How the past weighs on the present: Social representations of history and their role in identity politics

Abstract

Socially shared representations of history have been important in creating, maintaining and changing a people's identity. Their management and negotiation are central to interethnic and international relations. We present a narrative framework to represent how collectively significant events become (selectively) incorporated in social representations that enable positioning of ethnic, national and supranational identities. This perspective creates diachronic (temporal) links between the functional (e.g. realistic conflict theory), social identity, and cognitive perspectives on intergroup relations. The charters embedded in these representations condition nations with similar interests to adopt different political stances in dealing with current events, and can influence the perceived stability and legitimacy of social orders. They are also instrumental in determining social identity strategies for reacting to negative social comparisons, and can influence the relationships between national and ethnic identities.

Social representations of Latin American history and (post)colonial relations in Brazil, Chile and Mexico

“…Furthermore, there was a certain sociocentrism in the selection of events and personalities, which corroborates previous studies (e.g., Liu et al, 2005Liu et al, , 2009Pennebaker et al, 2006). Of all the events named by Brazilian, Chilean and Mexican participants, 22.9%, 7.1% and 12.6%, respectively, happened within, or directly concerned, each of these countries.…”

“…This is possibly due to debates in recent decades about "America's discovery," which we will discuss later. Regarding the periods in which the events occurred, or in which the personalities had higher performance, the results corroborated previous studies (e.g., Liu et al, 2005Liu et al, , 2009Pennebaker et al, 2006) on social representations of world history. More concretely, there was a recency effect in the collective memories regarding Latin American history, with a prominence of events -especially of people -from the twentieth century .…”

“…This concept became well known through the work of Liu and Hilton (2005), who based their ideas on Malinowski's work (1926Malinowski's work ( /2011) when referring to the "historical representations that serve to justify why the world is, by explaining how it came to be that way" (Liu et al, 1999(Liu et al, , p. 1023. According to Liu and Hilton (2005), charters are central parts of the social representations of a group's history, given their constitutive properties (i.e., which contribute to the position settings and status of a group) and their normative properties (i.e., setting moral codes, norms, and values to justify and legitimize actions that can serve as foundational myths within a society). In addition, they may act as guides that allow group members to decide what they should or should not do, and how to react to a situation (Liu & Hilton, 2005).…”

“…According to Liu and Hilton (2005), charters are central parts of the social representations of a group's history, given their constitutive properties (i.e., which contribute to the position settings and status of a group) and their normative properties (i.e., setting moral codes, norms, and values to justify and legitimize actions that can serve as foundational myths within a society). In addition, they may act as guides that allow group members to decide what they should or should not do, and how to react to a situation (Liu & Hilton, 2005). …”

“…Because we investigated social representations of history in the Latin American context in the present study, it is important to briefly discuss the main results found in the literature on social representations of world history (e.g., Pennebaker et al, 2006), namely: a) centrality of warfare and politics -people tended to consider events concerning conflicts, wars and revolutions as the most important factors in world history instead of other events such as those involving socioeconomic issues or scientific and technological achievements; b) recency bias -people tended to evoke recent events (for example, from the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries), considering them more important than those that occurred longer ago; c) sociocentric bias -individuals tended to adopt ethnocentric positions by considering events that occurred in or involved their own country and historical figures who were important for their national history as some of the most relevant to world history; d) Western-centric bias -when asked about the most important events in world history, people tended to remember events that took place mostly in Europe or in the United States of America (USA), reproducing the current world power order (e.g., Liu et al, 2005Liu et al, , 2009Pennebaker et al, 2006). In this paper we analyse whether our findings also reveal these biases.…”