Michael Pickering

Loughborough University | Lough · Department of Social Sciences

A nostalgia tem sido vista como o oposto conceitual do progresso, contra o qual é vista negativamente como reacionária, sentimental ou melancólica. Foi visto como um recuo derrotista do presente e evidência de perda de fé no futuro. A nostalgia é certamente uma resposta à experiência de perda endêmica na modernidade e na modernidade tardia, mas os...

The chapter advances interscalarity as a methodological principle for memory studies to help overcome thinking in terms of binaries when we consider memory and remembering processes in the individual-collective continuum. The interactions of individual memory, selfhood, belonging and civic participation operate via the macro-level of a broader cult...

Keightley and Pickering make a crucial intervention in debates about individual and collective memory by providing an account of what is involved in the changes the human subject undergoes across the vicissitudes of time, and by exploring the complex relations between a subject’s sense of self-identity at various stages in the past and their contem...

Keightley and Pickering explore the neglected role of space and place in the remembering process. Using a rich body of ethnographic fieldwork examples, they specifically address the ways in which changes in place, ranging from relatively local shifts such as moving house to macro-scale processes of migration and displacement, are made sense of in v...

Keightley and Pickering address a lacuna in contemporary research on collective memory by exploring the role of intimate relationships in processes of remembering. Using a rich body of ethnographic data, they illustrate how remembering intimate relationships and ruptures in them forges a sense of belonging with others over time, and how intimate re...

Keightley and Pickering provide an analysis of the ways in which the death of close others is negotiated through vernacular remembering processes, and in doing so, they explore the limits of the human capacity to manage life transitions. This vernacular perspective makes an important contribution to scholarship on the relationship between memory, l...

This book shows how the mnemonic imagination creatively uses the resources of photography and music in the registering and management of change. Looking in particular at major transitions and turning points, it covers key issues of identity for the remembering subject and key scales of remembering in vernacular milieus. The book explores the connec...

In this chapter we focus on the question of methodological procedure in the investigation of personal and public memory and the manifold relations between them. We do so because issues and concerns relating to methodology have been largely neglected in memory studies.1 There are various reasons for this neglect, but among them is the perceived need...

Stereotyping involves the representation and evaluation of others in ways that ratify and endorse unequal social relations. It does so by making such representations appear fixed and unchanging as well as in stark contrast to the identities of those who engage in and perpetuate them. Stereotypes diminish the social standing of those targeted, reduc...

The question of a content quota in the public media of communication only acquires cultural and political force in countries faced with a considerable volume of imported material. New Zealand/ Aotearoa is one such country. In this article, we review the widespread debate in New Zealand which has taken place over the past few years with respect to l...

Before we examine in detail, later in the book, how photography and recorded music facilitate remembering and are drawn upon as mnemonic resources, we need to consider more fully their characteristic features as both communications technologies and cultural forms. As ways of recording, storing, retrieving and replaying certain events and sequences...

In their use as mnemonic resources, photography and recorded music operate in part through their different constitutive forms as we have outlined these in the previous chapter, and in part through the various conventions associated with their use. For the most part, such conventions consist in the tacit rules and regularised codes underlying everyd...

Throughout this book we have explored how certain pieces of the past — personally made or inherited photographs, and recorded songs and music trailing their various associations of past times — are drawn upon and given meaning, value and significance in everyday life. These pieces of the past do not exist as isolated fragments somehow surviving ove...

In the previous chapter we outlined the process of creating and localising cultural resources and integrating them into our remembering practices. We referred to this process as one of making our own and presented it as central to vernacular memory in its vibrant interplay between convention and practice. Making our own mnemonic resources out of pa...

Having examined how photographs and recorded music are adopted as complementary resources for helping people retain or revitalise their connections with the past, we turn now to a different aspect of their use. This concerns the cross-temporal value and significance derived from these mnemonic resources, in some cases quite beyond the deliberate pu...

This article demonstrates the need always to consider change against continuity and continuity against change in the analysis of mnemonic technologies. It does so by exploring what has happened in the move from analogue to digital photography, looking, in particular, at how this has affected the meanings of personal photographs and the practices of...

Nostalgia is a multifarious phenomenon. Although it is always in some manner a response to social and cultural change, and particularly to the increasing divergence between experience and expectation that has developed in the modern and late-modern periods, it becomes manifest in a wide range of forms, with the feelings, meanings and values associa...

In this article we explore the issue of memory transmission by considering it along the two temporal planes on which it occurs: vertically, through time; and horizontally, in time. It is because we regard memory transmission as involving the mutual interaction of these two planes that we introduce the concept of the mnemonic imagination. The value...

This article presents the new method of self-interviewing as an empirical tool specifically for use in memory studies research. The article traces some of the empirical limitations specific to the field of memory studies and reviews the existing tools used in this area. It particularly focuses on some of the limitations of qualitative interviewing,...

It is significant that in English we do not possess a temporal equivalent of the word ‘elsewhere’. This word designates a location spatially distinct from that in which the speaker or writer is situated, but if we seek an ‘else’ word to identify a time distinct from our own, we are bereft. There is no ‘elsewhen’. This lexical absence in the languag...

In the two previous chapters we have paid considerable attention to processes of remembering and their interaction with our imaginative capacities as these relate to the individual person. In doing so we hope to have made clear that although anyone’s memories are in various ways specific to them, some are borrowed and adapted, many are shared and p...

In the last two chapters we have been discussing the relations between processes of social remembering involving individual participants and the public and popular forms of representing the past that are common in contemporary societies. Nostalgia as a mnemonic field grants us the opportunity to do so because it shows how individual remembering, wh...

During the final period of his life, Michel de Montaigne produced a series of essays which have become famous for their shrewd insight, practical wisdom and digressive, conversational style. They covered a wide range of topics, but their key underlying topic was Montaigne himself. In writing them, what he was studying most of all was his own self,...

Memory studies is an intellectually vibrant, yet still emergent field. Many disciplines meet there, but hardly as yet converge. Effective interdisciplinary synthesis will no doubt take some time to develop, and will be the work of divers hands. While we hope to make some contribution to this, our aim in what lies ahead is relatively modest. It is d...

The major preoccupation of this book has been with how memory and imagination operate in conjunction with each other in a necessary alliance that helps us develop our understanding of temporal processes and maintain the past as a dynamic presence within an ever-changing present. We have introduced the concept of mnemonic imagination in order to sho...

We have spoken so far of certain pitfalls associated with thinking about the relationship between memory and imagination, and suggested that we want to see this relationship in terms of an interstitial space between past and future in which cross-temporal transactions are made. It is through such transactions that lived experience in the present be...

Our discussion of the ways in which personal and public memory interact and inform each other can be usefully extended by exploring the case of nostalgia. The close interweaving of individual and collective processes of remembering is central to nostalgia. What it involves may be deeply felt by particular people at particular times, but the meaning...

Whether for weavers at the handloom, laborers at the plough, or factory workers on the assembly line, music has often been a key texture in people's working lives. This book is the first to explore the rich history of music at work in Britain and charts the journey from the singing cultures of pre-industrial occupations, to the impact and uses of t...

Trauma is a term that is widely used in memory studies, along with a number of other academic fields and disciplines. This article takes issue with its loose and indiscriminate application. Such application generates an unresolved paradox: trauma is associated with memories of events that are uncontrollable, yet large-scale commemorative practices...

An introduction to a range of research methods that are deployed in the study of cultural studies and related disciplines. © in this edition, Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

This is an electronic version of an article published in the journal, Social Semiotics [© Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group)]. It is available online at: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all?content=10.1080/10350330802217139 Sexuality and ethnicity are potent categories, especially in combination. In news reporting, the ways in which suc...

Recent work in the sociological critique of humour and comic media has challenged the notion that humour is an absolute good. In this article, we review some of the most interesting work that takes humour seriously and addresses the difficult topic of whether there are ethical limits to humour and media comedy. We outline three main reasons for tak...

This article examines the relationship between music and work in pre-industrial textile production and the ways in which it has been conceived and represented. Focusing on the processes of lace making, spinning and weaving, we consider whether working conditions were conducive to music making and the nature of the music being performed. In so doing...

This article examines the widespread practice of singing during the picking of hops in the Kent hop fields from the 1920s through to the 1950s.The singing is analysed both in terms of its position as a late, rare and therefore potentially revealing example of British work songs in the 20th century, and in terms of the light it casts on the musical...

Martin Heidegger believed that the modern privileging of seeing over understanding helped to debase the senses. In contrast to the circumspect observation involved in "tarrying observantly," it led to restlessness and distraction, "the excitement of continual novelty and changing encounters," so producing the distinctively modern experience of "nev...

The history of music in the workplace is a neglected area of study. This article explores the policies towards music in the paternalist Rowntree and Cadbury confectionery factories from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. We argue that the two firms were pioneering in their early use of music before becoming key players in the indust...

The huge success of the circus in the nineteenth century shows how much the Victorians loved variety in their light entertainment, for the circus was nothing if not varied in its form and content. As with the minstrel show and later music hall, the circus presented a range of different acts and performances for the delectation of audiences who were...

L’occasion perdue est un motif courant dans les représentations littéraires et populaires qui accompagnent le ressouvenir. Traditionnellement, les regrets du « chemin qui n’a pas été pris » jettent un éclairage nostalgique sur la vie. Mais cela n’est qu’un des aspects de l’occasion perdue. Jusqu’ici, il semble qu’on ait négligé la façon dont ce mot...

The ability of song and music to facilitate the process of manual labour is remarkable. For this reason they have been drawn upon in a wide range of occupations and trades, on land and at sea. While some work has been done on particular forms of work and the songs associated with them, insufficient attention has been paid to the historical diversit...

Nostalgia has been viewed as the conceptual opposite of progress, against which it is negatively viewed as reactionary, sentimental or melancholic. It has been seen as a defeatist retreat from the present, and evidence of loss of faith in the future. Nostalgia is certainly a response to the experience of loss endemic in modernity and late modernity...

Phonography and photography have been extensively discussed and analysed, but their complementary features as media of communication have received relatively little attention. Chief among these is the way in which, as technologies of recording, preservation and retrieval, they have affected forms of social remembering and orientations to historical...

Une des plus ambitieuses etudes de la culture populaire au XXeme siecle, «Mass Observation», mouvement de recherche fonde a la fin des annees 1930 avait eu pour but de fonder une anthropologie du peuple britannique «par lui-meme»

This paper examines the role of music in women's experience of factory work in the Second World War — an important topic but one largely overlooked in the existing literature. Two important forms of music flourished in war factories — the relaying of Music While You Work through loudspeakers, and the collective singing of workgroups. Drawing on a r...

The British comedy circuit has traditionally been the preserve of white men telling jokes primarily about sex and alcohol. However, in recent years, thanks to comics such as Omid Djalili and Shazia Mirza, jokes not only about acts of terrorism, holy pilgrimages and Orientalist stereotypes, but also humour from an ethnic minority perspective, have b...

Impersonation is an ambiguous term. It can be viewed positively, as for instance when we say of a certain act that it is a good impersonation or when we regard a certain comedian as an effective impersonator. It can also be viewed negatively, so drawing on other meanings of the word. This happens when we use it in its associations with imposture, d...

Two years ago, as we were planning this book, a story made the headlines. It was featured in all the major newspapers in Western Europe. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and billionaire media magnate, had begun his term as president of the European parliament in Strasbourg with an ill-judged and highly offensive remark. He had rounded...

This article explores and develops the concept of the horizon as a figurative and analytical device used to negotiate the relations between experience, everyday life and historical time. Its central focus is Reinhart Koselleck’s application of the concept, though it also draws on the work of Karl Mannheim (through his distinction between conjunctiv...