Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster by Guy Beiner (review)

Memory is a tricky subject, and social memory is even more so. But what about social forgetting? Take, for instance, one of the vignettes Guy Beiner uses to open his monograph: Robert Lyons Marshall—a Presbyterian minister, Professor of History and English, and member of the Orange Order—is taken by an interlocutor to an upstairs room in the man’s house to see an oil painting of the man’s ancestor. This ancestor had taken part in a rebellion in 1798 and was subsequently hanged for his involvement. Lyons was only permitted access to knowledge of the painting and the stigmatized family history of his interlocutor because Lyons had mentioned that his own ancestors had taken part in the rebellion. Beiner notes of this occasion: “Like the portrait of Dorian Gray, locked away in an attic to hide its record of unspeakable sins, the awkward recollection of a loyalist family having a republican rebel ancestor was kept out of sight and was only furtively revealed to those who could be trusted” (p. 4). This sets the stage for Beiner’s discussion on how social memory and forgetting work.

Beiner has become a pre-eminent scholar of social memory, beginning with his first book, Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). In Forgetful Remembrance, Beiner looks to the eastern counties of Northern Ireland in order to examine the other side of social memory—social forgetting. Beiner returns to his investigation of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland, known as the Year of the French or “Bliain na bfFrancach.” The Year of the French refers to a rebellion that began in 1798, when a French army landed in County Mayo and attempted to help the United Irish cause. Beiner states that this is “an episode in provincial history, in a peripheral corner of Europe, [that] was paradoxically both forgotten and remembered locally” (p. xvii).

The episode of the 1798 rebellion—also known as the “Turn-Out”—lays the ground for Beiner to traverse more than two centuries of local histories, found in manuscripts, archives, provincial newspapers, and through his own ethnographic collection. This span of time allows for Beiner to include thousands of voices previously excluded from the official historical narratives of this episode. And, in letting these voices guide his analysis, Beiner sidesteps many of the problems that he identifies in scholarly writings on cultural and social memory: all too often they make broad claims that are not supported by data. He reveals the “nuts and bolts of remembrance in order to closely examine the mechanics of how social forgetting actually works” (p. xvii).

Beiner begins with a discussion of “folk history,” “subaltern history,” “local history,” “provincial history,” “ethnohistory,” “public history,” and more. He writes: “Wishing to avail of the advantages of each and every one of these concepts, yet also weary of subscribing blindly to their predilections and being saddled with un-warranted baggage, this study has opted to introduce a different term: vernacular historiography” (p. 13). Vernacular historiography argues for a shift within the text-based discipline of history and, by association, historical studies more broadly by framing the making of history as a process performed at all levels of society. Understanding historiography as vernacular changes the view from history as text produced in the past and read in the present to history as process—events and actors recalled from the past and narrativized in the present.

Beiner makes an overt attempt to put “an emphasis on a diachronic awareness of how constructions of vernacular history were repeatedly reconstructed over time” (p. 14). Although, in the introduction, Beiner purposefully makes a move away from “folk history” to “vernacular historiography,” his use of “vernacular” agrees with how folklorists regard the forms of expressive culture that we study: as “informal expressions, including the seemingly oxymoronic combination of ‘oral historiography,’ alongside literary...