'Social Memory', by Chris Wickham & James Fentress
A Darwinian process of selectivity, 'oikotypical' history with social purpose, historians with political purpose, and ghosts in the machine
James Fentress and Chris Wickham wrote:
CHAPTER 1
Remembering
… Any set of categories used in the description of memory can have only a relative, rather than universal, validity; and this goes, of course, for the categories used in this book. We shall try to pick categories as general and as neutral as possible; they still remain relative categories. We must also beware of rationalizing memory as we describe it. Memory is fluid, and works in ways in which we are scarcely aware. The categories in which we discuss memory should thus be indefinite enough to avoid any sense of rigid boundaries separating one 'type' of memory from another.
There is … the problem that in discussing memory at all we give it an object-like consistency that it does not really possess. This, however, is a problem that is already present in our everyday habit of using physical analogies to express mental experience. Ideas ‘strike’ us; we ‘search’ for answers. What we ‘really’ mean when we say that ‘the penny finally dropped’ is that the ‘machine’ suddenly ‘switched on’ or, perhaps, that the ‘point’ of the remark suddenly ‘clicked’ and ‘fell in to place’. In explaining one analogy, we have recourse to another, and we seem to be permanently unable to move out of the circle. We shall see later that this tendency to describe mind in spatial analogies is itself significant. Here, however, the point is simply to emphasize that such descriptions are, in fact, analogies. As long as we are aware of that, we can understand that the homunculi in front of their control panels are just metaphorical and heuristic ‘little men’ rather than real mental entities.
The problem of analogy exists at a deeper level as well. Our use of descriptive analogies is influenced by our conception of language itself as a medium of description that is autonomous and separate from what it describes. It is this that renders Arthur Koestler’s ‘ghost in the machine’ analogy for describing our minds so obviously heuristic. Yet we also see that the distinction between ‘word’ and ‘thing' is not naturally present in our memories; nor do people of other cultures always experience this distinction in precisely the manner that we do. This means that in moving the discussion from the general problem of how we are to discuss social memory to that of the actual description of other people's experiences of memory, we must be careful how we describe the ‘ghosts’ in other people's ‘machines’.
In principle, we can usually regard social memory as an expression of collective experience: social memory identifies a group, giving it a sense of its past and defining its aspirations for the future. In doing so, social memory often makes factual claims about past events. Sometimes we are able to check these factual claims against documentary sources; sometimes we cannot. In either case, however, the question of whether we regard these memories as historically true will often turn out to be less important than whether they regard their memories as true. Groups may regard their traditions as a set of amusing stories, possessing, perhaps, a moral lesson to teach, but still only fictions. Yet, in other cases, groups may regard their traditions as authoritative. In these latter instances, it is important to ask how and why they do so; for it is not to be supposed that any group regards its traditions as merely the retained sense data of its ancestors.
Social memory is a source of knowledge. This means that it does more than provide a set of categories through which, in an unselfconscious way, a group experiences its surroundings; it also provides the group with material for conscious reflection. This means that we must situate groups in relation to their own traditions, asking how they interpret their own 'ghosts', and how they use them as a source of knowledge. …
CHAPTER 2
The Ordering and Transmission of Social Memory
… Once memory has been conceptualized into a story, the process of change and of factual loss naturally slows down. Remembering within an internal context gives the memory the support it needs to be retained. Individual narrators may expand or embellish the story in whatever way they wish; they will still tend to adhere to the plot as the group recognizes it. For the narrator's community, this stabilized version is ‘the story’, and they may often refuse to accept any major variant.
Folklorists have a term to express such a locally standardized species — ‘oikotype’ (home type). In any community, standard versions tend to emerge. These are the versions that are ‘oikotypical’ for that community. It is thus the remembering community which decides which version is acceptable and which not. In his account of a veglia, or storytelling evening, in Tuscany, the Italian folklorist Alessandro Falassi describes a storyteller trying to splice two different tales into one. On this occasion, the audience of adults and children simply would not accept it. They knew the stories too well themselves, and, when the storyteller stopped, they told them ‘correctly’. An allegiance to an oikotype reflects a habit of thinking. The group knew that the stories were simply fictions; yet this made them no less clear and concrete in their minds.
We saw that Andrew Lang remarked that some of the ‘attractive patterns’ into which fairy tale themes may be ordered are ‘fitter than others’. These ‘survive more powerfully’. This Darwinian language may have been inadvertent; it is not wholly inappropriate. The existence of oikotypical variants demonstrates that fairy tales do evolve. Evolution here is a process of transmission and diffusion. There are, for example, hundreds of oikotypes of the story of Cinderella existing all over the world. The earliest known comes from ninth-century China. Although we cannot always establish the chain of transmission and diffusion in detail, we sometimes know enough to sketch it out. We often, in other words, can trace certain paths by which the story, or a new version of it, diffused from one group to another. We can also trace lines of transmission showing how a single tale broke up into related ‘species’. …
CHAPTER 4
Medieval Memories
… If one wishes to understand the social framework of memory, written sources are not, in principle, any different from spoken ones. When they are written by historians, however, the issue is more complex. Historians have their own, more or less consciously formulated, interpretations of the past that they use to structure their material: as re-elaborators of the past, they are, so to speak, already competing with us, in compiling and analysing their material (both oral and written) to express particular points of view. When our informants are all dead, we can scarcely do without written sources; and when one gets back beyond the discursive complexities of the millions of texts and dozens of genres of the modern period to the sparser writings of the Middle Ages (especially before 1300 or so) and the ancient world before that, we find ourselves unable to avoid their historians — political history, in particular, from the time of Herodotus to that of Froissart, is hard to write without them. …
… Iceland's medieval literature is interesting to us as another example of an essentially peasant (although often, as we now see, rich peasant) social memory, that can be reconstructed for a period as far back as the thirteenth century — if not, indeed, sometimes the tenth, for those feuds that were accurately recalled in their main lines (those, probably, with most successive genealogical resonance) had presumably been commemorated orally in the intervening period as well. But it is also interesting, like our previous medieval examples, as an instance of the relationship between the social relevance of memory and genre. The social memory of Charlemagne changed as society changed, but it was continually constricted by the requirements of different narrative styles. Icelandic society did not, in fact, change very much between 900 and 1250 in its basic social presuppositions, even if powerful men were more powerful at the end than at the beginning, at least if we accept what the sagas tell us; as a result, the meaning of memory and the genre in which it was recorded would continue to fit like a glove. Icelanders in the thirteenth century prided themselves on being tough and laconic, their worth being shown in their actions rather than their words, except for the telling phrases that they appear to have held ready for the most crucial moments (such as death) so as to be remembered well. Sagas about the past were full of such models — they provided, indeed, a whole process of socialization, into every aspect of proper behaviour, and have materially influenced the behaviour and character of Icelanders to the present day. But the whole narrative style of sagas fits this image too: men and women are described physically, but not characterized or judged, apart from occasional phrases such as, “people thought that Gunnar had come out of that well”. Even the syntax fits it, with the minimum of adjectives and subordinate clauses (at least in the prose), and the maximum of conjunctions and other paratactic elements. The role of syntactic complexity, one could say, as well as the conceptual patterning that renders the story memorable, is instead played by the underlying logic of the feud relationships at each point in the narrative.
Feud, then, constitutes the basic form of the text. But it is also the content; indeed, in a totally stateless society, feud in the widest sense is the only means of dealing with political issues at all, and disputes, whether violent or not, constitute ‘political’ history. In this sense, the disputes of the past were both continuously relevant to commemorate (as the deeds of ancestors and as morally resonant stories) and easy to commemorate (as etched into the dramatic structure of the principal secular narrative prose genre of medieval Iceland). It is scarcely surprising, then, that they were so important a literary form; indeed, thanks also to the lasting literary quality of the best of them, they have dominated the culture of the island even in the present century. …
… In the case of the legend of Charlemagne, we ranged over rather more sources, using the content of the memory of Charlemagne as our guide rather than individual texts. As a result, the ideological manipulation of that memory is very obvious; in France and Germany, Charlemagne soon became a symbol, a legitimation device for all sorts of subsequent activities. He represented an image of just kingship that was used as a prop for, and as a critique of, subsequent kings. He represented, too, an origin legend, a point of reference for claims of legitimate rule by a wide variety of later kings and princes; not surprisingly, many churches and monasteries would claim to be founded by him as well. Charlemagne the converter of the Saxons, Charlemagne the crusader, and (rather later) Charlemagne the lawgiver were other justifications of subsequent activity that we can easily find in the sources. But such devices only made any sense, only had any efficacy, in an environment which really did remember Charlemagne in this way or something like it. …
CONCLUSION
… In reality, these images of unbroken continuity are usually illusions. The transmission of social memory is a process of evolution and change. These changes may be hidden from the community itself, however; for, to them, their stock of memories — their techniques, their stories, and their collective identities — seem to be things that have always remained the same. Yet this is only an appearance, a result of the continuous blotting out of memory as it changes. The process of change in a traditional, agrarian community may be slow; none the less, these communities are not outside history.
If memory cannot be taken either as the faithful bearer of knowledge, or even as the record of past experience, can it be of any further interest to the historian? The answer is very simple: behind the display of knowledge and the representation of experience, behind the facts, emotions, and images with which memory seems to be filled, there is only we ourselves. It is we who are remembering, and it is to us that the knowledge, emotions, and images ultimately refer. What is concealed in models of memory as a surface whereupon knowledge or experience is transcribed is our own presence in the background. Whatever memory may be as a purely neurological or purely epistemological object in itself, we can neither know nor experience our memories unless we can first ‘think’ them; and the moment we ‘think’ our memories, recalling and articulating them, they are no longer objects; they become part of us. At that moment, we find ourselves indissolubly in their centre.
Only by making memories part of us, first, can we share them with others. Historians are thus right to display little interest in purely theoretical accounts of memory in itself. Memory becomes vital to them only when it is in context; for it is at this point that their story begins. The only sort of theoretical account likely to be of use to historians is, therefore, one that describes what happens when memory comes to the surface, and what happens when we think, articulate, and transmit our memories. This book has therefore concentrated on describing what memory does. Memory has an immense social role. It tells us who we are, embedding our present selves in our pasts, and thus underpinning every aspect of what historians often now call mentalites. For many groups, this means putting the puzzle back together: inventing the past to fit the present, or, equally, the present to fit the past. We preserve the past at the cost of decontextualizing it, and partially blotting it out.
We saw that the resequencing, decontextualizing, and suppressing of social memory in order to give it new meaning is itself a social process, and one, moreover, whose history is sometimes recoverable. Luc de Reusch makes an interesting comment: “The Congolese myths”, he writes, “are exchanged like merchandise. But they have, properly speaking, no value. They are not the products of labor, and they defy all attempts at appropriation, whether private or collective .... They even elude the ideological function that kings invariably try to force on them”. The transmission and diffusion of the images and stories of social memory is a no less unlikely form of commerce. These images are untouched by the hand of any painter; these stories cannot bear a copyright. The trade is, in fact, nothing more than the exchange of ideas.
Yet, for all that these ideas are intangible, their transmission and diffusion is still a real process. Social memory seems indeed to be subject to the law of supply and demand. Memories must be supplied; they must emerge at specific points. Yet, to survive beyond the immediate present, and, especially, to survive in transmission and exchange, they must also meet a demand. A tradition survives in an oikotypical version because, to the group that remembers it, only this version seems to fit. Behind this sense of ‘fit’ can be sociological, cultural, ideological, or historical factors. One task that oral historians could set themselves is to explain how and why certain traditions fit the memories of certain groups. …
… Memories die, but only to be replaced by other memories. In attempting to explain what the images and stories in social memory really mean, we saw a tendency to slide from one topos to another, or else merely to rationalize the images and stories by recontextualizing them into other forms. We may sometimes, it seems, only be deluding ourselves when we think we are ‘debunking’ social memory by separating myth from fact: all we may get is another story. This does not mean that we must accept social memory passively and uncritically. We can enter into dialogue with it, examining its arguments, and testing its factual claims. But this interrogation cannot uncover the whole truth. It is a mistake to imagine that, having squeezed it for its facts, examined its arguments, and reconstructed its experiences — that is to say, having turned it into ‘history’ — we are through with memory.
The Source:
James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory, Blackwell Publishers, 1992
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.