Family Memory

Practices, Transmissions and Uses in a Global Perspective

Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková, Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000527162
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Historia
• Categoria: Historia social

In Family Memory: Practices, Transmissions and Uses in a Global Perspective, researchers from five different continents explore the significance of family memory as an analytical tool and a research concept.

Family memory is the most important memory community. This volume illustrates the range and power of family memories, often neglected by memory studies dealing with larger mnemonic entities. This book highlights the potential of family memory research for understanding societies'past and present and the need for a more comprehensive and systematic use of family memories. The contributors explain how family memories can be a valuable resource across a range of settings pertaining to individual and collective identities, national memories, intergenerational transmission processes and migration, transnational and diasporic studies. This volume presents the past, present and future of family memory as a prospective field of memory studies and the role of family memory in intergenerational transmission of social and political values. Family memory of violent events and genocide is also looked at, with discussions of the Armenian Genocide, Russian Revolution and Rwandan Genocide.

This book will be an important read for cultural and oral historians; family historians; public historians; researchers in narrative studies, psychology, politics and international studies.

1 Family Memory as a Prospective Field of Memory Studies Past, Present, Future

Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková

DOI: 10.4324/9781003156048-1

Family is the most important memory community. Most of us were born into families, and our lives have been embedded in them. In families we learn to feel the sense of belonging and experience the first links with the wider world. Families shape our understanding of individual and collective identities. Stories recounted in families have impact on our historical consciousness. Many of us cherish their family legacy, be that family heirlooms, photographs or digitized family videos. Some fall for the charm of genealogy, the others take the adventurous path of family historians.

Yet family memory as a research concept has not attracted a systematic attention of scholars. Disparate ideas have been published in various publications of different research fields focusing on very diverse topics. Indeed, studies of families and their rememberings have been fractured across as divergent disciplines, as history, oral history, family studies, psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, ethnology, communication studies, media studies and even computer science.

Astonishingly enough, family memory has not been conceptualized in any major theoretical volume summarizing the current state of the memory studies field (see e.g. Erll and Nünning, 2010; Radstone and Schwarz, 2010; Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi and Levy, 2011). This fact appears even more surprising taking into account the seminal status of Maurice Halbwachs, whose most influential theory of the “social frameworks of memory” (1994 [1925]) has been illustrated on collective family memory. Other collective memories, local, regional, national and recently transnational (de Cesari and Rigney, 2014); transcultural (Crownshaw, 2011); travelling (Erll, 2011b); cosmopolitan (Levy and Sznaider, 2002); and multidirectional (Rothberg, 2009) have been widely explored and theoretically elaborated. Family memory has not received similar attention.

A certain unease to inscribe family memory into memory studies is very probably connected with the intermediary position of family memory between the individual remembering and collective remembering, between private and public, between local and national/transnational. On the other side, family studies have not included memory into key research concepts of the field (see McCarthy and Edwards, 2011), nor the psychologists of family have considered memory as their research topic (Sobotková, 2017). Linked to two different areas of study, family to social science and memory to humanities, family memory has not been systematically used as an analytical tool.

Family memory however is a research concept of primordial importance. It changes a macro-perspective of memory studies dealing with larger entities for a micro-perspective of the intimate space of family. It switches a “telescope” through which we usually observe the uses of the past in memory studies for a “microscope” allowing an exceedingly close view of minute structures and details. The tiny dimensions are redeemed by more representative characteristics that are never isolated from the wider structures. What we gain is not only the knowledge of how a particular family works with its past, but the understanding of how the entire societies use their histories and memories.

This volume desires to remove family memory out of its “periphery” (Boesen et al., 2012) to the forefront of memory studies. Underlying two aspects of family memory, their locatedness and their capacity to move, this volume documents that family memory is a research tool of global importance that cuts mainly across four areas of research: individual and collective identities; intersections with national and transnational memories; intergenerational transmission processes and moves of people; ideas and thoughts pertaining to migration, transnational and diasporic studies.

Why Study Family Memory?

Although the need to study families may seem obvious, three major reasons related to the significance of family memories can be advanced. The first motivation concerns the ways the identities are influenced by memories shared in families. The numerous studies from the team around the psychologist Robyn Fivush have been instructive in this regard. To advance just a few of their many insightful ideas about family memories, I point in this introductory chapter to their research describing how the knowledge of the family past is crucial for adolescent’s psychosocial well-being and their higher level of identity development (Fivush, Bohanek and Zaman, 2011). The researchers have advanced the term of the “intergenerational self,” self-embedded in a larger familial history, showing it as an important resilience factor as children approach adolescence (Fivush, Bohanek and Duke, 2008). Overall, these psychologists have asserted the role of the past communicated in families and highlighted the function of family memory to act as an interpretative framework through which family members understand and incorporate past events into their own life story (Bohanek et al., 2006).

The second reason is connected to the critical role of families in the process of history-making. Studies across the globe have reflected a rising awareness among professionals to explore the public uses of the past. Research organized in various national settings have stated that individuals tend to derive their historical knowledge from family rather than from history in school education (for the USA Rosenzweig and Thelen, 1998; for Australia Hamilton and Ashton, 2003; for Canada Conrad et al., 2013). Family history has been evaluated as the most attractive source for knowledge about the past by a monumental European international project in which 32,000 15-year-old students participated (Angvik and von Borries, 1997).

The urge for researchers to understand why, how and which memories are constructed in families has been enhanced by a recent rise in genealogy and amateur family history. The growing effects of perhaps the globally favourite hobby on historical knowledge produced in families have driven some historians to argue for a “radical potential of family history” (Evans, 2011). Connected with the aim to democratize history, amateur family history, extended to the digitized environment and involving a DNA genealogy (de Groot, 2015), can help us to understand how historical knowledge is gained in families. Family history shapes the individuals’ rethinking of the past and becomes a unique and complex site of historiography in its own right (Barnwell, 2021). As Alison Light (2014) has recently shown, the pursuit of one’s ancestors may become more than a family history but a wider history of the entire period.

Current State of the Field

A few studies have provided a survey of previous research on families and memories/remembering, usually as introductory articles to the special issues of various journals. Scholars have been encouraged to combine two distinct research traditions, family and memory (Levin et al., 2011), presented with a detailed account of numerous oral history publications dealing with family and home (Srigley and Zembrzycki, 2009) and stimulated to conceive family memory against the backdrop of a changing media environment (Lohmeier and Böhling, 2017). Astrid Erll (2011a) has traced the evolution of theoretical works pertaining to family memory and highlighted its potential in comparative family research and transnational family studies. Most recently, a special issue of the Journal of Family History has included early modern perspectives and supplied an overview of research contributing to our understanding of how family memory and national memory intertwine in the production of individual identity (Barclay and Koefoed, 2021).

While the above-mentioned studies have been embedded within various research traditions and perspectives, this volume desires to underline two aspects of family memories: their locatedness (Radstone, 2011) in particular nations, cultures, times and research traditions; and their capacity to circulate, migrate and travel across borders and continents.

Family memories interwoven with collective memories are necessarily enrooted in particular cultures and respective national histories. Research on family memories can be therefore characterized not only as fractured across the disciplines but also as dispersed across various national research contexts. In pointing to the discrepancies between French and German research on family memories, French sociologists (Gollac and Oeser, 2011) characterized German research as work done by historians whose goal is to explore remembering of great historical events within family memories, this being connected with the politics of memory. French tradition of research on families and their past has engaged not historians, but ethnologists who have been interested rather in the social dimensions of private memories without reference to great national narratives. To my knowledge, we owe the first current use of the term family memory to the just mentioned French ethnological research. In her aim to explore how family memories of the inhabitants of Paris corresponded to their social positions, ethnologist Béatrix Le Wita used this term in 1984 (Le Wita, 1984).

In the Anglo-American context the interest in family memories has been fuelled by the History Workshop movement, public history and amateur family history (Samuel, 1981; Stone, 1988; Tonkin, 1992). Academic family history has included multiple variables that constitute families such as race, class, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, age and gender. In other national research contexts family history has been rooted in historical demography, in ethnology and only since recently in the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte) (Švaříčková Slabáková et al., 2018, p. 118).

This volume underlines the fact that historical past itself produces memories that are communicated in families. Important and widely experienced historical events which have had painful and extreme effects upon the everyday lives of people in a certain region or country will generate memories of these events (Rosenthal, 1991). In some national contexts family talks and communications will be framed by major historical events while in the other countries, family talks will be shaped by other experiences.

Four Interrelated Areas of Study

A bewildering array of topics, aims and perspectives through which it is possible to conduct family memory research is divided, for the purpose of this volume, into four research areas, though often interrelated.

The first area concerns the inner workings of family and is more psychologically oriented. Family identity (Cigoli and Scabini, 2006) is at the core of research interest. The meaning of family, its value and family legacies are targets of examination. Family cohesion, family stories and intergenerational relations are explored as well, as important dimensions of family memory (Švaříčková Slabáková and Sobotková, 2018). The ways families construct, negotiate, understand and maintain memories of their past have intrigued contributors mainly in the first part of this volume.

Many scholars have used the family settings to document the intergenerational transmission processes of difficult memories, associated particularly with World War II (WWII), Holocaust, Nazism and trauma. A ground-breaking study by social psychologist...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Family Memory as a Prospective Field of Memory Studies: Past, Present, Future
• Part I Private and Public Practices of Building Family Memory
• Part II Intergenerational Transmission of Social and Political Values
• Part III Family Memory of Violent Events and Genocide
• Part IV Family Memory, Family Identity and Digital Media
• Index