Japanese Communication: Language and Thought in Context

17 Japanese Text and Talk in Contrast

199 17 Japanese Text and Talk in Contrast Social Memory across Cultures In a 1932 book called Remembering, British psychologist Sir Frederick C. Bartlett proposed the idea that remembering is not simply recovering some fixed factual information but is itself a process of constructing knowledge. In one of his psychological experiments, he asked his British subjects to recall a North American folktale called “The War of the Ghosts” at different intervals, from fifteen minutes up to two and a half years later. The story went like this. The War of the Ghosts One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals, and while they were there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war-cries, and they thought: “Maybe this is a war-party.” They escaped to the shore, and hid behind a log. Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles, and saw one canoe coming up to them. There were five men in the canoe, and they said: “What do you think: We wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make war on the people.” One of the young men said: “I have no arrows.” “Arrows are in the canoe,” they said. “I will not go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have gone. But you,” he said, turning to the other, “may go with them.” So one of the young men went, but the other returned home. And the warriors went on up the river to a town on the other side of Kalama. The people came down to the water, and they began to fight, and many were killed. But presently the young man heard one 200 Japanese Communication in Global Context of the warriors say: “Quick, let us go home: that Indian has been hit.” Now he thought: “Oh, they are ghosts.” He did not feel sick, but they said he had been shot. So the canoes went back to Egulac, and the young man went ashore to his house, and made a fire. And he told everybody and said: “Behold I accompanied the ghosts, and we went to fight. Many of our fellows were killed, and many of those who attacked us were killed. They said I was hit, and I did not feel sick.” He told it all, and then he became quiet. When the sun rose he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted . The people jumped up and cried. He was dead. (Bartlett 1932, 65) Each subject read through the story twice, and subjects were asked to recount it as opportunity offered. Bartlett found that subjects interpreted the story according to their own cultural schemata or their particular social memory. They interpreted the story in the way they understood things. Subsequent retellings were remarkably similar in general form and outline to the first. For all subjects, rationalization—the reduction of material to a form that the subject could readily and satisfyingly deal with—was very prominent. We all try to make sense of things, and the way we do this is to use already existing knowledge. This suggests that knowledge is interpretable within the cultural discourse that one’s own language allows. Once one has reached a rationalized interpretation, that understanding continues and is often reinforced by time. One of the subjects retold the story two and a half years later as follows: “Some warriors went to wage war against the ghosts. They fought all day and one of their members was wounded. They returned home in the evening, bearing their sick comrade. As the day drew to a close, he became rapidly worse and the villagers came round him. At sunset he sighed: something black came out of his mouth. He was dead” (Bartlett 1932, 75). It is true that this short version seems to make more sense to us—making war against the ghosts, fighting all day, returning home in the evening, getting worse at night, having the villagers come around, and dying. Our attempts at understanding are creative endeavors. Observing this and other similar cases, Bartlett stated: “Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a Japanese Text and Talk in Contrast 201 whole active mass of organized...