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Family Memory and the Intergenerational Remembering of Political Violence
Abstract
This chapter further explores the affective ties that are transmitted in the language of the family and the way intergenerational memories of state violence are invested with value. What happens when family legacies are political? To what extent can state violence and political violence be inherited as family legacies, and if so, what does this mean? What happens when political memories are remembered as family memories? This chapter suggests that family memories mobilize a sense of duty between generations, which may vary in its forms, ranging from sympathy to political commitment, but which nevertheless provides memory with ‘weight’.
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In this article I argue that the telling of family secrets is tied into the workings of family memories and that the stories that people tell cannot be regarded as simple factual accounts. Rather they are amongst the kinds of stories that are part of the constitution of ‘the family’. Secrets, it might be assumed, are buried and forgotten but it is equally likely in families that secrets can be kept alive by innuendo, palpable silences, and rumour. I argue that it is important to understand the sociological significance of family secrets, not because they reveal a simple ‘truth’ about family life, but because these secrets are a route into understanding the complex relationship between power, the personal, the cultural and the social. This entanglement of secrets, memories and family practices is explored through written accounts of family secrets found in the Mass Observation Project. The study of family secrets throws additional light on the everyday workings of families and the ways in which family stories are managed.
Stories we tell about our lives very much define who we are as individuals, within particular families, cultures and historical periods. In this article, I review psychological research that demonstrates how autobiographical memories are created and re-created in daily interactions in which we share our stories with others, and how this process is modulated by individual, gendered and cultural models of self expressed in everyday family reminiscing. I focus on two critical developmental periods: the preschool years when autobiography is just beginning to emerge; and adolescence when autobiographical memories begin to coalesce into an overarching life narrative that defines self, others and values. I show how individual differences in the ways in which families reminisce are related to individual autobiographical narratives. Importantly, just as our individual narratives are shaped by cultural and historical models of selves and lives, individuals come to shape their culture and their historical moment by the stories they tell.
Voice and silence are socially constructed in conversational interactions between speakers and listeners that are influenced by canonical cultural narratives which define lives and selves. Arguing from feminist and sociocultural theories, I make a distinction between being silenced and being silent; when being silenced is contrasted with voice, it is conceptualised as imposed, and it signifies a loss of power and self. But silence can also be conceptualised as being silent, a shared understanding that need not be voiced. More specifically, culturally dominant narratives provide for shared understandings that can remain silent; deviations from the norm call for voice, and thus in this case silence is power and voice expresses loss of power. At both the cultural and the individual level, there are tensions between culturally dominant and prescriptive narratives and narratives of resistance and deviation, leading to an ongoing dialectic between voice and silence. I end with a discussion of why, ultimately, it matters what is voiced and what is silenced for memory, identity and well-being.
This chapter identifies and analyzes the dilemmas concerning the social, political, and historical memory of Chile’s recent past. Memory is closely related to the political struggles for better social and political conditions in the country over the past 50 years. It is also associated to the political repression that unfolded during the military dictatorship (1973–1990), with its heavy legacy of violations of human rights and, at the same time, the resistance against political oppression and repression during this period. This memory has gradually been taking shape through various means of recording and working through the consequences of the violations of fundamental rights that individuals endured as a consequence of the state’s repressive action.
Two Argentine filmmakers of the postdictatorship generation have used the documentary as a space in which to question constructions of history, memory, and identity in the aftermath of traumatic and tumultuous experiences. Both projects foreground the idea of loss and the difficulties of writing a “truthful” version of the past when confronted by politically motivated “official histories,” temporal shift, ideological change, lost referents, and missed experience. Andrés Di Tella’s La televisión y yo (2003) questions the intersections among history, identity, and the media. In it the filmmaker’s identity, fragile and tenuous, is shown to be based upon memories of the television programs of his youth that he missed because of his family’s self-imposed exile during the Onganía regime. The film is a clear critique of globalization’s effects on subjectivity. Albertina Carri’s Los rubios (2003) highlights the tenuousness of her identity by exploring the gaps and silences of memory. It raises key questions about “postmemory” and generational shifts and, more particularly, about how those at a generational remove from the traumas of dictatorship can comprehend these traumatic historical events and their own relationships to them.
Even before Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London in October 1998, the past hung heavily over Chile's distinctive transition to democracy. This was apparent during the previous year in the attention given to its conflictive recent history in television and radio talk shows and in newspaper and magazine articles. Since the return to elected rule in 1990, volumes on the dictatorship and the Popular Unity government were staples in Santiago bookstores. With the approach of the 25th anniversary of the 1973 military coup, what had been a steady stream of publication turned into a torrent of personal and political memoirs, extended essays, political journalism, and scholarly studies evoking the country's divided historical memory.
Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative. Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. âHis success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeurâs own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.ââLibrary Journal âRicoeur writes the best kind of philosophyâcritical, economical, and clear.ââ New York Times Book Review
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Princeton University, 2004. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 208-305).
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