This article presents the results of a qualitative micro-study of a 3-minute conversation between a research participant and a researcher. The talk in the interaction concerns the past of the contemporary Polish town of Oświęcim, internationally better known as Auschwitz. Borrowing methods and concepts from interactional sociology and linguistic ethnography, the article demonstrates that people know different cultural narratives about the same past event and are able to move between those narratives when the interactional context requires them to. The combination of micro-discourse analysis with ethnographic detail provides an insight in the entanglement of general cultural meanings and specific interactional dynamics when people attribute meaning to the past. The findings and methodological framework presented in this article also engage in a dialogue with some fundamental critiques on the field of memory studies. These include, among others, the need to connect the micro, meso, and macro, and the individual with the social, and the urge to actively develop and think through methods in memory studies research.
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.
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