Jan 29, 2017
Memories of the past are, like all common-sense forms, strangely composite constructions, resembling a kind of geology, the selective sedimentation of past traces.
The Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, and Method
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Memories of the past are, like all common-sense forms, strangely composite constructions, resembling a kind of geology, the selective sedimentation of past traces.
The Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, and Method
There is a second way of looking at the social production of memory which draws attention to quite other processes--a knowledge of past and present also produced in the course of everyday life. There is a common sense of the past which, though it may lack consistency and explanatory force, nonetheless contains elements of good sense. Such knowledge may circulate, usually without amplification, in everyday talk and in personal comparisons and narratives. It may be encapsulated in anecdotes that acquire the force and generality of myth. If this is history, it is history under extreme pressures and privations. Usually this history is held to the level of private remembrance. It is not only unrecorded, but actually silenced. It is not offered the occasion to speak.
Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, and Method
Official history tends to arrest the future by means of the past. Historians privilege the written word of the text - it serves as their rule of law. It claims a ‘center’ which continuously marginalizes others. In this way its ideology inhibits people from constructing their own history or histories.
Popular memory, on the other hand, considers the past as a political issue. It orders the past not only as a reference point but also as a theme of struggle. For popular memory, there are no longer any ‘centers’ or ‘margins,’ since the very designations imply that something has been conveniently left out. Popular memory, then, is neither a retreat to some great tradition nor a flight to some imagined ‘ivory tower,’ neither a self-indulgent escapism nor a desire for the actual ‘experience’ or ‘content’ of the past for its own sake. Rather, it is a ‘look back to the future,’ necessarily dissident and partisan, wedded to constant change.
— Teshome H. Gabriel, “Third Cinema as Guardian of Popular Memory: Towards a Third Aesthetics.” In Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 53-54.
[Television's] dual status as entertainment and informations places the knowledge it distributes somewhere between fiction and science, between memory and history.
Lynn Spiegal's "From the dark ages to the golden age: women's memories and television reruns"