Rinnawi’s book offers us a wealth of information about the past and present state of Arab media and the changing shape of the imagined Arab community. It distinguishes between previous pan-Arabism (a disparate community brought loosely together by state owned media through pop culture and radio) and contemporary McArabism that is based largely on news (rather than songs) created by media organizations that are significantly more commercialized, less state controlled, and more supportive of social (not necessarily political) liberalization. His key argument is that McArabism is a product of globalization, a hybrid that is as much based on imitation of Western formats (e.g., imitating CNN) as on Arab political values (e.g., about Palestine).
Rinnawi reminds us that satellite media were endorsed by Arab governments initially as a way of creating pan-Arab content that would be popular and coherent with Islamic values to preempt the effects of media liberalization (e.g., American values and programs). However, McArabism took on a life of its own despite continuing government attempts to reign it in (see chapter 5), and the transformation in political economy in Arab media has resulted in a more critical and participatory public sphere and civil society across the Middle East. On this last point, though, Rinnawi offers mixed praise for al-Jazeera and argues that CNN is more neutral.
on Instant Nationalism: McArabism, al Jazeera, and Transnational Media in the Arab World
taken from a review written SOEK-FANG SIM
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
The Unpredictability of the Past
face up to history!
historical amnesia
japan's constitution articles 9, with its famous renunciation of war as an instrument of the state
Political volatility of war-related memories.
Asahi Shimbun printed a story claiming that several right-wing politicians had pressured the NHK public television network into revising a documentary on the Imperial Army's wartime system of sexual slavery.
Asia-Pacific War
Many observers believe that Beijing is exploiting the history of the Asia-Pacific War to whip up Chinese nationalism during a time of considerable social disruption at home (pp. 5-6).
Asia-Pacific War, Pacific War, Greater East Asia War, Fifteen-Year War, Anti-Japanese War, the War of Resistance, World War II (against Fascism)
The First Revisionist: Booner Fellers, Herbert Hoover, and Japan's Decision to Surrender / Haruo Iguchi
War Memories across the Pacific: Japanese Visitors at the Arizona Memorial / Yujin Yaguchi
historical amnesia
japan's constitution articles 9, with its famous renunciation of war as an instrument of the state
Political volatility of war-related memories.
Asahi Shimbun printed a story claiming that several right-wing politicians had pressured the NHK public television network into revising a documentary on the Imperial Army's wartime system of sexual slavery.
Asia-Pacific War
Many observers believe that Beijing is exploiting the history of the Asia-Pacific War to whip up Chinese nationalism during a time of considerable social disruption at home (pp. 5-6).
Asia-Pacific War, Pacific War, Greater East Asia War, Fifteen-Year War, Anti-Japanese War, the War of Resistance, World War II (against Fascism)
The First Revisionist: Booner Fellers, Herbert Hoover, and Japan's Decision to Surrender / Haruo Iguchi
War Memories across the Pacific: Japanese Visitors at the Arizona Memorial / Yujin Yaguchi
Monday, September 08, 2008
Halbwachs and Anderson from Yasukuni article
French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1992) proposed the concept of collective memory and posits that memory is a social activity accomplished not in the privacy of one’s own gray matter but via shared consciousness with others. Thus, our memory truly rests not on learned history but on lived history and mediated history at the present. Zelizer (1995), a journalism scholar, summarizes discussions about collective memory as follows:
…the collective memory comprises recollections of the past that are determined and shaped by the group…collective memory thereby presumes activities of sharing, discussion, negotiation, and, often, contestation. Remembering becomes implicated in a range of other activities having as much to do with identity formation, power and authority, cultural norms, and social interaction as with the simple act of recall. (p. 215)
Scannel (2000) explains how the mass media produce a pervasive social and historical mood with their message in what he called as “for-anyone-as-someone structure”. By “for-anyone-as-someone structure,” he means the powerful effect of the mass media that works not only on individual level but also on the social context level. Therefore, it is possible to assume that the experience of the public is shared and believed to be true in the historical mood. This is the reason Scannel notes that “when I turn on the news I am spoken to while knowing that millions of others are watching at exactly the same time and seeing and hearing exactly the same things” (p. 11). Scannel argues that the historical mood always manifests as what it is and provides the texture of lived experience, the structure of feeling, and the climate of the times. Thus, in the mass media “history is relocated: it is no longer ‘then’ but ‘now’, no longer ‘there’ but ‘here’ (p. 21).
Scannel’s (2000) explication of what appears to be the lopsided power relationship between media and audiences in the modern society seems to rearticulate the nature of framing. He argues that the idea of getting a message across successfully suggests three things simultaneously: “that the communicative process was essentially manipulative, that the communicator was powerful…and that those on the receiving end were powerless” (pp. 6-7). Although he does not include newspapers, because he is more interested in electronic media, we can assume that his theorization of “for-anyone-as-someone structure” also involves print media. In the Yahsukuni Shrine controversy, considering that extremely different views have appeared in the national media of the countries involved, it seems logical to assume that the national news media might have applied certain frames because they reflect their nations’ perspective on the issue.
As Zelizer (1995) notes, remembering is closely related to identity. Identities are constructed by shared memory transmitted through media. They are produced “in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practice, by specific enunciative strategies” (Hall, 1996, p. 4). According to Hall (1996), is a socially constructed phenomenon:
I use ‘identity’ to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate,’ speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be spoken. (pp. 5-6).
Anderson:
The confluence of national identity and mass media is articulated by Anderson (1983) when he explains in his book “Imagined Community” how the media make people share the same experience and eventually imagine themselves as a national community. He uses the concept of mass ceremony to explain the “mass consumption of the newspaper-as-fiction” (p. 35). According to him, each person is well aware that the ceremony (s)he performs is being replicated by millions of others. By observing that millions of others consume the same media content, people are “continuously assured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life” (pp. 35-36).
While constructing national identity, witnesses are constructed under the rule of “arbitrariness of their inclusion and juxtaposition and the linkage between them is imagined” (Anderson, 1983, p. 33). This is similar to criticisms of news framing as Anderson (1983) acknowledges that the existence of national media institutions and the dissemination of stories are significant in the formation of an imagined community, a national community and its identity. Hence, “it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love. The cultural products of nationalism – poetry, prose fiction, music, plastic arts – show this love very clearly in thousands of different forms and styles” (Anderson, 1983, p. 141).
Similarly, Scannel (2000) argues that the mass media expresses ‘we-ness,’ and “one pervasive way” (pp. 9-10).
Germany has faced the problem not only of bridging the 'divided memory' (Herf) of the nazi past, but at the same time of incorporating the memory of the communist totalitarian past in the eastern part into an overriding national narrative. This complex process of memory formation in Germany is dealt with in all but one of the books discussed here.
…the collective memory comprises recollections of the past that are determined and shaped by the group…collective memory thereby presumes activities of sharing, discussion, negotiation, and, often, contestation. Remembering becomes implicated in a range of other activities having as much to do with identity formation, power and authority, cultural norms, and social interaction as with the simple act of recall. (p. 215)
Scannel (2000) explains how the mass media produce a pervasive social and historical mood with their message in what he called as “for-anyone-as-someone structure”. By “for-anyone-as-someone structure,” he means the powerful effect of the mass media that works not only on individual level but also on the social context level. Therefore, it is possible to assume that the experience of the public is shared and believed to be true in the historical mood. This is the reason Scannel notes that “when I turn on the news I am spoken to while knowing that millions of others are watching at exactly the same time and seeing and hearing exactly the same things” (p. 11). Scannel argues that the historical mood always manifests as what it is and provides the texture of lived experience, the structure of feeling, and the climate of the times. Thus, in the mass media “history is relocated: it is no longer ‘then’ but ‘now’, no longer ‘there’ but ‘here’ (p. 21).
Scannel’s (2000) explication of what appears to be the lopsided power relationship between media and audiences in the modern society seems to rearticulate the nature of framing. He argues that the idea of getting a message across successfully suggests three things simultaneously: “that the communicative process was essentially manipulative, that the communicator was powerful…and that those on the receiving end were powerless” (pp. 6-7). Although he does not include newspapers, because he is more interested in electronic media, we can assume that his theorization of “for-anyone-as-someone structure” also involves print media. In the Yahsukuni Shrine controversy, considering that extremely different views have appeared in the national media of the countries involved, it seems logical to assume that the national news media might have applied certain frames because they reflect their nations’ perspective on the issue.
As Zelizer (1995) notes, remembering is closely related to identity. Identities are constructed by shared memory transmitted through media. They are produced “in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practice, by specific enunciative strategies” (Hall, 1996, p. 4). According to Hall (1996), is a socially constructed phenomenon:
I use ‘identity’ to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate,’ speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be spoken. (pp. 5-6).
Anderson:
The confluence of national identity and mass media is articulated by Anderson (1983) when he explains in his book “Imagined Community” how the media make people share the same experience and eventually imagine themselves as a national community. He uses the concept of mass ceremony to explain the “mass consumption of the newspaper-as-fiction” (p. 35). According to him, each person is well aware that the ceremony (s)he performs is being replicated by millions of others. By observing that millions of others consume the same media content, people are “continuously assured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life” (pp. 35-36).
While constructing national identity, witnesses are constructed under the rule of “arbitrariness of their inclusion and juxtaposition and the linkage between them is imagined” (Anderson, 1983, p. 33). This is similar to criticisms of news framing as Anderson (1983) acknowledges that the existence of national media institutions and the dissemination of stories are significant in the formation of an imagined community, a national community and its identity. Hence, “it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love. The cultural products of nationalism – poetry, prose fiction, music, plastic arts – show this love very clearly in thousands of different forms and styles” (Anderson, 1983, p. 141).
Similarly, Scannel (2000) argues that the mass media expresses ‘we-ness,’ and “one pervasive way” (pp. 9-10).
Germany has faced the problem not only of bridging the 'divided memory' (Herf) of the nazi past, but at the same time of incorporating the memory of the communist totalitarian past in the eastern part into an overriding national narrative. This complex process of memory formation in Germany is dealt with in all but one of the books discussed here.
The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration
Public commemoration orchestrated by nation state
Personal memory
Cultural memory
Judicial memory…
Extend international discussion of war memory
Oppressed private memories vs. official public memories
Forgetting of colonial conquest in exclusion from citizenship of Aboriginal ex-service men
Inscription of memory in national heritage
Shoah
1974 revolution in Portugal – official remembrance and official silence
post-traumatic stress disorder
representation
emergence into public visibility of shoah
museum, documentary, films, campaign
ethnographic approach
suffering injustice, injury or trauma
testimomy
sometimes relates to material compensation
official investigation
enhanced frofile of anniversary commemoration (anniversary journalism)
anniversary boom – public communication media
commemoration transformed into a media event
constesting as well as celebrating received memories
memory studies emerged across a wide disciplinary spectrum
war has been the most productive area
particular political contexts and local applications of their analysis
The invention of tradition Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger
Invention of social cohesion
Legitimizing authority and socializing populations into a common culture
Hobsbawm argues that there “invented traditions” were highly relevant to analysis of the nation with its associated phenomena: nationalism, the nation-state, national symbols, histories and the rest.
This argument meshed with Anderson’s imagined communities in which the nation is seen as a collectively defined by its own ways of imaging itself and the identity of those ‘ghostly imaginings’ whereby the living generations feel their connection with the dead who belong to the ‘same’ national community thus securing the nation’s imagined continuity and transcendence of time.
Besides opening up new ways of thinking about nationalism, these two books helped bring into focus the relations between the nation-state, the ‘invented traditions and imaginings that give shape to national identity, and the forms and rituals of war commemoration, thereby generating a set of questions about the power of such commemorations to draw upon the sacrifice and loss occasioned by war as a means of preserving and reinforcing (or, it may be, challenging) dominant elites and ideologies within existing states.
Remembrance by the nation state
Remembrance by the agencies of civic society
For example, Catherine Merridale has shown how, in war-torn Soviet Russa during the 1920s, the Bolsheviks launched an assault on the customs, rituals and supposed superstitions of traditional Russian funerary culture. This led rapidly to their enforced abandonment and replacement with officially sanctioned socialist alternatives, notably ‘the practice of secular, scientific cremation (p. 10).
Politics of memory, according to The Invention of Tradition, is an exercise in social engineering from above: the history which became part of the fund of knowledge or the ideology of the nation, state or movement movement is not what has actually been preserved in popular memory, but what has been selected, written, pictured, popularized and institutionalized by those whose function it is to do so (p. 10).
From this perspective, the study of war memory is concerned with its official orchestration and embodiment in ceremonial and physical reminders, and with the patterns of inclusion and exclusion that determine which aspects of collective and individual experience are admitted to public recall and commemoration.
Hobsbawm himself has acknowledged more recently that nationalism cannot be understood unless also anlaysed from below, that is, in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalistic (pp. 10-11).
Forms of official commemoration rested on a rich undergrowth of unofficial activity (p. 11).
Popular memory group: public representations and private memory
The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration
Personal memory
Cultural memory
Judicial memory…
Extend international discussion of war memory
Oppressed private memories vs. official public memories
Forgetting of colonial conquest in exclusion from citizenship of Aboriginal ex-service men
Inscription of memory in national heritage
Shoah
1974 revolution in Portugal – official remembrance and official silence
post-traumatic stress disorder
representation
emergence into public visibility of shoah
museum, documentary, films, campaign
ethnographic approach
suffering injustice, injury or trauma
testimomy
sometimes relates to material compensation
official investigation
enhanced frofile of anniversary commemoration (anniversary journalism)
anniversary boom – public communication media
commemoration transformed into a media event
constesting as well as celebrating received memories
memory studies emerged across a wide disciplinary spectrum
war has been the most productive area
particular political contexts and local applications of their analysis
The invention of tradition Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger
Invention of social cohesion
Legitimizing authority and socializing populations into a common culture
Hobsbawm argues that there “invented traditions” were highly relevant to analysis of the nation with its associated phenomena: nationalism, the nation-state, national symbols, histories and the rest.
This argument meshed with Anderson’s imagined communities in which the nation is seen as a collectively defined by its own ways of imaging itself and the identity of those ‘ghostly imaginings’ whereby the living generations feel their connection with the dead who belong to the ‘same’ national community thus securing the nation’s imagined continuity and transcendence of time.
Besides opening up new ways of thinking about nationalism, these two books helped bring into focus the relations between the nation-state, the ‘invented traditions and imaginings that give shape to national identity, and the forms and rituals of war commemoration, thereby generating a set of questions about the power of such commemorations to draw upon the sacrifice and loss occasioned by war as a means of preserving and reinforcing (or, it may be, challenging) dominant elites and ideologies within existing states.
Remembrance by the nation state
Remembrance by the agencies of civic society
For example, Catherine Merridale has shown how, in war-torn Soviet Russa during the 1920s, the Bolsheviks launched an assault on the customs, rituals and supposed superstitions of traditional Russian funerary culture. This led rapidly to their enforced abandonment and replacement with officially sanctioned socialist alternatives, notably ‘the practice of secular, scientific cremation (p. 10).
Politics of memory, according to The Invention of Tradition, is an exercise in social engineering from above: the history which became part of the fund of knowledge or the ideology of the nation, state or movement movement is not what has actually been preserved in popular memory, but what has been selected, written, pictured, popularized and institutionalized by those whose function it is to do so (p. 10).
From this perspective, the study of war memory is concerned with its official orchestration and embodiment in ceremonial and physical reminders, and with the patterns of inclusion and exclusion that determine which aspects of collective and individual experience are admitted to public recall and commemoration.
Hobsbawm himself has acknowledged more recently that nationalism cannot be understood unless also anlaysed from below, that is, in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalistic (pp. 10-11).
Forms of official commemoration rested on a rich undergrowth of unofficial activity (p. 11).
Popular memory group: public representations and private memory
The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration
Friday, September 05, 2008
Kansteiner, W: Finding meaning in memory
Many of the conceptually more interesting studies of memory gravitate towards the term “cultural memory” in order to maintain and further develop Halbwachs’s emphasis on the materiality of memory.15 In this context Jan Assmann’s juxtaposition of communicative and cultural memory is particularly useful.
Assmann also makes an important differentiation between potential and actual cultural memories. He argues that cultural memories occur in the mode of potentiality when representations of the past are stored in archives, libraries, and museums; they occur in the mode of actuality when these representations are adopted and given new meaning in new social and historical contexts. These distinctions suggest that specific representations of the past might traverse the whole spectrum, from the realm of communicative memory to the realm of actual cultural memory and finally potential cultural memory (and vice versa) (pp. 182-183).
Assmann’s concepts remind us that despite their power to transmit concern for historical events to future generations, collective memories have a strong bias toward the present (p. 183).
He (Nora) divides the history of memory into three periods, a premodern, modern, and postmodern condition. Premodern times are characterized by a natural, unself-conscious relation between people and their past. Their environments of memory sustain traditions and rituals that provide a stable sense of being in time for the members of local memory communities. For Nora, the fall from memory grace occurred in the nineteenth century with the acceleration of everyday life through industrial and
social modernization. As old traditions and affiliations lost their meaning, the relation between people and their past was reconstructed through first-order simulations of natural memory. Elites produced sites of memory in language, monuments, and archives which had one common referent, the nation-state, and which strove to secure the future of the nation-state through compelling inventions of its traditions. With the collapse of the ideology and reality of the nation state in the twentieth century, these first-order simulations have been replaced by second-order simulations of natural memory. The media culture of the late twentieth century spews out identities and representations of the past which have little relation to any shared traditions, life worlds, or political institutions other than the frantic pace of media consumption itself (P. 183)
Assmann also makes an important differentiation between potential and actual cultural memories. He argues that cultural memories occur in the mode of potentiality when representations of the past are stored in archives, libraries, and museums; they occur in the mode of actuality when these representations are adopted and given new meaning in new social and historical contexts. These distinctions suggest that specific representations of the past might traverse the whole spectrum, from the realm of communicative memory to the realm of actual cultural memory and finally potential cultural memory (and vice versa) (pp. 182-183).
Assmann’s concepts remind us that despite their power to transmit concern for historical events to future generations, collective memories have a strong bias toward the present (p. 183).
He (Nora) divides the history of memory into three periods, a premodern, modern, and postmodern condition. Premodern times are characterized by a natural, unself-conscious relation between people and their past. Their environments of memory sustain traditions and rituals that provide a stable sense of being in time for the members of local memory communities. For Nora, the fall from memory grace occurred in the nineteenth century with the acceleration of everyday life through industrial and
social modernization. As old traditions and affiliations lost their meaning, the relation between people and their past was reconstructed through first-order simulations of natural memory. Elites produced sites of memory in language, monuments, and archives which had one common referent, the nation-state, and which strove to secure the future of the nation-state through compelling inventions of its traditions. With the collapse of the ideology and reality of the nation state in the twentieth century, these first-order simulations have been replaced by second-order simulations of natural memory. The media culture of the late twentieth century spews out identities and representations of the past which have little relation to any shared traditions, life worlds, or political institutions other than the frantic pace of media consumption itself (P. 183)
Assman: Collective Memory and Cultural Identity
According to Nietzsche, while in the world of animals genetic programs guarantee the survival of the species, humans must find a means by which to maintain their nature consistently through generations. The solution to this problem is offered by cultural memory, a collective concept for all knowledge that directs behavior and experience in the interactive frame- work of a society and one that obtains through generations in repeated societal practice and initiation (Assman, p. 126)
Collective Memory = Cultural Memory
Communicative Memory - daily life memory
Halwachs's Collective Memory - basically oral memory composed and maintained in everyday lives
Every individual memory consti- tutes itself in communication with others. These "others," however, are not just any set of people, rather they are groups who conceive their unity and peculiarity through a common image of their past. Halbwachs thinks of families, neighborhood and professional groups, political par- ties, associations, etc., up to and including nations. Every individual belongs to numerous such groups and therefore entertains numerous col- lective self-images and memories (p. 127).
Transitions to larger unit of groups
Once we remove ourselves from the area of everyday communication and enter into the area of objectivized culture, almost everything changes. The transition is so fundamental that one must ask whether the metaphor of memory remains in any way applicable. Halbwachs, as is well known, stopped at this juncture, without taking it into account systematically.
Cultural Memory - Jewish
Cultural memory has its fixed point; its horizon does not change with the passing of time. These fixed points are fateful events of the past, whose memory is maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and institutional communication (recitation, practice, observance). We call these "figures of memory." The entire Jewish cal- endar is based on figures of memory.16 In the flow of everyday commu- nications such festivals, rites, epics, poems, images, etc., form "islands of time," islands of a completely different temporality suspended from time.
1) "The concretion of identity" or the relation to the group
2) its capacity to reconstruct. No memory can preserve the past. What remains is only that "which society in each era can reconstruct within its contemporary frame of reference.
3) Formation. The objectivation or crystallization of communicated meaning and collectively shared knowledge is a prerequisite of its transmission in the culturally institutionalized heritage of a society
4) Organization. With this we mean a) the institutional buttressing of communication, e.g., through formulization of the communicative situa- tion in ceremony and b) the specialization of the bearers of cultural memory.
5) Obligation. The relation to a normative self-image of the group engenders a clear system of values and differentiations in importance which structure the cultural supply of knowledge and the symbols.
6) Reflexivity. Cultural memory is reflexive in three ways
Collective Memory = Cultural Memory
Communicative Memory - daily life memory
Halwachs's Collective Memory - basically oral memory composed and maintained in everyday lives
Every individual memory consti- tutes itself in communication with others. These "others," however, are not just any set of people, rather they are groups who conceive their unity and peculiarity through a common image of their past. Halbwachs thinks of families, neighborhood and professional groups, political par- ties, associations, etc., up to and including nations. Every individual belongs to numerous such groups and therefore entertains numerous col- lective self-images and memories (p. 127).
Transitions to larger unit of groups
Once we remove ourselves from the area of everyday communication and enter into the area of objectivized culture, almost everything changes. The transition is so fundamental that one must ask whether the metaphor of memory remains in any way applicable. Halbwachs, as is well known, stopped at this juncture, without taking it into account systematically.
Cultural Memory - Jewish
Cultural memory has its fixed point; its horizon does not change with the passing of time. These fixed points are fateful events of the past, whose memory is maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and institutional communication (recitation, practice, observance). We call these "figures of memory." The entire Jewish cal- endar is based on figures of memory.16 In the flow of everyday commu- nications such festivals, rites, epics, poems, images, etc., form "islands of time," islands of a completely different temporality suspended from time.
1) "The concretion of identity" or the relation to the group
2) its capacity to reconstruct. No memory can preserve the past. What remains is only that "which society in each era can reconstruct within its contemporary frame of reference.
3) Formation. The objectivation or crystallization of communicated meaning and collectively shared knowledge is a prerequisite of its transmission in the culturally institutionalized heritage of a society
4) Organization. With this we mean a) the institutional buttressing of communication, e.g., through formulization of the communicative situa- tion in ceremony and b) the specialization of the bearers of cultural memory.
5) Obligation. The relation to a normative self-image of the group engenders a clear system of values and differentiations in importance which structure the cultural supply of knowledge and the symbols.
6) Reflexivity. Cultural memory is reflexive in three ways
Collective Memory Summary
It has become clichéd to assert that journalists write the first draft of history. Far less attention has been paid to who does the rewrites. Frequently, second drafts of history are also written by journalists. The typology developed here describes the
ways journalists use our public past and offers some insights about the process of collective memory development in the news media. Commemorative journalism seems to offer the best chance to reexamine our past, but may offer little incentive to do so. Historical analogies may not encourage us to contest the meaning of the past due to the simple, dramatic narratives of news reporting. Historical contexts may not encourage us to look closely at the meanings we ascribe to the past either, because they are presented as facts rather than interpretations (Edy, p. 71)
Halbwachs, a student of Durkheim (a sociologist)
they understand collective memories as collectively shared representations of the past.
exclusion of the importance of individual difference and realm and roles of individual memories
Basically they are sociologist
Barry Schwartz (1991) offered the most concise definition of collective memory: “‘Collective memory’ is a metaphor that formulates society’s retention and loss of information about its past in the familiar terms of individual remembering and
forgetting” (p. 302). Halbwachs (1950/1980) explained that memory is the product of a social group. It is a past that is shaped by and meaningful for a community. Communication is a critical element of collective memory. It is what transcends the psychological aspects of memory and makes the concept sociological. Communication makes possible the unique capacity of collective memory to preserve pasts older than the oldest living individual (p. 72).
The documentary style of journalists’ work gives them a unique authority in telling the story of the past. That authority may make for more powerful emotional connections on the part of the audience (p. 73).
Journalists’ references to the Watts riots were identified with Lexis/Nexis searches
Commemorative stories are sometimes referred to as “anniversary journalism.”
Three forms of journalistic uses of collective memory suggested by Edy
Commemoration
HIstorical Analogy
HIstorical Context
drawn from Edy, J. A. (1999). Journalistic uses of collective memory. Journal of Communication, 49, 71.
ways journalists use our public past and offers some insights about the process of collective memory development in the news media. Commemorative journalism seems to offer the best chance to reexamine our past, but may offer little incentive to do so. Historical analogies may not encourage us to contest the meaning of the past due to the simple, dramatic narratives of news reporting. Historical contexts may not encourage us to look closely at the meanings we ascribe to the past either, because they are presented as facts rather than interpretations (Edy, p. 71)
Halbwachs, a student of Durkheim (a sociologist)
they understand collective memories as collectively shared representations of the past.
exclusion of the importance of individual difference and realm and roles of individual memories
Basically they are sociologist
Barry Schwartz (1991) offered the most concise definition of collective memory: “‘Collective memory’ is a metaphor that formulates society’s retention and loss of information about its past in the familiar terms of individual remembering and
forgetting” (p. 302). Halbwachs (1950/1980) explained that memory is the product of a social group. It is a past that is shaped by and meaningful for a community. Communication is a critical element of collective memory. It is what transcends the psychological aspects of memory and makes the concept sociological. Communication makes possible the unique capacity of collective memory to preserve pasts older than the oldest living individual (p. 72).
The documentary style of journalists’ work gives them a unique authority in telling the story of the past. That authority may make for more powerful emotional connections on the part of the audience (p. 73).
Journalists’ references to the Watts riots were identified with Lexis/Nexis searches
Commemorative stories are sometimes referred to as “anniversary journalism.”
Three forms of journalistic uses of collective memory suggested by Edy
Commemoration
HIstorical Analogy
HIstorical Context
drawn from Edy, J. A. (1999). Journalistic uses of collective memory. Journal of Communication, 49, 71.
Public Sphere Summary
Habermas and his theory is okay, actually more than okay considering he was the one who came up with a genuine idea of public sphere (it has to be said though that he got those idea from Kant and Hegel and German idealism) as an idealism and presentation of fundamental normative rules for liberal democratic society. However it shouldn't be used to discipline members of society or to exclude voices which resist to follow the normative conditions.
Everybody loves plurality, diversity, no-censorship
Anyhow,
There shouldn't be any type of ethical monopoly which dominates others' opinions and eventually an ideal public sphere
Can media be democratic technic?
Public Sphere and Media (Dahlgren)
Media Institution
Media Representation
Sociocultural Foundation
Cultural Interaction among individuals
Freedom of communication among citizens within civil society requires a vigorous political and constitutional defense. As I have argued elsewhere, democratically elected and internationally coordinated parliaments are an indispensable means of aggregating, coordinating, and representing diverse social interests and opinions (keane, p. 149)
Public Service Media: the development of a plurality of non-state media of communication which both function as permanent thorns in the side of political power (helping thereby to minimize political censorship) and serve as the primary means of communication for citizens living, working, loving, quarrelling and tolerating others within a genuinely pluralist society (Keane, p. 150)
Everybody loves plurality, diversity, no-censorship
Anyhow,
There shouldn't be any type of ethical monopoly which dominates others' opinions and eventually an ideal public sphere
Can media be democratic technic?
Public Sphere and Media (Dahlgren)
Media Institution
Media Representation
Sociocultural Foundation
Cultural Interaction among individuals
Freedom of communication among citizens within civil society requires a vigorous political and constitutional defense. As I have argued elsewhere, democratically elected and internationally coordinated parliaments are an indispensable means of aggregating, coordinating, and representing diverse social interests and opinions (keane, p. 149)
Public Service Media: the development of a plurality of non-state media of communication which both function as permanent thorns in the side of political power (helping thereby to minimize political censorship) and serve as the primary means of communication for citizens living, working, loving, quarrelling and tolerating others within a genuinely pluralist society (Keane, p. 150)
John Keane: Media and Democracy
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an example: 'Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers (p. 136)
Freedom of communication among citizens within civil society requires a vigorous political and constitutional defense. As I have argued elsewhere, democratically elected and internationally coordinated parliaments are an indispensable means of aggregating, coordinating, and representing diverse social interests and opinions (Keane, p. 149)
Public Service Media: the development of a plurality of non-state media of communication which both function as permanent thorns in the side of political power (helping thereby to minimize political censorship) and serve as the primary means of communication for citizens living, working, loving, quarrelling and tolerating others within a genuinely pluralist society (Keane, p. 150).
Public service media require a post-capitalist civil society guaranteed by democratic state institutions (p. 152).
Is it possible anyway? It is fair to say that making state institution that guarantees functions of public sphere became ever-more difficult as globalization has been carried out in neo-liberal direction.
Keane's argument sounds archaic considering his suggestion about erecting world organizations or having different countries follow UN-made international treaty do not seem to be carried out in practice.
Freedom of communication among citizens within civil society requires a vigorous political and constitutional defense. As I have argued elsewhere, democratically elected and internationally coordinated parliaments are an indispensable means of aggregating, coordinating, and representing diverse social interests and opinions (Keane, p. 149)
Public Service Media: the development of a plurality of non-state media of communication which both function as permanent thorns in the side of political power (helping thereby to minimize political censorship) and serve as the primary means of communication for citizens living, working, loving, quarrelling and tolerating others within a genuinely pluralist society (Keane, p. 150).
Public service media require a post-capitalist civil society guaranteed by democratic state institutions (p. 152).
Is it possible anyway? It is fair to say that making state institution that guarantees functions of public sphere became ever-more difficult as globalization has been carried out in neo-liberal direction.
Keane's argument sounds archaic considering his suggestion about erecting world organizations or having different countries follow UN-made international treaty do not seem to be carried out in practice.
Dahlgren: Television and the Public Sphere
Discussion of Public Sphere and its application in society
Media Institution
Media Representation
Sociocultural Foundation
Cultural Interaction among individuals
Media Institution
Media Representation
Sociocultural Foundation
Cultural Interaction among individuals
Postpositivism and Interpretism
If post-positivism is like a language, it has many dialects
Finally, we note an aftermath of specialization and fragmentation. Specifically, there is a growing sense that discipline-wide agreement about the goals and epistemology of communication science may not be achievable.
Natural Science ⇔ Naturalistic Inquiry or Naturalism
Interpretive Paradigm (p. 11)
It is an ontological and epistemological foundation of qualitative method
It developed from the convergence of several 19th- and 20th-century intellectual traditions. including German idealist philosophy, phenomenology, and American pragmatism.
The human sciences concerned with experience and social action are inherently different from the natural sciences.
Realities are plural, simultaneous, and local phenomena
Theory should be developed inductively through the iterative testing of tentative explanation against the experience of ongoing interaction with group members.
Criticism
It appeared to practice insufficient controls against random effects (and other threats to internal validity), representative sampling, generalizability, and the falsification of hypotheses.
Lindlof & Taylor
Finally, we note an aftermath of specialization and fragmentation. Specifically, there is a growing sense that discipline-wide agreement about the goals and epistemology of communication science may not be achievable.
Natural Science ⇔ Naturalistic Inquiry or Naturalism
Interpretive Paradigm (p. 11)
It is an ontological and epistemological foundation of qualitative method
It developed from the convergence of several 19th- and 20th-century intellectual traditions. including German idealist philosophy, phenomenology, and American pragmatism.
The human sciences concerned with experience and social action are inherently different from the natural sciences.
Realities are plural, simultaneous, and local phenomena
Theory should be developed inductively through the iterative testing of tentative explanation against the experience of ongoing interaction with group members.
Criticism
It appeared to practice insufficient controls against random effects (and other threats to internal validity), representative sampling, generalizability, and the falsification of hypotheses.
Lindlof & Taylor
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Objectivist, Empricist, and Rationalist
* Reality is singular, a priori, and objective
* True knowledge arises from observation of empirical phenomenon that form the tangible, material traces of essential reality
* The concepts and methods of natural science are a legitimate model for the conduct of social science
* Essential reality constraints the range of possible knowledge claims. Those claims should aspire to exacting correspondence with reality
* In observation, the complexity of phenomena should be reduced
* The logic of measurement and quantification is best for formalizing empirical observations
* Research should search for mechanisms of cause and effect
* Based on these understanding, research should be able to predict and control
* Researcher should aggregate subjects based on their possession of a specified trait, attribute, or performance
* Theory is developed deductively and incrementally. Researcher should proceed by systematically proposing and testing explanations based on existing, verified knowledge. Hypotheses inviting confidence are to be added to theory.
* True knowledge arises from observation of empirical phenomenon that form the tangible, material traces of essential reality
* The concepts and methods of natural science are a legitimate model for the conduct of social science
* Essential reality constraints the range of possible knowledge claims. Those claims should aspire to exacting correspondence with reality
* In observation, the complexity of phenomena should be reduced
* The logic of measurement and quantification is best for formalizing empirical observations
* Research should search for mechanisms of cause and effect
* Based on these understanding, research should be able to predict and control
* Researcher should aggregate subjects based on their possession of a specified trait, attribute, or performance
* Theory is developed deductively and incrementally. Researcher should proceed by systematically proposing and testing explanations based on existing, verified knowledge. Hypotheses inviting confidence are to be added to theory.
Liberalism, public sphere, pluralism by Peters
Liberalism (before they advance their ideas too further) needs to think itself
Need to be Less hostile toward religious ideas
Because their ideas actually rest partly upon religious ideas
such as "Truth wins in the end"
or "We can tolerate evil because truth will win eventually"
Liberal deceived themselves or forget that their very basic ideas came from religious traditions
Space: settlementaion of space
Mohamad Debate
Cartoon cause a riot in Jordan
Content not restricted in a nation where liberals hold "freedom of speech"
Images and messages now travel So much faster
Distinction between public and private blurs
Liberal needs to rethnk that Now it is very difficult to think you can separate public and private clearly
A central principle of religious ideas: Kindness to the stranger
It is in truth and practice more powerful foundation
Solidarity and freedom gives more strength
Religious person means – he can’t be fanatic
We wants to be plural, open, diverse, and respectful of others
But we can’t get there with moral monopolies
Liberalism sometimes undermines us by pretending to be liberal
Solidarity protest criticism
I have more like a religious public sphere, to be honest about it
Set up a rule – no positive vision? Just procedure
Liberalism became a rule
In one of the player
Claiming a neutrality – pushing other people out
Ethical monopoly – with liberty, enlightenment, reason… actually insulting and alienating other people
Mohamad cartoon – geopolitical battle
Secular modernity
Politics of position that claims to be not political
Media fit into whole question
Media blur public and private
18th century
inside home private
coffeehouse public
20th century
news coming to you home
computer is a world public sphere
youtube broadcast yourself
communication – make common means shareable
public sphere mixed up degenerate
free speech
modernity and globalization – European sense
complicated mixture of race ethnicity
globalization is uneven
liberal idea of free speech
civic participation – rationality read write argue
but Very different understanding about what it mean to be a citizen. Sometimes it is very ritual based on performance
Recognizing globalization is uneven
Different intellectual and geographical blocks
In occidental world: Absolute liberty of press and speech
India latin America – more positive vision of freedom respect
You can‘t say they don’t respect freedom
Censorship
Nobody wants to say I love censorship
Because future is open. We don’t know the future
We also don’t know what it (certain content) means to my neighbor
But in higher level
disapproving censorhip is theatrical performance
how smart how liberal and how cool it is to be disapproving of censorship
People in other countries and different parts of the world have
Very good reasons to be outraged actually because of pictures and stories
Reasonable and rational but what about other people?
Need to be Less hostile toward religious ideas
Because their ideas actually rest partly upon religious ideas
such as "Truth wins in the end"
or "We can tolerate evil because truth will win eventually"
Liberal deceived themselves or forget that their very basic ideas came from religious traditions
Space: settlementaion of space
Mohamad Debate
Cartoon cause a riot in Jordan
Content not restricted in a nation where liberals hold "freedom of speech"
Images and messages now travel So much faster
Distinction between public and private blurs
Liberal needs to rethnk that Now it is very difficult to think you can separate public and private clearly
A central principle of religious ideas: Kindness to the stranger
It is in truth and practice more powerful foundation
Solidarity and freedom gives more strength
Religious person means – he can’t be fanatic
We wants to be plural, open, diverse, and respectful of others
But we can’t get there with moral monopolies
Liberalism sometimes undermines us by pretending to be liberal
Solidarity protest criticism
I have more like a religious public sphere, to be honest about it
Set up a rule – no positive vision? Just procedure
Liberalism became a rule
In one of the player
Claiming a neutrality – pushing other people out
Ethical monopoly – with liberty, enlightenment, reason… actually insulting and alienating other people
Mohamad cartoon – geopolitical battle
Secular modernity
Politics of position that claims to be not political
Media fit into whole question
Media blur public and private
18th century
inside home private
coffeehouse public
20th century
news coming to you home
computer is a world public sphere
youtube broadcast yourself
communication – make common means shareable
public sphere mixed up degenerate
free speech
modernity and globalization – European sense
complicated mixture of race ethnicity
globalization is uneven
liberal idea of free speech
civic participation – rationality read write argue
but Very different understanding about what it mean to be a citizen. Sometimes it is very ritual based on performance
Recognizing globalization is uneven
Different intellectual and geographical blocks
In occidental world: Absolute liberty of press and speech
India latin America – more positive vision of freedom respect
You can‘t say they don’t respect freedom
Censorship
Nobody wants to say I love censorship
Because future is open. We don’t know the future
We also don’t know what it (certain content) means to my neighbor
But in higher level
disapproving censorhip is theatrical performance
how smart how liberal and how cool it is to be disapproving of censorship
People in other countries and different parts of the world have
Very good reasons to be outraged actually because of pictures and stories
Reasonable and rational but what about other people?
Fortner & Christians. Separating wheat from chaff
External validity addresses the ability to generalize your study to other people and other situations.
Internal validity addresses the "true" causes of the outcomes that you observed in your study. One of the keys to understanding internal validity (IV) is the recognition that when it is associated with experimental research it refers both to how well the study was run (research design, operational definitions used, how variables were measured, what was/wasn't measured, etc.), and how confidently one can conclude that the change in the dependent variable was produced solely by the independent variable and not extraneous ones.
If true interiority has occurred, that is, if data accurately reflect the natural circumstances, those data are valid and reliable even though not based upon radomization, repeated and controlled observation, measurement, and statistical inference. Our concern is for a research style that reduces situations and simultaneously maintains a broad understanding.
The researcher does not merely cite these secondary documents, but rather weighs, evaluates, and then constructs them fairly.
Effective use of triangulation is another mark of competent humanistic research.
the goal is to build up a fully rounded analysis.
The facts never speak for themselves. They must be selected, marshalled, linked together, and given a voice.
external and internal validity
exegetical awareness
accurate assessment of secondary sources
imaginative triangulation
We do not conduct our research in a vacuum
Also, to be a part of such an enterprise implies that we have accepted both the historical and mythological constructs of the community to which we belong.
Because culturalism is necessarily a historical method, the scholar using the cultural method must address history that circumscribes, and which may impinge on, his or her interpretations and explanations of meaning.
Because the conduct of cultural studies borrows so heavily from historical methods, we need to be especially aware of the pitfalls that haunt historical research.
Fortner & Christians. Separating wheat from chaff in qualitative studies. Research methods in mass communication
Internal validity addresses the "true" causes of the outcomes that you observed in your study. One of the keys to understanding internal validity (IV) is the recognition that when it is associated with experimental research it refers both to how well the study was run (research design, operational definitions used, how variables were measured, what was/wasn't measured, etc.), and how confidently one can conclude that the change in the dependent variable was produced solely by the independent variable and not extraneous ones.
If true interiority has occurred, that is, if data accurately reflect the natural circumstances, those data are valid and reliable even though not based upon radomization, repeated and controlled observation, measurement, and statistical inference. Our concern is for a research style that reduces situations and simultaneously maintains a broad understanding.
The researcher does not merely cite these secondary documents, but rather weighs, evaluates, and then constructs them fairly.
Effective use of triangulation is another mark of competent humanistic research.
the goal is to build up a fully rounded analysis.
The facts never speak for themselves. They must be selected, marshalled, linked together, and given a voice.
external and internal validity
exegetical awareness
accurate assessment of secondary sources
imaginative triangulation
We do not conduct our research in a vacuum
Also, to be a part of such an enterprise implies that we have accepted both the historical and mythological constructs of the community to which we belong.
Because culturalism is necessarily a historical method, the scholar using the cultural method must address history that circumscribes, and which may impinge on, his or her interpretations and explanations of meaning.
Because the conduct of cultural studies borrows so heavily from historical methods, we need to be especially aware of the pitfalls that haunt historical research.
Fortner & Christians. Separating wheat from chaff in qualitative studies. Research methods in mass communication
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
The logic and aims of qualitative research
Social sciences possessed for Vico a common task with the humanities. The explanation of how people create what is distinctively human - civilization and cultures, In Vico's view the social science were scientific in the sense that they aimed at systematic knowledge
A major part of our task is to clarify systemically what we and others already know, or potentially know, of the social world based solely upon our ordinary immersion in this world. From this perspective, every person is a social scientist (p. 355).
One assumption of quantitative research - normal distribution of phenomena
The inverse of qualitative studies is that version of social science (or history) philosophically known as positivism and methodologically known as empiricism.
Qualitative studies are a self-conscious attempt to restore the critical and liberating function to intellectual investigation. They do not view the social sciences as a natural science of society, but as a distinctive science of the human. They do not view society as a body of contingent and neutral facts to be charted but as an active creation of its members. They do not view social science as "objective" in the ordinary and simple understanding of that term, but as an active intervention in social life with claims and purposes of its own (p. 358).
Qualitative studies start from the assumption that in studying humans we are examining a creative process whereby people produce and maintain forms of life and society and systems of meaning and value.... To study this creative process is our first obligation.
Human live by interpretations.
It is, then, to this attempt at recovering the fact of human agency - the ways persons live by intentions, purposes, and values - that qualitative studies are dedicated.
Thus we do not ask "how do the media affect us" (could we figure that out if we wanted to), but "what are the interpretations of meaning and value created in the media and what is their relation to the rest of life?" (p. 359).
The task of social science, the basic task of qualitative studies, is to study these interpretations, that is, to interpret these interpretations so that we may better understand the meanings that people use to guide their activities (p. 359).
Four Criteria
Naturalistic Observation
Contextualization
Maximized Comparisons (Glaser and Strauss; Grounded Theory)
Sensitized Concepts
Carey and Christians. The logic and aims of qualitative research Research methods in mass communication
A major part of our task is to clarify systemically what we and others already know, or potentially know, of the social world based solely upon our ordinary immersion in this world. From this perspective, every person is a social scientist (p. 355).
One assumption of quantitative research - normal distribution of phenomena
The inverse of qualitative studies is that version of social science (or history) philosophically known as positivism and methodologically known as empiricism.
Qualitative studies are a self-conscious attempt to restore the critical and liberating function to intellectual investigation. They do not view the social sciences as a natural science of society, but as a distinctive science of the human. They do not view society as a body of contingent and neutral facts to be charted but as an active creation of its members. They do not view social science as "objective" in the ordinary and simple understanding of that term, but as an active intervention in social life with claims and purposes of its own (p. 358).
Qualitative studies start from the assumption that in studying humans we are examining a creative process whereby people produce and maintain forms of life and society and systems of meaning and value.... To study this creative process is our first obligation.
Human live by interpretations.
It is, then, to this attempt at recovering the fact of human agency - the ways persons live by intentions, purposes, and values - that qualitative studies are dedicated.
Thus we do not ask "how do the media affect us" (could we figure that out if we wanted to), but "what are the interpretations of meaning and value created in the media and what is their relation to the rest of life?" (p. 359).
The task of social science, the basic task of qualitative studies, is to study these interpretations, that is, to interpret these interpretations so that we may better understand the meanings that people use to guide their activities (p. 359).
Four Criteria
Naturalistic Observation
Contextualization
Maximized Comparisons (Glaser and Strauss; Grounded Theory)
Sensitized Concepts
Carey and Christians. The logic and aims of qualitative research Research methods in mass communication
End of Memory-History; Memory Grasped by History;Realms of Memory: Another History
Why did this synthesis (Memory-Nation) break down? Because its sacred character was undermined in the crisis of the 1930s, when the state was divorced from the nation and eventually the old couple was supplanted by a new one: state and society. At the same time, and for the same reasons, history, which had become a tradition of memory, was transformed into social self-understanding (p. 5).
Historicized memory comes to us from without. Because it is no longer a social practice, we internalize it as an individual constraint. The transition from memory to history requires every social group to redefine its identity by dredging up its past. (p. 10).
Memorial Space
Practically every organized social group, and not just the intellectual or educated, has followed the lead of the ethnic minorities in seeking their own roots and identities.
The proliferation of genealogical research is a striking recent phenomenon
The demise of memory-history has multiplied the number of private memories demanding their own individual histories.
The atomization of memory (as collective memory is transformed into private memory) imposes a duty to remember on each individual.
When memory ceases to be omnipresent, it ceases to be present at all unless some isolated individual decides to assume responsibility for it.
to be Jewish is to remember being Jewish.
If truly internalized, such a memory inexorably asserts its claim over a person's whole being.
Archival Memory; Memory as an Individual Duty; Alienated Memory
We no longer speak of "origins" but rather of "inceptions." Given to us as radically other, the past is a world from which we are fundamentally cut off. We discover the truth about our memory when we discover how alienated from it we are (p. 12).
The whole dynamic of our relation to the past is shaped by the subtle interplay between the inaccessible and the nonexistent. If the old ideal was to resurrect the past, the new ideal is to create a representation of it. Resurrection, no matter how complete, implied a careful manipulation of light and shadow to create an illusion of perspective with an eye to present purposes (p. 12).
With the integration of memory-history, however, a new kind of historian has emerged, a historian prepared, unlike his predecessors, to avow his close, intimate, and personal ties to this subject (p. 13).
Our society is quite different: it has changed so radically that it has lost its memory and become obsessed with understanding itself historically. This accounts for the increasingly central role of the historian: he prevents history from being merely history.
Thus we compensate for our alienated perspective by trying to view the past in close-up and artificial hyper-reality.
Realms of Memory: Another History
Lieux de Memoire are complex things. At once natural and artificial, simple and ambiguous, concrete and abstract, they are lieux - places, sites, causes - in three senses: material, symbolic, and functional.
The observance of a commemorative minute of silence, which might seem to be a strictly symbolic act, disrupts time, thus concentrating memory (p. 14).
"Memories are crystallized"
For although it is true that the fundamental purpose of a lieu de memoire is to stop time, to inhibit forgetting, to fix a state of things, to immortalize death, and to materialize the immaterial (just as gold, they say, is the memory of money) - all in order to capture the maximum possible meaning with the fewest possible signs - it is also clear that lieux de memoire thrive only because of their capacity for change, their ability to resurrect old meanings and generate new ones along with new and unforseenable conncetions (that is what makes is exciting).
Lieux de memoire are created by the interaction between memory and history, an interaction resulting in a mutual overdetermination. A will to remember must be present initially. Without this criterion, the definition would be so broad as to encompass almost any object worthy of remembrance.
Memory dictates and history writes.
Only certain works of history are lieux de memoire, namely, those that reshape memory in some fundamental way or that epitomize a revision of memory for pedagogical purpose.
Memoirs, too, can be lieux de memoire (as the word suggest).
There is, however, no reason why we cannot imagine a variety of possible arrangements or classifications of objects within the category of lieux de memoire. Some such objects are part of everyday experience: cemeteries, museums, commemorations. Others are products of reflection, such as the concept of historical generation, which was mentioned earlier, or the lineage, or the "region" as an object of memory, or certain "divisions" in the way the French perceive their national territory..., or of the notion that... (p. 18).
And finally, if we were to emphasize the symbolic elements, we might want to distinguish between "dominant" lieux de memoire and "dominated" ones. Dominant site are spectacles, celebrations of triumph. They are imposing as well as generally imposed from above by the government or some official organization, and typically cold and solemn, like official ceremonies...Dominated sites are places of refuge, sanctuaries of instinctive devotion and hushed pilgrimages, where the living heart of memory still beats. (p. 19).
Historicized memory comes to us from without. Because it is no longer a social practice, we internalize it as an individual constraint. The transition from memory to history requires every social group to redefine its identity by dredging up its past. (p. 10).
Memorial Space
Practically every organized social group, and not just the intellectual or educated, has followed the lead of the ethnic minorities in seeking their own roots and identities.
The proliferation of genealogical research is a striking recent phenomenon
The demise of memory-history has multiplied the number of private memories demanding their own individual histories.
The atomization of memory (as collective memory is transformed into private memory) imposes a duty to remember on each individual.
When memory ceases to be omnipresent, it ceases to be present at all unless some isolated individual decides to assume responsibility for it.
to be Jewish is to remember being Jewish.
If truly internalized, such a memory inexorably asserts its claim over a person's whole being.
Archival Memory; Memory as an Individual Duty; Alienated Memory
We no longer speak of "origins" but rather of "inceptions." Given to us as radically other, the past is a world from which we are fundamentally cut off. We discover the truth about our memory when we discover how alienated from it we are (p. 12).
The whole dynamic of our relation to the past is shaped by the subtle interplay between the inaccessible and the nonexistent. If the old ideal was to resurrect the past, the new ideal is to create a representation of it. Resurrection, no matter how complete, implied a careful manipulation of light and shadow to create an illusion of perspective with an eye to present purposes (p. 12).
With the integration of memory-history, however, a new kind of historian has emerged, a historian prepared, unlike his predecessors, to avow his close, intimate, and personal ties to this subject (p. 13).
Our society is quite different: it has changed so radically that it has lost its memory and become obsessed with understanding itself historically. This accounts for the increasingly central role of the historian: he prevents history from being merely history.
Thus we compensate for our alienated perspective by trying to view the past in close-up and artificial hyper-reality.
Realms of Memory: Another History
Lieux de Memoire are complex things. At once natural and artificial, simple and ambiguous, concrete and abstract, they are lieux - places, sites, causes - in three senses: material, symbolic, and functional.
The observance of a commemorative minute of silence, which might seem to be a strictly symbolic act, disrupts time, thus concentrating memory (p. 14).
"Memories are crystallized"
For although it is true that the fundamental purpose of a lieu de memoire is to stop time, to inhibit forgetting, to fix a state of things, to immortalize death, and to materialize the immaterial (just as gold, they say, is the memory of money) - all in order to capture the maximum possible meaning with the fewest possible signs - it is also clear that lieux de memoire thrive only because of their capacity for change, their ability to resurrect old meanings and generate new ones along with new and unforseenable conncetions (that is what makes is exciting).
Lieux de memoire are created by the interaction between memory and history, an interaction resulting in a mutual overdetermination. A will to remember must be present initially. Without this criterion, the definition would be so broad as to encompass almost any object worthy of remembrance.
Memory dictates and history writes.
Only certain works of history are lieux de memoire, namely, those that reshape memory in some fundamental way or that epitomize a revision of memory for pedagogical purpose.
Memoirs, too, can be lieux de memoire (as the word suggest).
There is, however, no reason why we cannot imagine a variety of possible arrangements or classifications of objects within the category of lieux de memoire. Some such objects are part of everyday experience: cemeteries, museums, commemorations. Others are products of reflection, such as the concept of historical generation, which was mentioned earlier, or the lineage, or the "region" as an object of memory, or certain "divisions" in the way the French perceive their national territory..., or of the notion that... (p. 18).
And finally, if we were to emphasize the symbolic elements, we might want to distinguish between "dominant" lieux de memoire and "dominated" ones. Dominant site are spectacles, celebrations of triumph. They are imposing as well as generally imposed from above by the government or some official organization, and typically cold and solemn, like official ceremonies...Dominated sites are places of refuge, sanctuaries of instinctive devotion and hushed pilgrimages, where the living heart of memory still beats. (p. 19).
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Publics and Counterpublics
Warner suggests that the public we address is always imaginary in that the text precedes the audience.
Warner defines a public as a "cultural form, a kind of [self-creating] practical fiction" (p. 8). Only "a certain kind of [modern] person- inhabiting "a certain kind of social world," "motivated by a certain normative horizon," and able "to speak within a certain language ideology"-is able to "address a public or to think of [her]self as belonging to a public" (p. 10).
"The notion of a public enables a reflexivity in the circulation of texts among strangers who become, by virtue of their reflexively circulating discourse, a social entity,"
"when people address publics, they engage in struggles... over the conditions that bring them together (p. 11-12).
counterpublic
s as collective responses to the limitations and exclusions of "the public."
counterpublics are simply publics aware of their subordinate status
." Counterpublics represent new species of publics and are a recurrent theme in Warner's work, best known in the context of dissident sexualities.
Going Public
a call to refuse privacy, to go public as a way of making visible the cultural work of counterpublics
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, examined the rise of public opinion and print culture in the eighteenth century. Habermas recognized that the explosion of the print industry—newspapers, pamphlets, and books—began to exert a powerful influence on political life separate from the traditional ruling agency exerted by the king, the aristocracy, and the parliament. For Habermas, it was not simply the growth of publishing that created the public sphere—it was the simultaneous dawn of a kind of consciousness that the public could be systematically addressed through a pamphlet as if a group of strangers were gathered together in a giant auditorium. Habermas saw this imaginary “public sphere” as a potential democratic utopia where individuals could discuss national issues and come to common consent in public. His book tells a sad story, however, because it also chronicles the loss of that utopian potential during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when publishing media became consolidated in the hands of a few. Less and less the voice of a democratic public (if it ever was one), press media became largely the instrument of industrial magnates and the ruling class. In the United States, individuals like Randolph Hearst bought up newspapers and controlled public opinion. Presently, when Tom Brokaw addresses the U.S. “public” on the evening news, that news is filtered and arranged by the megacorporations that own the television stations that bang the drum for war on Iraq’s oil. For Habermas, the challenge of the twentieth century is to reclaim the promise of the public sphere for genuine democratic debate.
The key to Warner’s definition of a public is the idea of reflexiveness. People rhetorically hail a group of strangers in a certain way (“Hey, you!”, or “my fellow Americans”), which in turn, frames and proscribes the expressive and behavioral possibilities of that interaction (11-12). The performative culture thus created depends crucially on the imaginative projection of the participants, which is why public sphere theory is so attractive to scholars of narrative and aesthetics. Warner’s goal is not to explain the origin of a public, but rather to provide a working taxonomy of different styles of reflexive behavior that characterize different kinds of publics, ranging from racial and sexual discourse of the early nineteenth-century, to Whitman’s poetry, and to contemporary drag performance. Warner makes seven claims about publics, the most important being his last three: 1) a public is self organized; 2) A public is a relation among strangers; 3) The address of public speech is both personal and impersonal; 4) A public is constituted through mere attention; 5) A public is the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse; 6) Publics act historically according to the temporality of their circulation; 7) A public is poetic world making (67-118).
With The Spectator, Warner has put his finger right on the sound of “going public,” and he provides very plausible accounts of the way subordinated groups use the same tools to create counterpublics (in Warner’s formulation, counterpublics are simply publics aware of their subordinate status). One of Warner’s most provocative insights is his assertion that “All the verbs for public agency are verbs for private reading, transposed upward to the aggregate of readers. Readers may scrutinize, ask, reject, opine, decide, judge, and so on. Publics can do exactly these things. And nothing else” (123).
taken from http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~ganterg/sjureview/vol1-1/publics.html, a review written by Granville Ganter
Warner defines a public as a "cultural form, a kind of [self-creating] practical fiction" (p. 8). Only "a certain kind of [modern] person- inhabiting "a certain kind of social world," "motivated by a certain normative horizon," and able "to speak within a certain language ideology"-is able to "address a public or to think of [her]self as belonging to a public" (p. 10).
"The notion of a public enables a reflexivity in the circulation of texts among strangers who become, by virtue of their reflexively circulating discourse, a social entity,"
"when people address publics, they engage in struggles... over the conditions that bring them together (p. 11-12).
counterpublic
s as collective responses to the limitations and exclusions of "the public."
counterpublics are simply publics aware of their subordinate status
." Counterpublics represent new species of publics and are a recurrent theme in Warner's work, best known in the context of dissident sexualities.
Going Public
a call to refuse privacy, to go public as a way of making visible the cultural work of counterpublics
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, examined the rise of public opinion and print culture in the eighteenth century. Habermas recognized that the explosion of the print industry—newspapers, pamphlets, and books—began to exert a powerful influence on political life separate from the traditional ruling agency exerted by the king, the aristocracy, and the parliament. For Habermas, it was not simply the growth of publishing that created the public sphere—it was the simultaneous dawn of a kind of consciousness that the public could be systematically addressed through a pamphlet as if a group of strangers were gathered together in a giant auditorium. Habermas saw this imaginary “public sphere” as a potential democratic utopia where individuals could discuss national issues and come to common consent in public. His book tells a sad story, however, because it also chronicles the loss of that utopian potential during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when publishing media became consolidated in the hands of a few. Less and less the voice of a democratic public (if it ever was one), press media became largely the instrument of industrial magnates and the ruling class. In the United States, individuals like Randolph Hearst bought up newspapers and controlled public opinion. Presently, when Tom Brokaw addresses the U.S. “public” on the evening news, that news is filtered and arranged by the megacorporations that own the television stations that bang the drum for war on Iraq’s oil. For Habermas, the challenge of the twentieth century is to reclaim the promise of the public sphere for genuine democratic debate.
The key to Warner’s definition of a public is the idea of reflexiveness. People rhetorically hail a group of strangers in a certain way (“Hey, you!”, or “my fellow Americans”), which in turn, frames and proscribes the expressive and behavioral possibilities of that interaction (11-12). The performative culture thus created depends crucially on the imaginative projection of the participants, which is why public sphere theory is so attractive to scholars of narrative and aesthetics. Warner’s goal is not to explain the origin of a public, but rather to provide a working taxonomy of different styles of reflexive behavior that characterize different kinds of publics, ranging from racial and sexual discourse of the early nineteenth-century, to Whitman’s poetry, and to contemporary drag performance. Warner makes seven claims about publics, the most important being his last three: 1) a public is self organized; 2) A public is a relation among strangers; 3) The address of public speech is both personal and impersonal; 4) A public is constituted through mere attention; 5) A public is the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse; 6) Publics act historically according to the temporality of their circulation; 7) A public is poetic world making (67-118).
With The Spectator, Warner has put his finger right on the sound of “going public,” and he provides very plausible accounts of the way subordinated groups use the same tools to create counterpublics (in Warner’s formulation, counterpublics are simply publics aware of their subordinate status). One of Warner’s most provocative insights is his assertion that “All the verbs for public agency are verbs for private reading, transposed upward to the aggregate of readers. Readers may scrutinize, ask, reject, opine, decide, judge, and so on. Publics can do exactly these things. And nothing else” (123).
taken from http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~ganterg/sjureview/vol1-1/publics.html, a review written by Granville Ganter
Les Lieux de Memoire
Adopting such a view opens the way to a new kind of history: a history less interested in causes than in effects; less interested in actions remembered or even commemorated than in the traces left by those actions and the interaction of those commemorations; less interested in events themselves than in the construction of events over time, in the disappearance and reemergence of their significations; less interested in "what actually happened" than in its perpetual reuse and misuse, its influence on successive presents; less interested in traditions than in the way in which traditions are constituted and passed on. In short, a history that is neither a resurrection nor a reconstitution nor a reconstruction nor even a representation but, in the strongest possible sense, a "rememoration" - a history that is interested in memory not as remembrance but as the overall structure of the past within the present: history of the second degree.(p. xxiv).
Memory is everyday practice
Memory is life
Memory is present.
History is reconstruction
History is always problematic
History is a representation of the past.
There are as many memories as there are groups.
Memory becomes History. And this is a discursive and constructive process in which certain ideologies are embedded or certain meanings of memory are applied.
Our very perception of history has, with much help from the media, expanded enormously, so that memory, once the legacy of what people knew intimately, has been supplanted by the thin film of current events.
Perhaps the most tangible sign of the split between history and memory has been the emergence of a history of history, the awakening of historiographical consciousness.
In France, by contrast (to the U.S.) historiography is iconoclastic and irrelevant.
...When we study the historiography of the French Revolution, when we reconstruct its myths and interpretations, we indicate that we no longer identify fully with its heritage.
History was holy because the nation was holy. The nation became the vehicle that allowed French memory to remain standing on its sanctified foundation.
After state and society were separated (enlightenment, or structural transformation, or modernization) the nation is no longer the unifying framework that defines the collective consciousness.
Thus the three terms - nation, history, memory - regained their autonomy: the nation ceased to be a cause and became a given; history became a social science; and memory became a purely private phenomenon. The memory-nation was thus the last incarnation of memory-history.
Memory is everyday practice
Memory is life
Memory is present.
History is reconstruction
History is always problematic
History is a representation of the past.
There are as many memories as there are groups.
Memory becomes History. And this is a discursive and constructive process in which certain ideologies are embedded or certain meanings of memory are applied.
Our very perception of history has, with much help from the media, expanded enormously, so that memory, once the legacy of what people knew intimately, has been supplanted by the thin film of current events.
Perhaps the most tangible sign of the split between history and memory has been the emergence of a history of history, the awakening of historiographical consciousness.
In France, by contrast (to the U.S.) historiography is iconoclastic and irrelevant.
...When we study the historiography of the French Revolution, when we reconstruct its myths and interpretations, we indicate that we no longer identify fully with its heritage.
History was holy because the nation was holy. The nation became the vehicle that allowed French memory to remain standing on its sanctified foundation.
After state and society were separated (enlightenment, or structural transformation, or modernization) the nation is no longer the unifying framework that defines the collective consciousness.
Thus the three terms - nation, history, memory - regained their autonomy: the nation ceased to be a cause and became a given; history became a social science; and memory became a purely private phenomenon. The memory-nation was thus the last incarnation of memory-history.
Monday, September 01, 2008
Realm of Memory - P. Norra
History of memory is realized through the imaginary representations and historical realities that occupy the symbolic sites that form French social and cultural identity.
Memory which is also includes forgetting, should not be taken literally. It is to be understood in its "sacred context" as the variety of forms through which cultural communities imagine themselves in diverse representational modes.
In this sense, as a critical category "memory" distinguishes itself from history, which is regarded as an intellectual practice more deeply rooted in the evidence derived from the study of empirical reality.
Nora's magnum opus represents the symptomology of a certain form of cultural melancholia as well as the sign of an attempt to construct a symbolic encyclopedia that attests to the values and belief systems of the French nation.
Nora's work not only demonstrates how memory binds communities together and creates social identities but also dramatizes how one's consciousness of the past is symptomatic of the disappearance of certain living traditions.
geographical places or locus
historical figures
monuments or buildings
literary and artistic objects
emblems, commemorations, and symbols
all of which are results of imaginary process that codifies and represents the historical consciousness of "quintessential France."
Indeed, a realm of memory is a polyreferrential entity that can draw on a multiplicity of cultural myths that are appropriated for different ideological or political purposes.
In articulating the concept of memory Nora's work represents a rethinking of certain key ideas found in Maurice Halbwachs's theory of collective memory. To be sure, Halbwachs's sociological conceptualization of memory is diametrically opposite to that of the philosopher Henir Bergson who thought of memory as a purely subjective phenomenon. On the contrary, Halbwachs displaces memory from the individual realm to domain of the "social frames" (what he terms the cadres sociaux) of collective experience. In essence, the act of remembering is always related to the repository of images and ideals that constitute the social relations of which we partake. Places of memory are therefore determined by the mix of individuals that constitute the social group to which they relate (p. xi).
(Sites of memory) gives the social community a narrative through which it could continue to forge its identity.
In this context the memorial process activates a renewed sense of national self-consciousness by dividing the "unitary framework" of collective memory into smaller configurations or identities resulting in the politicization of memory.
The present mode of historical perception is derived from an imaginative form of consciousness based more on myths than on facts.
The "realms of memory" explored in the essays in these three volumes produce a multiplicity of interpretations that give new meaning to history through what might be termed a form of genealogical revisionism. If a realm of memory is to exist it must have a capacity for metamorphosis: the recycling of knowledge through associations and new symbolic representations. In becoming a synonym for national identity, a realm of memory enables successive generations to mediate their cultural myths by inculcating them with their desires (xii).
The social order of the modern nation-state, rooted in the secularized traditions of the Rpublic, could be legitimized in a collective identity whose consciousness was based on a teleological view of the nation as pedagogical authority in the representation of vales.
When all is said and done the idea of France that emerges from these volumes is based more on the imaginary construction of memory than on the encyclopedic compilation of empirical data.]
Era of Commemoration
Memory which is also includes forgetting, should not be taken literally. It is to be understood in its "sacred context" as the variety of forms through which cultural communities imagine themselves in diverse representational modes.
In this sense, as a critical category "memory" distinguishes itself from history, which is regarded as an intellectual practice more deeply rooted in the evidence derived from the study of empirical reality.
Nora's magnum opus represents the symptomology of a certain form of cultural melancholia as well as the sign of an attempt to construct a symbolic encyclopedia that attests to the values and belief systems of the French nation.
Nora's work not only demonstrates how memory binds communities together and creates social identities but also dramatizes how one's consciousness of the past is symptomatic of the disappearance of certain living traditions.
geographical places or locus
historical figures
monuments or buildings
literary and artistic objects
emblems, commemorations, and symbols
all of which are results of imaginary process that codifies and represents the historical consciousness of "quintessential France."
Indeed, a realm of memory is a polyreferrential entity that can draw on a multiplicity of cultural myths that are appropriated for different ideological or political purposes.
In articulating the concept of memory Nora's work represents a rethinking of certain key ideas found in Maurice Halbwachs's theory of collective memory. To be sure, Halbwachs's sociological conceptualization of memory is diametrically opposite to that of the philosopher Henir Bergson who thought of memory as a purely subjective phenomenon. On the contrary, Halbwachs displaces memory from the individual realm to domain of the "social frames" (what he terms the cadres sociaux) of collective experience. In essence, the act of remembering is always related to the repository of images and ideals that constitute the social relations of which we partake. Places of memory are therefore determined by the mix of individuals that constitute the social group to which they relate (p. xi).
(Sites of memory) gives the social community a narrative through which it could continue to forge its identity.
In this context the memorial process activates a renewed sense of national self-consciousness by dividing the "unitary framework" of collective memory into smaller configurations or identities resulting in the politicization of memory.
The present mode of historical perception is derived from an imaginative form of consciousness based more on myths than on facts.
The "realms of memory" explored in the essays in these three volumes produce a multiplicity of interpretations that give new meaning to history through what might be termed a form of genealogical revisionism. If a realm of memory is to exist it must have a capacity for metamorphosis: the recycling of knowledge through associations and new symbolic representations. In becoming a synonym for national identity, a realm of memory enables successive generations to mediate their cultural myths by inculcating them with their desires (xii).
The social order of the modern nation-state, rooted in the secularized traditions of the Rpublic, could be legitimized in a collective identity whose consciousness was based on a teleological view of the nation as pedagogical authority in the representation of vales.
When all is said and done the idea of France that emerges from these volumes is based more on the imaginary construction of memory than on the encyclopedic compilation of empirical data.]
Era of Commemoration
Japan's Quest for Power and WWII
Kwantung Army (関東軍 Kantōgun), also known as the Guandong Army was an army group of the Imperial Japanese Army in the early twentieth century. It became the largest and most prestigious command in the IJA. Many of its personnel, such as Chief of Staff Hideki Tojo, were promoted to high positions in both the military and civil government in the Empire of Japan and it was largely responsible for the creation of the Japanese-dominated Empire of Manchukuo.
After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the former Emperor of China, Pu-Yi, was invited to come with his followers and act as the head of state for Manchuria; he accepted this request. On February 18, 1932 the "State of Manchuria" (Manchukuo, Pinyin: Mǎnzhōuguó) was declared to exist and recognized by Japan.
Only 23 out of 80 then-existing nations recognised the new state.
Domestic Politics
The political structure of Japan at this time was inherited from the Meiji era and was increasingly dominated by the military. During the Meiji period, the government was controlled by a small ruling group of elder statesmen who had overthrown the shogun and established the new centralized Japanese state. These men used their position to coordinate the bureaucracy, the military, the parliament, the Imperial Household, and other branches of government. Following their deaths in the early 1920s, no single governmental institution was able to establish full control, until the 1931 Manchurian Incident, when Japan took control of Manchuria. This began a process in which the military behaved autonomously on the Asian mainland and with increasing authority in politics at home.
From 1937 on, Japan was at war with China. By the time General Hideki Tôjô and the war against the United States began in 1941, the nation was in a state of "total war" and the military and their supporters were able to force their policies on the government and the people. The wartime regime used existing government controls on public opinion, including schools and textbooks, the media, and the police, but Japan continued to have more of an authoritarian government than a totalitarian one like Hitler's Germany. In particular, the government was never able to gain real control of the economy and the great zaibatsu, which were more interested in the economic opportunities provided by the military's policies than in submitting loyally to a patriotic mission.
The emperor has been criticized for not taking a more forceful action to restrain his government, especially in light of his own known preference for peace, but Japanese emperors after the Meiji Restoration had "reigned but not ruled." One wonders if a more forceful emperor in fact could have controlled the army and navy at this late date. The doubts are strengthened in light of the difficulty the emperor had in forcing the military to accept surrender after the atomic bombings. The emperor's decision at that point to bring agreement among his advisers was an extraordinary event in Japanese history.
Ideology
The emperor-based ideology of Japan during World War II was a relatively new creation, dating from the efforts of Meiji oligarchs to unite the nation in response to the Western challenge. Before the Meiji Restoration, the emperor wielded no political power and was viewed simply as a symbol of the Japanese culture. He was the head of the Shintô religion, Japan's native religion, which holds, among other beliefs, that the emperor is descended from gods who created Japan and is therefore semidivine. Westerners of that time knew him only as a shadowy figure somewhat like a pope.
The Meiji oligarchs brought the emperor and Shintô to national prominence, replacing Buddhism as the national religion, for political and ideological reasons--since Buddhism had originated in India and come to Japan via China. The people were not allowed to look at the emperor, or even to speak his name; patriotism had been raised to the unassailable level of sacredness.
It is sometimes difficult to comprehend the extreme sacrifices the Japanese made in the name of the emperor. This can perhaps best be viewed, however, as extreme patriotism--Japanese were taught to give their lives, if necessary, for their emperor. But this was not entirely different from the Americans who gave their lives in the same war for their country and the "American" way. The kamikaze pilots, who were named for the "divine wind" (kami kaze) that destroyed the Mongol fleet in the thirteenth century and saved Japan from invasion, might be compared to the young Iranian soldiers fighting in suicide squadrons in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, or even to fanatical Shiites responsible for the truck bombing of the U.S. Lebanese embassy in 1983.
The Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952), headed by General Douglas MacArthur and the American forces, leads to the third major historical instance in which Japan deliberately borrows and adapts from other countries. (The first is in the 6th - 8th centuries when Japan looks to China for models during Japan's classical period; the second instance is in the late 1800s when Japan looks to the West as it seeks to modernize under the Meiji Restoration.)
After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the former Emperor of China, Pu-Yi, was invited to come with his followers and act as the head of state for Manchuria; he accepted this request. On February 18, 1932 the "State of Manchuria" (Manchukuo, Pinyin: Mǎnzhōuguó) was declared to exist and recognized by Japan.
Only 23 out of 80 then-existing nations recognised the new state.
Domestic Politics
The political structure of Japan at this time was inherited from the Meiji era and was increasingly dominated by the military. During the Meiji period, the government was controlled by a small ruling group of elder statesmen who had overthrown the shogun and established the new centralized Japanese state. These men used their position to coordinate the bureaucracy, the military, the parliament, the Imperial Household, and other branches of government. Following their deaths in the early 1920s, no single governmental institution was able to establish full control, until the 1931 Manchurian Incident, when Japan took control of Manchuria. This began a process in which the military behaved autonomously on the Asian mainland and with increasing authority in politics at home.
From 1937 on, Japan was at war with China. By the time General Hideki Tôjô and the war against the United States began in 1941, the nation was in a state of "total war" and the military and their supporters were able to force their policies on the government and the people. The wartime regime used existing government controls on public opinion, including schools and textbooks, the media, and the police, but Japan continued to have more of an authoritarian government than a totalitarian one like Hitler's Germany. In particular, the government was never able to gain real control of the economy and the great zaibatsu, which were more interested in the economic opportunities provided by the military's policies than in submitting loyally to a patriotic mission.
The emperor has been criticized for not taking a more forceful action to restrain his government, especially in light of his own known preference for peace, but Japanese emperors after the Meiji Restoration had "reigned but not ruled." One wonders if a more forceful emperor in fact could have controlled the army and navy at this late date. The doubts are strengthened in light of the difficulty the emperor had in forcing the military to accept surrender after the atomic bombings. The emperor's decision at that point to bring agreement among his advisers was an extraordinary event in Japanese history.
Ideology
The emperor-based ideology of Japan during World War II was a relatively new creation, dating from the efforts of Meiji oligarchs to unite the nation in response to the Western challenge. Before the Meiji Restoration, the emperor wielded no political power and was viewed simply as a symbol of the Japanese culture. He was the head of the Shintô religion, Japan's native religion, which holds, among other beliefs, that the emperor is descended from gods who created Japan and is therefore semidivine. Westerners of that time knew him only as a shadowy figure somewhat like a pope.
The Meiji oligarchs brought the emperor and Shintô to national prominence, replacing Buddhism as the national religion, for political and ideological reasons--since Buddhism had originated in India and come to Japan via China. The people were not allowed to look at the emperor, or even to speak his name; patriotism had been raised to the unassailable level of sacredness.
It is sometimes difficult to comprehend the extreme sacrifices the Japanese made in the name of the emperor. This can perhaps best be viewed, however, as extreme patriotism--Japanese were taught to give their lives, if necessary, for their emperor. But this was not entirely different from the Americans who gave their lives in the same war for their country and the "American" way. The kamikaze pilots, who were named for the "divine wind" (kami kaze) that destroyed the Mongol fleet in the thirteenth century and saved Japan from invasion, might be compared to the young Iranian soldiers fighting in suicide squadrons in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, or even to fanatical Shiites responsible for the truck bombing of the U.S. Lebanese embassy in 1983.
The Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952), headed by General Douglas MacArthur and the American forces, leads to the third major historical instance in which Japan deliberately borrows and adapts from other countries. (The first is in the 6th - 8th centuries when Japan looks to China for models during Japan's classical period; the second instance is in the late 1800s when Japan looks to the West as it seeks to modernize under the Meiji Restoration.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)