Social Research articles from March 2008

Social Research archives from March 2008

Endangered scholars worldwide.
March 22, 2008... Once again we urge our readers to act on behalf of these endangered scholars around the world. It is all that we can do, but we know that doing so can make a difference. If you are aware of endangered or imprisoned scholars whose cases are not...

Editors' introduction.(Editorial)
March 22, 2008... SINCE MAURICE HALBWACHS FIRST WROTE ABOUT THE PHENOMENON, the study of collective memory has played a critical role in discussions of collective and, in particular, national identity. Students of collective memory have chiefly been interested...

The ciphered transits of collective memory: neo-Freudian impressions.(Part I: What Does It Mean for a Community to Have a Memory?)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... In the group too an impression of the past is retained in unconscious memory-traces. --Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism SINCE BENEDICT ANDERSON FIRST PUBLISHED HIS LANDMARK Imagined Communities in 1991, scholars have almost...

Between individual and collective memory: coordination, interaction, distribution.(Part I: What Does It Mean for a Community to Have a Memory?)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... HISTORY ANIMATES DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS HISTORY ANIMATES DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS AT MANY DIFFERENT timescales. * Brains, people (with their embodied minds and their more or less mindful bodies), small groups, and institutions are all open to the past,...

Transformations between history and memory.(Part I: What Does It Mean for a Community to Have a Memory?)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... COLLECTIVE MEMORY--A SPURIOUS NOTION? THERE IS NO NEED TO CONVINCE ANYBODY THAT THERE IS SUCH A THING as individual memory; memory attaches to persons in the singular. But does it attach to them in the plural? Although the term "collective...

Collective memory and abortive commemoration: Presidents' Day and the American holiday calendar.(Part II: What Are the Means through which the Community Shapes Its Memory?)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition "NATURE," AS ERNST CASSIRER CONCEIVED IT, "YIELDS NOTHING without ceremony" (1955: 38-9). The...

Through a glass, darkly: photography and cultural memory.(Part II: What Are the Means through which the Community Shapes Its Memory?)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... "I DON'T KNOW WHY A REPLICANT WOULD COLLECT PHOTOS--MAYBE they were like Rachel--they needed memories." In the role of the bounty hunter Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott's 1982 cult classic, Blade Runner, Harrison Ford utters these words with a...

Collective memory and narrative templates.(Part II: What Are the Means through which the Community Shapes Its Memory?)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... ON THE EVENING OF APRIL 26, 2007, ROVING BANDS OF YOUTH IN Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, ransacked autos, storefronts, and other buildings. The next clay the city remained tense, and violence erupted again that evening, despite the presence...

A tale of Easter Ovens: food and collective memory.(Part II: What Are the Means through which the Community Shapes Its Memory?)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... AT A TIME WHEN DRINKS AVAILABLE IN GAS STATION COOLERS PROMISE exotic ingredients to boost your memory powers, my own interest in food and memory meets with bemusement from friends and colleagues." Both the study of food and of memory are...

Creating shared memories in conversation: toward a psychology of collective memory.(Part III: How Are Collective Memories Formed>)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... PROBLEMS OF MEMORY ARE SALIENT IN TODAY'S WORLD: STRUGGLES BY present-day Germans to face the atrocities of the Holocaust, by South Africans to confront the legacy of apartheid, or by East Europeans to deal with those who collaborated with the...

A tour of the battleground: the seven circles of pan-European memory.(Part III: How Are Collective Memories Formed>)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... "WE HAVE NO MONEY, NO COLLECTION, AND NO LOCATION." THIS USED to be Krzystof Pomian's succinct answer, delivered with an impish smile, to the question of what one could expect to see in the planned Musee de l'Europe in Brussels. We found out...

The work of memory: time, identity, and justice.(Part IV: How Does a Collective Memory Bear on Collective Identity?)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... IN THIS ESSAY I DISCUSS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEMORY, identity, and justice. Each of these terms adumbrates a wide field of concepts, with deep practical, literary, and philosophical roots and controversies. Given the unmanageably large...

Memory, responsibility, and identity.(Part IV: How Does a Collective Memory Bear on Collective Identity?)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... ONE OF THE TASKS OF MEMORY IS TO MAKE AVAILABLE TO US KNOWLEDGE that we have acquired in the past. Let us call this aspect of memory cognitive memory. This kind of memory clearly plays a crucial role in our life--as becomes apparent on those...

Collateral damage of history education: national socialism and the holocaust in German family memory.(Part IV: How Does a Collective Memory Bear on Collective Identity?)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... HISTORY IS NOT ONLY ON THE CURRICULUM, AND IT IS NOT ONLY THE subject of books, journals, radio and television programs, or public debates that explicitly deal with the past and with the question of how to remember it in an adequate way. *...

Memory, the rebirth of the native, and the "Hebrew Bedouin" identity.(Part IV: How Does a Collective Memory Bear on Collective Identity?)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... IN APRIL 1903, THE KISHINEV POGROM SENT A WAVE OF SHOCK THROUGH European Jewry." The publication of a report by the Zionist poet Chaim Nachman Bialik and the powerful poems he wrote under the impact of the pogrom heightened the Jewish public's...