study of collective memory extends beyond the individual. In “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures, American sociologist Jeffrey Olick distinguishes between collected and collective forms of memory studies. The former focuses on the memories of specific individuals and the forces that shape them. Meanwhile, the latter centers traditions, commemorative practices, and the memory of entire groups as opposed to that of specific members. While Olick respects the value of both types of memory studies, he argues that collective memory favors sociology while collected memory studies are perhaps more suited to psychologists or neurologists.

The collective memory of the My Lai Massacre seems quite informal. Villagers commemorate the event separately from official government remembrance practices. These traditions that are distinctly separate from the Vietnamese government remind us that collective memory exists beyond governments. While collective memory practices tell us to adopt a broader frame of study, it does not necessarily mean that we must look at the actions of governments to find memory. The most relevant scholarship to collective memory studies deals in the realms of geo-politics, museums, or archives. If we can observe memory through traditions and celebrations, all of these subjects represent additional filters we force ourselves to learn through. We might gain greater insight into mnemonic practices through ethnography.

Most of the readings we discussed in our unit on the Black struggle in the United States focused on Abraham Lincoln, memory museums, and how those museums get funded. These all represent extremely institutional filters that alter the “memory” we read about in these studies. In a strange way these almost resemble works written by political scientists, and slightly less so by sociologists. How should mnemonic ethnographies be weighed alongside institutional studies like these?

Kirsten Weld’s Paper Cadavers strikes an interesting balance between the two. Her book resembles an ethnography of people working with documents from the international police archives—a government institution. Her work centers the archivists and their experiences as part of the larger project. This distinct humanness felt  in Onwuachi-Willig’s piece on the Emmett Till verdict, in which she follows Till’s mother and the media’s coverage of the trial, adds incredible depth to studies of collective memory. It seems essential for these studies to include the actions, emotions, and thoughts of real people. Analyses of governments, laws, and state actors contain a more diluted form of memory than those that focus on unelected, human actors. Scholarship like what Phoebe references in her research paper are the most valuable to collective memory studies. Ultimately, a third distinction in the field of mnemonic studies seems necessary. Collective memory studies can be divided between those that study institutionalized memory and those that study informal commemorative practices. Both methods seem worthy of study, however, the latter seems more sociological in practice.


References

Simko, Christina. 2020. “Marking Time in Memorials and Museums of Terror: Temporality and Cultural Trauma.” Sociological Theory 38(1): 51–77.


Shwartz, Barry. 1997. “Collective Memory and History: How Abraham Lincoln Became a Symbol of Racial Equality.” The Sociological Quarterly 38 (3): 469-496

Olick, Jeffrey K. 1999. “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures.” Pp. 225-228 in The Collective Memory Reader, edited by Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy. Oxford University Press.

Onwuachi-Willig, Angela. 2016. “The Trauma of the Routine.” Sociological Theory 34(4):335–57. 


 

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