“Let me tell you what we already know”: Collective memory between culture and interaction

Abstract

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.

Scrolling back: Remediation within and through digital memory work

“…To explore how digital memory work extends, reflects, and potentially remediates preexisting mnemonic media practices, I examine the narratives of young women. Van de Putte (2022) suggests in memory studies, there is a reliance on political, art, and media professionals, which has contributed to an over-representation of their (re)production of discourse over ordinary people. I conceptualise young women as memory agents who offer critical insight into the performance of digital memory work, drawing on the tradition in feminist research of studying women from the perspectives of their own experiences and lives (Harding 1987; Hesse-Biber 2013).…”

Memorializing the unspectacular: Toward a minor remembrance

“…Nevertheless, such a recalibration cannot be achieved without simultaneously keeping in mind larger scale temporal and spatial processes. Only a multiscalar analysis—something that, as Keightley et al (2019: 5) argue, the discipline of memory studies has “failed” to do (see also Van De Putte, 2022) 4 —has the potential to reveal (and remember) the multiple facets of violence, to better understand how it unfolds, and to undertake actions to counter its ongoing detrimental effects. Thinking with feminist geopolitics 5 could be productive in this regard, especially given the complex entanglement of the geo and the political within the current debates about both the roots and routes of environmental change.…”

“… 4. The discussion of multi-/interscalarity has been present within the field of memory studies in, for example, ethnographic studies offered by Kidron (2009, 2012) or works by Keightley et al (2019) and Van De Putte (2022) situated within the field of communication and interactionist sociolinguistics. These studies mostly focus on “lived” memory of violence and how it pervades everyday (narrative) interactions, including within intimate, familial contexts.…”