Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (review)

Eviatar Zerubavel is in love with time. How else to explain the erudite, fascinating, complex ways he exposes the cultural work we do to make a host of different kinds of time comprehensible, even obvious?

In Time Maps, Zerubavel builds on his previous research into commemoration and social memory by offering a general theory of the connection between time and culture. He argues for a "sociomental topography of the past" as a framework for understanding how time and cognition interact. His conception, therefore, is at once sociological, mental, and topographical — it combines influences of social patterns, cognitive processes, and visual organization.

The breadth of the book is impressive. In the service of a general theory of time and cognition, Zerubavel does not pause long on any one case (although readers will recognize cases from his previous work). We get examples from American electoral politics, Israeli and Palestinian popular opinion, evolutionary biology, genealogy, and more. In each of these cases, Zerubavel shows that the divisions of time are neither natural nor consensual; rather, they have particular histories and, more importantly, particular cultural roles.

It is these cultural roles that form the crux of Zerubavel's argument. The reader is presented with a series of drawings representing the ways cultures and groupings have carved up time to fit their understandings of happenings within it. Different periods of time, each the same literal length, have different "sociomnemonic densities": different numbers of commemorative and commemorated events that punctuate the periods of time. Take, too, the notion of "mnemonic cutting," in which naturally contiguous historical time is separated into periods. Events in a given period, then, seem closer to one another than they are to events in other periods — even when, as with many cases in the book, they are further away in literal time.

We are asked, then, whether it is appropriate to accept the notion that "more" has happened in sociomnemonically dense eras and that historical periods are naturally split from one another. The alternative is that cultural work has gone into determining what events — and what kinds of events — are commemorable and therefore form part of our collective memory.

Zerubavel clearly advocates the latter position: chunks of time are not, in themselves, more or less full of events; they are constructed as such, post hoc, through a process of collective memorialization. Similarly, in an extended tangent on the concept of genetic closeness, we are treated to debates about the classification of the human species vis-à-vis other primates, animals, and even grapes. The point is clear and has a pedigree reaching back to Durkheim and Mauss: culture's job is classification, and without classification we have no access to meaning, whether individual or shared.

As exciting as Time Maps is, it suffers from one important shortcoming. Appropriately, that shortcoming, too, dates back to Durkheim and Mauss. It is the unexamined "we" that categorizes, understands, interprets, and acts in Zerubavel's work. As culturally determined and interpretively important as these categorizations are, we would expect to find groups with a stake in one or another interpretation actively arguing for that interpretation and against the interpretive claims of rival groups.

Indeed, in many of Zerubavel's cases groups have done just that, and several of them (think, in particular, of his competing visions of claims over Palestine) are literally frought with conflict. Yet the book shies away from this, seeing the mnemonic communities that categorize time as largely static and homogeneous. There is "historical irony," but not historical animosity; mnemonics unite, but they do not produce new divisions.

Nowhere is this lack clearer than when Zerubavel discusses actual conflicts: it is the mnemonic significance of relics and anniversaries that leads victorious armies and new regimes to destroy historical monuments and remove certain holidays from the calendar. Thus, Hungarians no longer commemorate their liberation by...