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John Sutton Between Individual and Collective Memory: Coordination, Interaction, Distribution HISTORY ANIMATES DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS H IST O R Y A N IM A T E S D Y N A M IC A L SYSTEM S AT M A N Y D IF F E R E N T timescales.* Brains, people (with their embodied minds and their more or less m indful bodies), small groups, and institutions are all open to the past, both to specific past events and to general past trends and practices, w ithout in general being overwhelmed by it. Coordinating change at many different rates and at many different levels of organiza­ tion, these interacting and history-dependent open systems exhibit and contribute to a range of phenom ena related to remembering. But how do they incorporate and act on the basis of their pasts? By what m echa­ nisms, and through what m edia do traces shape the behavior of these systems? Such general questions abstract away, for sure, from the specific neural or affective or interpersonal or organizational features that compose and flavor m em ory processes in particular individuals and collectives. One critic complains that “the positing of a weakly defined type, generic memory . . . subsum ing both internal and external states and processes” will not be of significant explanatory use (Rupert, 2004). Others think that my search for an integrated framework w ithin which quite different memoiy-related phenom ena m ight be understood is “a social research Vol 75 : No 1 : Spring 2008 23 non-revolutionary approach to embodied cognition,” “a project that can be undertaken while leaving m uch of the cognitive psychology of m em ory as the study of processes that take place, essentially w ithout exception, w ithin nervous systems” (Adams and Aizawa, 2008:179). In contrast, my hunch is that an initial levelling of the grounds of inquiry can fruitfully and substantially rejig the terrain of m em ory studies by flattening out w hat otherw ise often rem ain the dam agingly discon­ nected domains of distinct disciplines. We w ant to examine relations betw een different m em ory-related phenom ena empirically, as the focus for explicit study (Wertsch, 2002: 37-38), rather than starting with any assumed divisions of proprietary labors between psychological and social sciences. So there is strategic room in m em ory studies for deterritorializing , refusing to privilege any particular location—w hether in neuro­ biology or in narrative, in cognition or culture—as the single hom e of our subject-matter. This m ight help in developing models of the rela­ tions between individual and collective m em ory based not on analogy or parallel or m etaphor, b u t on understanding interactions betw een distinct yet highly interdependent phenom ena. These interactions between forms of m emory and between disparate com ponents in and across (transient or enduring) systems take m any shapes, revealing cooperation and com plem entarity as well as com petition and conflict. The pluralist fram ew ork sketched in this paper for studying such forms of interaction and coordination has m any historical predecessors and contem porary resonances across the disciplines th at will not be highlighted here (see also Sutton, 2009). Instead, the paper selectively updates recent literature in the philosophy and psychology of m em oiy and distributed cognition, com plem enting a distinct treatm ent of related m aterial from a m ore em pirical perspective (Barnier, Sutton, Harris, and Wilson, 2008). Before em barking on the task of fram ework construction, here are two examples from recent empirical studies that do justice to the entangling of embodied, cognitive, affective, and cultural dimensions of remem bering. Neither is yet a case of “collective m em oiy”; before 24 social research seeking conceptual space for one way of characterizing such a notion, it will help first to delineate a broader range of m emory phenomena. In 1999, Kyoko M urakami interviewed British form er prisoners of w ar about a return visit they undertook to Japan alm ost 50 years after their incarceration there. Seeking to elicit these m en’s “views on reconciliation w ith the troubling past,” the...

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