From the archive model of memory to lived experience

Memory is at the centre of human experience. Memory is what makes us human. The past is a site of social meaning. These are statements with which the majority of psychologists agree. The truth of these statements rests on two fundamental questions: (a) how to study memory by incorporating the tension and interplay between preservation and loss, remembering and forgetting, the relationship between memory, identity and narrative: and (b) how to reconcile the distinction between memory as individual faculty, and memory as collective or social phenomenon. This chapter outlines some of the issues that arise from various attempts to find answers to these questions, especially those with particular relevance to political psychology. This chapter presents the main tenets of a sociocultural approach to researching social memory, with an emphasis on political narratives, commemoration and national memory of socio-political events and coming to terms with the past. The chapter ends with a brief outline of implications (and recommendations) for a political psychology of collective memory.

In his book The Sense of an Ending, British novelist Julian Barnes writes: ‘As the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty as to what you are or have been.’ The quotation expresses, in a nutshell, the contingency of selfhood. What it intimates is that biographical time does not correspond exactly to biographical reality, but to the multiple reconstructions of the unfolding past/time by people. What Barnes has found, as so many of us have, is that what we call ‘individual memory’ about one’s life appears only apparently as a ‘property’ of the self. Instead we find it distributed beyond one’s own person, ‘beyond one’s head’ (Bruner, 2001), as it were, and mediated by personal and social relationships, and the material environment. Our relationship to the past and others is an unfinished business. Our memories (and identities) are not essences we carry within us, but rather a result of particular configurations and constellations of the subject in relation to networks of distributed and mediated activities. Our memories are located within mental, material and cultural spaces.