Commentary on “Studying Eyewitness Investigations in the Field”: A Look Forward

Schacter et al. (2007, this issue) address the controversy surrounding an Illinois pilot project that attempted to compare sequential versus simultaneous police lineup formats. The statement by these experts will guide the design and execution of future field lineup experiments. This commentary discusses three aspects of field studies that pose challenges as lineup experiments are interpreted: the imprecise meaning of the dependent measure (eyewitness decisions), the limitations of single studies, and the necessity to devise public policy from incomplete knowledge. A combination of laboratory and field information provides the means to determine best practices in eyewitness identification procedures.     

Post-Event Information Affects Children’s Autobiographical Memory After One Year

In two experiments, we examined whether post-event information (PEI) about true and false events persisted in children’s reports after approximately 1 year. In Experiment 1, 4- to 6-year-olds were given PEI and then were given memory tests 2 weeks and 15 months later. Although PEI appeared in free recall at the initial testing, it decreased substantially by the long-term test. In contrast, on recognition tasks the children showed facilitation and misinformation effects at initial and follow-up tests. Experiment 2 replicated lasting misinformation and facilitation effects in recognition memory among 4- to 9-year-olds who were tested after 1-week and 10-month delays. We conclude that true and false reminders about an experienced event continue to affect children’s memory approximately 1 year later.

Borders of memory: affirmation and contestation over Japan’s heritage

Abstract

This essay, introducing the special issue on ‘Borders of Memory’, aims to shed light on the links between memory and heritage in contemporary Japan. It does so by examining how heritage sites serve as spaces within which collective memory is both affirmed and contested. Heritage sites enable us to survey the contours of the borders of memory that exist between different memory collectives. An analysis of South Korean and Chinese objections to the Meiji Industrial Sites shows how these heritage sites work as borders of memory, spaces where the competing collective memories of neighbouring East Asian governments and societies clash and rub up against one another. This analysis is then extended to the four articles that make up this special issue. In each case, it is the competing meanings invested in the site, and the struggle over the narrative within which it is incorporated, that results in such sites coming to be demarcated as borders of memory. Understanding these heritage sites as bordered spaces allows us to see such them as being not only where antagonistic collective memories come into contact, but also spaces through which they connect. The existence of such spaces enables the political process of articulating the stories associated with different memory collectives.     

Negotiating memory: funerary commemoration as social change in emancipation-era Barbados

Anglican church commemoration in Barbados is traditionally viewed as reflecting a wholly white, British history; however, beginning in the late eighteenth century, these spaces were circumvented as places of memory for the freed black community. As abolition and emancipation triggered greater integration of previously racially segregated groups on the island, funerary monuments provided the opportunity to negotiate memory, social structure, and community relationships, subverting dominant power hierarchies and tensions stimulated by race, religion, and marginalization. This paper will reconstruct narratives and counter-narratives in burial practice and monument use against the backdrop of abolition and emancipation to contribute to historical and archaeological understandings of historical processes of colonization and decolonization, relevant to Barbados and other colonies dependent on slave labour.     

The Diputación de la Grandeza and the organization of ‘Retrospective Art Exhibitions’ in the second half of the nineteenth century

This paper analyses the art policies deployed by old Spanish nobility in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in particular those who became involved in organising what were then known as retrospective art exhibitions. The old nobility, whose families held titles that dated back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and belonged to the category of Grandes (Grandees) of Spain, joined together in the Diputación de la Grandeza de España – a private association created in opposition to the new nobility. It was a consultative institution attached to the Crown and created in 1815 under the honorary presidency of the King. This paper argues that the distinction sought by this regrouping of the old nobility does not imply lack of engagement in the new artistic model based on the notion of fine arts, in which they were responsible for a number of rather telling nuances. As well as sharing with the bourgeoisie the general idea that the arts were in need of protection, the nobility cultivated the image that patronage of the arts was linked to tradition, and this had consequences for the evaluation of history, the musealisation of their private collections and the public reception of old art.     

Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification

This essay explores the ethical and political dimensions of what I have elsewhere called “prosthetic memories” (Landsberg, Prosthetic memory: The transformation of American remembrance in the age of mass culture, Harvard University Press, 2004), focusing on those that are produced and disseminated cinematically. I argue that cinematic technology, by which I mean also to include the dominant cinematic conventions and practices used in the Hollywood style of filmmaking, is an effective means for structuring vision. Through specific techniques of shooting and editing, films attempt to position the viewer in highly specific ways in relation to the unfolding narrative. Sometimes, in such films, viewers are brought into intimate contact with a set of experiences that fall well outside of their own lived experience and, as a result, are forced to look as if through someone else’s eyes, and asked to remember those situations and events as both meaningful and potentially formative. By engaging specific strategies intended to elicit identification, films can force viewers to engage both intellectually and emotionally with another who is radically different from him or herself. This complicated form of identification across difference might condition viewers to see and think in ways that could foster more radical forms of democracy aimed at advancing egalitarian social goals.

Technocrats and Tortured Bodies: Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images

Through an analysis of Simone de Beauvoir's final novel Les Belles Images (1966), this article examines how a 1960s French technocratic class dealt with individual and collective traumas, particularly how they placed their faith in an undying hope in the future while simultaneously ignoring the horrors of wartime violence. The article contends that Beauvoir's novel is a story of not remembering—or, more specifically, attempting to forget—Algeria and all the conflict signified to the average French citizen, including decolonization, torture, racial difference and political tumult. Analysis rests on the novel's representation of its protagonist Laurence, who had been shaken to the core after reading a newspaper article about a (likely Algerian) woman tortured to death, ultimately causing a nervous breakdown that forever altered her interactions with her family and fellow technocrats. Gender and nationality also figure centrally in this examination of the broader role that images—not only belles images—played in the construction of French national identity at this historical moment.     

Residual history: memory and activism in modern Poland

This article examines the divide between national and local collective memory in Poland and investigates the role of “memory activists” in mediating and exploiting this divide. It narrows its focus to the ethnic cleansing of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) from 1943 to 1944 and the forced relocation of Ukrainians in Poland, Operation Vistula, in 1947. It surveys local and national newspapers to understand competing interpretations and analyzes what incidents (e.g. protests, disputes, commemorations, reenactments, etc.) related to these events take place in local communities. It highlights the many actors, “memory activists,” and associations involved in pushing specific, often ahistorical, interpretations of these events – motivated by political gain, careerism, or personal conviction. It uses the theoretical works of Maurice Halbwachs and Karl Mannheim to effectively distinguish between local and national phenomenon and to elucidate the various nuances of collective memory.