Collective Memory and Emotions

 

What is the relationship between feeling and sense experience and the collective memory associated with an event or landmark - how does your bodily experience impact it?

In thinking about the question I was stumped by the emotional effect of one person on their own memory. It seems to me that emotional attachment of any kind makes the memory what it is. Positive and negative emotions make events more meaningful. In this way, a neutral experience would have the effect of neutralizing the event, yet people seem to have positive reactions to entirely meaningless events. 

It would have no effect on the whole community, the back sheep doesn’t reflect the sentiments of the flock. But in the same breath, each and every person is an individual, the idea of the flock seems to both hold true and be entirely false. The factor I’m missing is social cohesion. The environment of each individual in the time surrounding the event will dictate the way in which they remember the event. Even in the event that no one experienced the desired effect, they will all attempt to virtue signal within the groups, changing the way each individual viewed the event.

The most significant event I can relate to this phenomenon is the death of a graduate of my high school. In my ninth grade year, just as I had changed into this new school. a graduate of my school, having just started her time at Barnard, was killed in Morningside Park in the early morning. The news reached my school, and the reaction of the student body was what you would expect. The interesting thing for me to notice as an outsider, was the number of people who had no contact whatsoever with the deceased, emotionally reacting to the news in the same way that the “popular”(older) students had. Interesting in that, for whatever reason, they were emulating the emotions of the community and not their own. 

The news did several stories about it and tried to sneak onto campus to interview students. The brother of the woman who died, Maxwell, says that he receives texts from people who never knew her on the anniversary of her death. in fact, people from other schools throughout the country, reach out to offer their condolences. He shows some level of frustration because it strikes him as fake. However, this shows both sides of the coin. Even so far as people feign emotional connection, this shows that generation and location effectively create a community, memories, and traditions. 

From what I can understand, the authors discuss Paul Connerton’s distinction between inscribed memories and embodied memories.  They explain in the context of Bloody Sunday, that practices of inscribed memory are often fickle. The Authors take the view that embodied memories have more merit because, “ In this context, it becomes impossible to make any sharp empirical distinction between, or to assign relative importance to, embodied performance and inscribed history.” In other words, if preserved improperly through purely performative commemoration, memory will become less impactful. Briefly in this section, they use a personal statement, of a person who had used a book’s publishing as a landmark to determine how many years it had been since Bloody Sunday. This underscores the way in which inscribed practices don’t achieve the goal of strengthening the memory.  This performative action of texting Maxwell condolences might annoy him, but in doing so the community of his hometown, acknowledges the event and creates a structure of memory.