“Hey, look! That’s really cool!”

By

 
    While looking at materials archived by the Library, I found two photos from environmental organisations on campus in the ‘80s. One depicted about 15 students sitting in a semi-circle in front of a building. My best guess is that those were the members of the Kenyon Environmental Club. The other one depicted three students/members sat on the hood of a car from the 70s. I wanted to keep one of those pictures for our group display, so I was met with a dilemma. Do I keep the picture with the most people in front of a relevant building - a picture that better encapsulates what that organization was about, who belonged there, and what the general vibe was between them; or do I keep the picture that I think looked the coolest?
    A. Assmann makes that distinction between intentional and passive forgetting when it comes to cultural objects and symbols, claiming that intentional forgetting involves the active destruction or suppression of memory, whereas passive forgetting involves the neglect, abandoning, or loss of whatever it was that was attached to a memory. She describes archiving yes an act between forgetting and remembering as objects are kept but often separated from their original “place in life”.
    While I recognize the higher mnemonic value of the first of the two pictures, I was still compelled to keep the second for our display. To me, that means that the second picture - the one with the students sat on the car - had some sort of value which the first one did not. I think that value stemmed from how cool it looked. It looked just like an album cover, as one of my groupmates claimed. It was the “coolness” of the picture that made me see it as an item perhaps  worth saving from passive forgetting for longer. Even now, I remember more details of this picture compared to the other one, and that is no coincidence. I would say that this “coolness” value that an item may possess might make it more likely to be saved from intentional forgetting, or even intentional forgetting too. While I can’t really define what it means for a thing to look cool, I can say with enough confidence that whatever qualities that object may have make it likelier to be remembered, kept, resurfaced, or preserved when other objects similar to it might get destroyed.
Think of a cool looking pebble you might have taken home from the beach a really sick picture of your grandpa from the 50s, or a really nice gift an ex gave you that you still possess because it would be a waste to throw it away. All these Items are likelier to be archived or intentionally remembered just because of how cool they might be, even when other similar items with a higher mnemonic value are forgotten. Nifty, right?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Junzo Shono: How We Remember Gambier

By
Image
When I entered the Special Collections room, I had no idea where to start or what to do. We were given large files of several notable Kenyon alumni, and it was overwhelming. Without a clear understanding of the responsibilities we were tasked with, we each selected a different file without giving reason or pause as to who we selected. For one reason or another, Junzo Shono’s name caught my eye. I had never heard of the man, but after taking a class on Japanese Literature last fall, I was curious as to who he was and his involvement with the College. Junzo Shono, an acclaimed Japanese writer, first came to Gambier in 1957, where he spent a year in the College capturing and describing the mundane moments of everyday life (Creel, 2022). He would eventually publish these memories in the form of a novel titled “Gambia Taizaiki” (Sojourn in Gambier. He was born in Osaka, Japan on February 9th, 1921, and studied at Osaka University of Foreign Languages for four years, and later studied at Kyu...
Read more

Archival and Canon Memory: Understanding Our Present Through Our Past

By
Image
  This week, one of the many artifacts my group examined, was an old issue of The Collegian. The main story of this issue was the reconstruction of the Brown Family Environmental Center. This edition of the Collegian was significant because it detailed certain transformations being made to the center that would give it more focus on academics and incorporating student education as a part of the BFEC. For example, the article focuses on the construction of a new building that will operate as a hub for both student labs, as well as environmental education programs for the public, which the BFEC is now well known for. This article is also historically significant as it was written right after the BFEC was renamed to the Brown Family Environmental Center. It is important to examine sources like these, as they offer what the earliest perspectives and actions of what the BFEC were, which is interesting to compare to modern activities of the environmental center. This week we also read an...
Read more

Hope, Suffering, and The Kenyon College Campus Guide

By
Image
  Attached above is a screenshot of “The Kenyon College Campus Guide”, which is a near-comprehensive list of buildings that have belonged to the College and Village of Gambier since 1824. Although my group is curating something about the future of the Hill, our first meeting mainly involved discussions of its past. To this end, we tried to develop a picture of what the Hill physically looked like in the past 100 years by reviewing photographs of buildings, construction plans, and the Campus Guide, which you can see above. If you were to review the entire guide, you’d see that under the name of every building is a description of when it was built, what it was used (or being used) for, and when (if) it was destroyed. In the context of this week’s reading, these descriptions call the terms “communities of memory” and “communities of hope” to mind. According to Bellah et al. (1985, 2011), a “community of memory…tell[s]...stories of shared suffering” and orients us towards “future co...
Read more