Discursive Remembering: Individual and Collective Remembering as a Discursive, Cognitive and Historical Process

✍ Scribed by Lucas M. Bietti

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 186
• Series: Media and Cultural Memory; 16
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book aims at building a bridge between the social and political aspects of remembering and the cognitive and discourse processes driving such activities. By analyzing these cognitive and discursive processes, Bietti explores practices of individual and collective remembering in institutional and private settings in relation to periods of political violence in Argentina. This books begins to fill the conceptual gap between cognitive oriented approaches to remembering that draw conclusions about how memory functions in the mind without a detailed discourse analysis of the communicative interaction in which this process unfolds, and the discourse and pragmatic oriented approaches that are mainly interested in analyzing the rhetorical features of conversational remembering, in some cases disregarding that there are underlying cognitive mechanisms that drive the construction of discourses about past experiences. The empirical analysis shows that individual and collective remembering in relation to periods of political violence in Argentina vary in pragmatic ways due to the fact that these accounts of the past were constructed with reference to the communicative situation. Thus, this book also aims at shedding new light on the current practices of commemoration and remembrance related to periods of political violence in Argentina, in public and private settings.

✦ Table of Contents

1 Introduction
1.1 A Cognitive and Discursive Approach to Remembering
1.2 Remembering in Context
1.3 Remembering in History
2 Constructing a Collective Memory in Argentina
2.1 The National Security Doctrine in South America
2.2 From the Desaparecidos to Néstor Kirchner
2.2.1 The return of democracy
2.2.2 From the early 1990s to the financial crisis of December 2001
2.2.3 Political changes since the administration of Néstor Kirchner
2.3 The Necessity of Remembering
2.3.1 Psychosocial perspectives
2.3.2 Sociological, political and anthropological perspectives
2.3.3 Discourse analysis and memory studies
2.4 Final Remarks
3 A Cognitive Pragmatics of Remembering
3.1 Neurocognitive Approaches
3.2 Socio-cultural, Linguistic and Cognitive Approaches
3.2.1 Schematic narrative templates
3.2.2 Conversational remembering
3.2.3 Epidemiological approach in cognitive psychology
3.2.4 Collaborative remembering and distributed cognition
3.3 Mental models, Cognitive and Discourse processes
3.3.1 Cultural models
3.3.2 Situation models
3.3.3 Discursive dimension of cultural and situation models
3.3.4 Context models
3.3.5 The discursive management of mental models
3.4 The Cognitive Pragmatics of Remembering
3.5 Summary and Conclusions
4 Remembering in Commemorative Speeches
4.1 Political Cognition and Commemorative Speeches
4.2 Political Uses of Discourse Strategies
4.3 Creating Times, Representing Actors
4.3.1 Commemorating 24 March 1976
4.3.2 Making exceptionality with the military
4.3.3 Constructing a possible future
4.3.4 Following the people’s will
4.3.5 Who they were, who they are
4.4 Conclusions
5 Memories of an ‘Ordinary’ Man
5.1 Moral Self-Disengagement
5.1.1 Moral justification of immoral acts
5.1.2 Neglecting the negative consequences of immoral acts
5.1.3 Neglecting and rejecting personal responsibility
5.1.4 Neglecting or rejecting the victim
5.2 Interviewing Paco: an ‘Ordinary’ Man
5.2.1 Discourse processes of moral self-disengagement and knowledgemanagement
5.2.2 Justification of immoral acts
5.2.3 Neglecting and rejecting the negative consequences of immoral acts
5.2.4 Neglecting and rejecting the personal responsibility
5.2.5 Neglecting or rejecting the victim
5.3 Conclusions
6 Memories of a Political Activist
6.1 Going Into Exile
6.2 The Days Before Leaving Buenos Aires
6.3 The Exile and Its Positive Consequences
6.4 Concluding Remarks
7 Family Remembering
7.1 Distributed Cognition and Family Conversations
7.2 Family Conversation: Sharing Memories of Argentinean History
7.2.1 16 September 1955: The Liberating Revolution
7.2.2 24 March 1976: The beginning of the 1976–1983 military dictatorship
7.2.3 10 December 1983: The return of democracy
7.3 Conclusion
8 Generational Remembering
8.1 Creating Agreements Through Interaction
8.2 From Not Knowing to Remembering, But Not Believing
8.3 Summary and Conclusions
9 Conclusions: Bringing Things Together
9.1 The Cognitive Pragmatics of Remembering
9.2 Cultural Models and Social Representations of the Past
9.3 Integrating Individual and Shared Experiences
9.4 Remembering in Social and Material Environments
9.5 Final Remarks
References
Index