Remembered and Forgotten - Sociology of Peace Processes - Lecture Notes, Study notes of Sociology

Download Remembered and Forgotten - Sociology of Peace Processes - Lecture Notes and more Study notes Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! Sociology of Peace Processes Lecture summary: Memory and Peace Post violence societies based on negotiated peace settlements have the problem of how to remember and commemorate the conflict in such a way as to permit people to move forward. There are two sociological issues around public memory in peace processes: what it is that is publicly remembered and forgotten; and what social practices need to be adopted to culturally reproduce these selective public memories. I want to do three things in this lecture: • Outline the nature of memory as a social process • Discuss the ‘problem’ of memory • Suggest some social practices by which to construct remembrance as a peace- making strategy Sociology understands memory as having individual and social dimensions. What goes on in people’s heads in the formation and use of individual memories is a question about individual remembrance. We might call this personal memory. What goes on in society in the formation and use of collective memory is a question of social remembrance. Sociologists in the past have called this collective memory, although Barbara Misztal employs the term ‘social memory’. There is a good reason for this change in nomenclature. Collective memories are understood as group memories, shared by a community, that help to bind that community together. Social memory as a term includes this dimension, but it also incorporates the claim that individual remembrance or personal memory is itself social. Personal memory is clearly not collective but it is still social. There are several reasons why memory is social. • People have personal and collective memories at the same time, the latter being those representations that are commonly shared by all • Personal memories exist in relation to the social processes that occasion and shape them, such as language, nationalism, cultural and political symbols and the like • Individual remembering takes place in a social context and memories can be occasioned by the context in which people live • Remembering serves social purposes at the personal and public levels, being sociologically functional for individuals and societies • Memories can affect the social behaviour of people and groups • Memories supply individual and social sense-making processes, giving ways of understanding and comprehending the world and a set of values and beliefs about the world docsity.com • Memories help in the construction of collective identities and boundaries, whether these are national, cultural, ethnic, religious or otherwise • Social processes like culture, nationhood and ethnicity are in part constituted by memory • Memory is constructed by various social practices that encourage or discourage the remembrance and commemoration of particular things • Forgetting is as social as remembrance and the denial or recasting of particular memories serves social purposes • Memories are selective and therefore always open to change and can be affected by social change, social changes which reinforce certain memories or encourage collective amnesia. Social memory does not just work through people’s personal memory as a set of consequences at the societal level deriving from individual remembrances. Social memory is this, but it is also more: it is also a set of specific public remembrances that are manipulated and constructed by various social practices. It’s the very social nature of memory that makes it a problem in communal violence. Misztal refers to ‘communities of memory’, in that memories help to mark social boundaries and define collective identity. These groups – families, ethnic, racial or religious communities, whole nations or global diaspora networks – are in part constituted by memory – that is, they are made up as units in part from the sense of shared past and common journeying that memories furnish – but these communities also help to constitute memory, in that they socialize us into what should be remembered and what forgotten. It is for this reason that there is such a strong link between memory and nationalism. There are several dimensions to this relationship. Social memories are often linked to features of nationhood, to the physical and symbolic places, landscapes, cultural and historical sites and events that constitute the nation. We have personal memories of places and landscapes that link us collectively to the nation. Nations need a narrative by which to construct a sense of nationhood – a historical narrative of the past, a sense of the travails and triumphs on the journey to nationhood, a sense of collective identity and solidarity and so on – all of which memories help to supply. Nations require a sense of their past for reasons of social cohesion, memories of which are embodied in acts of public commemoration and in public memorials, in public images, texts, photographs and rituals that socialize us in what to remember. Nationhood also requires us to forget too. Deliberate collective amnesia or denial helps in nation building since it excludes from the national narrative items that in the present here-and-now are problematic. These items might be anything that prevents the construction of the nation as an imagined community and which blur the social boundaries that mark the nation or which disrupt the formation of a common identity. They might also be any items that suggest that the members of the nation do not share a common destiny. Nations need to forget things from the past that dispute a common docsity.com