历史与记忆

当代史学和历史哲学中关于记忆问题的探讨为我们关于史学的理解提供了新的视角。在这一视野下,记忆超越单纯个体心理的层次获得了作为脑外"文化记忆"的历史维度。在历史与记忆关系的层面上,历史记忆的多元性对历史记载的单一性提供了重要的补益,同时,史学文本的宏观视野对于历史记忆的微观局部性和片断性亦显示出认识上的优越性。在认识论维度之外,历史记忆诉诸历史正义的道义性是其十分显著的特质,于此凸显史学科学性与道义性维度复杂的张力关系,历史科学性不能成为漠视道义性的理由。最后,在历史与记忆关系上传统的历史本位立场之外,对人生有意义的历史终究要落实在人间的历史记忆中,从而彰显记忆本位的合理性,这或许是关注历史记忆所能带给我们的一点理论启示。     

Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum

Museums are conventionally viewed as institutions dedicated to the conservation of valued objects and the education of the public. Recently, controversies have arisen regarding the representation of history in museums. National museums in America and Germany considered here, such as the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the German Historical Museum, have become sites of contention where national histories and personal memories are often at odds. Contemporary art installations in museums which take historical consciousness as their theme similarly raise contentious issues about public knowledge of and personal interest in the past. When members of publics find that their memories of the past or their expectations for museum experiences are not being met, a kind of "distortion" occurs. The "distortion" related to memory and history in the museum is not so much of facts or interpretations, but rather a distortion from the lack of congruity between personal experience and expectation, on the one hand, and the institutional representation of the past on the other. This essay explores the possibilities for a redefined relationship between personal memory and history that is experienced in contemporary museums.     

Documenting Cultural and Historical Memory: Oral History in the National Park Service

"Documenting Cultural and Historical Memory: Oral History inthe National Park Service" provides an overview and assessmentof the current state of oral history projects and programs withinthe National Park Service. Oral history has long been a particularlyvaluable resource and tool for the Park Service in preservingcultural and historical memory. Its rangers, interpreters, historians,archaeologists, ethnographers, and cultural landscape specialistsuse oral history to document the history of individual parks,as well as the events and people the parks commemorate. Theyuse oral history to create interpretive exhibits, movies, andvideos and to record perspectives on major events, figures,and movements. The Service initiates and manages a large numberof unique and significant oral history projects and programs. However, too often the value of its oral history projects andcollections has been diminished because of funding shortages,poor equipment, insufficient training, inadequate preservationmeasures, or other problems.     

Memory,Forgetting and the New Tribes Mission in West New Britain

In this paper, I use ethnography from the Kaliai area to explore the social and political relationships which underpin memory and forgetting. I analyse the relationships of hegemony and resistance which are inscribed and articulated in a context of missionising where villagers and missionaries enter into an uneasy alliance to control what should be remembered so that people emerge as particular kinds of subjects. In exploring the social and political organisation of memory, this paper does not treat memory and forgetting as opposites, for people are also taught how to forget. Indeed they are caught in the paradox of always needing to remember that they have to always try to forget. Here the need to forget has the paradoxical effect of keeping alive the content of what must be forgotten. In a strange sort of way the need to forget sustains the need to remember what must be forgotten. I explore the political implications of these paradoxes and ambiguities for sustaining a place outside European hegemony whilst still inscribed in it.     

Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time

This article investigates the differential structure and representation of time in memory and history. It examines two moments in Jewish historical thought—in the Middle Ages, and in works written within and after the Holocaust—and demonstrates the fundamentally liturgical nature of Jewish historical memory in selected texts from these two periods. Following the groundbreaking work of Yerushalmi, it seeks to demonstrate that for Jews, historical experience is incorporated into the cyclical reenactment of paradigmatic events in Jewish sacred ritual. Recent or contemporary experiences acquire meaning only insofar as they can be subsumed within Biblical categories of events and their interpretation bequeathed to the community through the medium of Scripture, that is to say, only insofar as they can be transfigured, ritually and liturgically, into repetitions and reenactments of ancient happening. In such liturgical commemoration, the past exists only by means of recitation; the fundamental goal of such recitation is to make it live again in the present, to fuse past and present, chanter and hearer, into a single collective entity. History, in the sense that we understand it to consist of unique events unfolding within irreversible linear time, is absorbed into cyclical, liturgical memory.
This article argues that the question of Jewish history—both medieval and post-Holocaust—poses in a compelling fashion the question of the relationship between memory and history more generally, and serves to contest the current tendency in academic historiography to collapse history into memory. It claims that to the extent that memory "resurrects,""re-cycles," and makes the past "reappear" and live again in the present, it cannot perform historically, since it refuses to keep the past in the past, to draw the line, as it were, that is constitutive of the modern enterprise of historiography.     

Southern Farmers and Their Stories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History

Melissa Walker, an associate professor of history at ConverseCollege, author of All We Knew Was To Farm: Rural Women in theUpcountry South, 1919–1941 (Baltimore, MD: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2000), winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prizefrom the Southern Association for Women Historians, presentsan intellectual tour de force in Southern Farmers and TheirStories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History, part of the NewDirections in Southern History Series from the University ofKentucky