I've been away from my desk for the last six weeks or so and have missed
much of this thread. As part of my travels I spent about two weeks in
Ireland, and as part of my trip I have read several books about Ireland (in
my mother's ancestry are Irish potato famine refugees). I'm currently
reading Richard White's Remembering Ahanagran: A History of Stories. White
is a Stanford historian and his book is about his mother's memories of the
townland of Ahanagran in County Kerry in the west of Ireland and her
immigration to the US. As a historian, he is interested in coming to an
understanding of what happened in the past--which he essentially sees as a
story--which requires corroborative evidence from multiple sources and
subjectivities (my language, not his). Set against this disposition is his
knowledge of his mother's life, which comes from her memory of it, which he
finds to be unreliable. One example: She vividly tells stories of her
youth, particularly of IRA rebellion, that he later realizes occurred
before she could have witnessed them; that, he realizes, are actually
stories she heard as a child that she has incorporated into her own
childhood memories. White's book (which I'm about one-third through)
explores this tension between history and memory in a way that's quite
different from the way that a psychologist would think about memory. A
psychologist might find it imprecise (no memory nodes, etc.). But one
thing that I find useful about CHAT, at least in Mike's architecture, is
that it is an ecumenical approach that considers contributions from many
fields. In White's book, memory is a memory of stories, those experienced
and those believed to be experienced. In a sense it's about subjectivity,
though he does not use poststructuralist language, and about appropriation
and the orchestration of experience and story into a set of memories that
provide one's life narrative. That narrative is not constant; he tells of
how his grandmother's narrative as a young woman was cast as a romance
(available through letters she wrote), but when her husband left for the US
for several decades in order to save the family farm, her narrative (as
told to her children) changed to a narrative of regret. And although he
does not approach it in this way, I'm sure that he'd agree that memory is a
matter of addressivity (to use Bakhtin's term), that is, what one remembers
is a function of the dialogue through which the memory emerges. Memory,
says White, serves the present.
At any rate, undoubtedly a different take on the topic, and an interesting
one. Peter
At 05:07 AM 8/12/01 -0700, you wrote:
> > Christophe-- There is a very deep and interesting
> > mine to be explored if
> > we are to head down the path of discussing memory.
> > There is the middleton
> > and Edwards book on collective remembering, the Star
> > and Bowker recent
> > book, *Sorting things out* which moves from
> > knowledge in things and places
> > in the home to the same principle at work in the
> > technical infrastructure of
> > society, a new collection on Bartlett......
> > and......
> >
> > I believe that the incidental/involuntary
> > distinction found in Smirnov and
> > Zinchenko remains relevant and a place where
> > American and Soviet views
> > long diverged. I am not sure they any longer do, but
> > perhaps so.
> > mike
> >
> >
> >
>
>
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