Anette Kuhn: Family Secrets
Kuhn, A. (1995) Family Secrets. New York: Verso.
Khun talks of memory work in her introduction and explains how sharing an individual's recollections and past experiences contributes to a greater collective memory. It is especially key for those whose stories would otherwise be untold, to recall events that may have been largely undocumented but still have importance in a society’s history. She states: “there is a collective nature in the activity of remembering”, implying the stories shared through remembering can resonate with others especially as, often, one's past experiences are intertwined with more public issues of the time such as economic hardship.
Throughout the book, the author talks of the cues which aid and trigger certain personal memories from her own childhood, such as personal photographs of herself dressed for the Queen’s coronation or films she has studied which are more publicly appreciated. The author uses family photos to elicit memory work and begin forming associations between the present visual information and past recollections. She also writes about the relevance of memories to our lives today. Speaking of the present, the way one remembers an event may show how the mind changes aspects of that experience over time through the knowledge acquired afterwards, tainting that particular memory. It is important, therefore, that a process of introspection is necessary to carry out memory work: “Family photos may affect to show us our past but what we do with them is really about today, not yesterday”.
Biographical Objects, Affective Kin Ties, and Memories of Childhood: Arianna Huhn
Huhn, A. 2018. Biographical Objects, Affective Kin Ties, and Memories of Childhood. The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Volume 11, Number 3, Fall 2018, pp. 403-420 (Article)
This article regarding the exhibition 'Re|Collect', which was put together by the Anthropology Museum at California State University–San Bernardino in 2016, deals with childhood and the biographical objects that were used to aid the recollection of its participants' experiences of youth.
Huhn speaks of the importance of using objects as cues due to their physicality which allows narrators to recall experiences and feelings with greater clarity than perhaps relying purely on a hazy memory of an event. She states, "Our things stand as testaments to the experiences we have had and objectify the memories that we draw upon as evidence.”
It was discovered through this exhibition that the objects individuals chose, which had significance to them, weren’t stereotypical of childhood or remarkable in their aesthetic quality or indeed material value. Instead, these items had strong mnemonic cues that allowed the individual to recall the emotions and feelings held at a particular early stage in their lives.
These “childhood objects” that were chosen certainly did not “display privilege material culture of the elite and represent childhood through objects made, gifted, and valued by adults” and therefore displayed a more raw and personal side to childhood experiences and were able to effectively demonstrate the items that shaped the past; communicating their collective history.
Biographical Objects
Hoskins, J. (1998) Biographical objects : how things tell the stories of people’s lives. Routledge
The Kodi of Indonesia want to retell and narrate their lives through objects and feel it easiest to tell of their personal experiences in this way. In some cases, telling these stories allows them to achieve closure after bereavement. Objects are symbolic for the Kodi and although they do not stand in the place of people who are deceased, they create 'mutual enchainment' that connects people together - such as ancestors to the living - through passing down personal effects. In my culture this is often similarly carried out through family heirlooms; however, I believe we don't seem to associate the objects quite so heavily with the people especially if their original owners are no longer in living memory. For the Kodi, the spirit of someone is alive in these items passed down to current generations, and that is what makes their stories so important to recall.
In this Indonesian culture a description is associated whereby the materiality of their biographies and the inseparable nature of their possessions to themselves has been termed "partible personhood".
Clearly there is an importance in storytelling in indigenous cultures and the principal storytellers who have special "prerogatives as a teller of tales”, due to ancestral inheritance, are challenged by the loss of culture and transition into their nation state. In the Kodi culture, narratives are often "owned or held by a specific storyteller” it is interesting to see how even the stories have a physicality even without being directly prompted by an object.
Working Title: Biographical Objects
I thought of ways to summarise my project to create a working title. As I will work with found objects to design sets which will tell a life-story I recalled a study which did just this. Published in 1998, 'Biographical Objects' tells of the biographical accounts of people's lives through their personal items.
In this innovative study, six women and men from Eastern Indonesia narrate their own lives by talking about their possessions, domestic objects used to construct a coherent identity through a process of identification and "self-historicizing."... Biographical Objects is an ethnography of persons which takes the form of a study of things, showing how the object is not only a metaphor for the self but a pivot for reflexivity and introspection, a tool for autobiographic elaboration, a way of knowing oneself through things.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Biographical-Objects-Things-Stories-Peoples/dp/0415920124
Fictionalisation of memories and recall using spatial cues
"A text claiming to represent a memory can aim to be a verbal “translation” or approximation of a prior mental event. A text claiming to represent a memory can certainly also be invented or faked. (One thinks of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s fake holocaust memoir Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood [orig. 1995]). Between these poles of “verbal translation” and “fake” lies a spectrum of possible rapprochements and disjunctions between what the rememberer saw before his mind’s eye and the text that the reader has before her eyes." (1)
This is an interesting point to note when I am conducting my interviews and producing subsequent work to visualise, rephrase and adapt the stories I hear. It is likely that a personal narrative could be retold in a specific manner biased to a currently held viewpoint or perception of an event. It is also possible that this alteration of the memory comes through a conscious effort to project a self-history that works to enhance the audience's perception of themselves.
Later, Martens discusses the importance of objects and places in recall. Marcel Proust conceptualised that memories could be 'revealed' to people involuntarily through certain triggers in his novel 'À la Recherche du Temps Perdu' (In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past). These 'Involuntary Memories' were often surrounding themes such as childhood as it is believed children may turn their focus to the more 'spatial world' and therefore as adults we will likely recall events through physical scenes and items. I will therefore be aiming to focus my project on physical memory cues in order to have participants more readily recollect their earliest memories.
(1) Martens, L. (2011) The Promise of Memory : Childhood Recollection and Its Objects in Literary Modernism. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
The Remembering Self, Neisser, U. and Fivush, R. (1994)
Neisser, U. and Fivush, R. (1994) The Remembering Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
FABRICATED MEMORIES
In ‘The Remembering Self’, Neisser writes about a process of self reflection and how autobiographical memory may not always be correctly remembered even when the narrator aims to tell the truth. ‘Remembering’ suggests that accounts of the past can alter over the years reflecting a shift in memory. This ‘remembering self’ is a category in autobiographical memory where the person recalls events on a later occasion: these may be constructed and elaborated upon to serve the narrator or even never remembered personally and the narrator has only been informed about events they were involved in.
Definition of Memory from Recollection and Its Objects in Literary Modernism
'William James begins his classic “Analysis of the Phenomenon of Memory” with the following definition: “Memory proper, or secondary memory as it might be styled, is the knowledge of a former state of mind after it has already once dropped from consciousness; or rather it is the knowledge of an event, or fact, of which meantime we have not been thinking, with the additional consciousness that we have thought or experienced it before.” He continues: “The first element which such a [memory] knowledge involves would seem to be the revival in the mind of an image or copy of the original event.” As something that is “in the mind,” a memory cannot be studied directly, but only obliquely, as it manifests itself in the subject’s behaviour or in his or her words.'
Extract from: Martens, L. (2011) Recollection and Its Objects in Literary Modernism. Harvard University Press
Folk Art and Aging
Kay, J. (2016) Folk art and aging. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Kay describes how various elderly Americans find solace in the objects they create in later life. For many, the creation of memory and "life-story" objects creates cues for sharing their personal stories with others whilst also connecting them to a wider community who share in their passion for craft. Although these objects haven't had a place in forming their earlier memories or indeed were even present in their pasts, the use of objects to provoke social interactions centred around recollections is a key factor in their creation. For John Schoolman, a cane maker and former shopkeeper, discussed later in the book, the time consuming process of transforming wooden sticks into intricately decorated canes was worth the dedication due to the subsequent storytelling and relationships formed. Inscribed with his own poems regarding his life and other more universally known events, the 100-year-old found great satisfaction when asked to explain the meaning behind such writings and recount his past experiences. Such references were central not only for his memory-work but also his vitality later in life.
Jeffrey K. Olick: Double-exposure
Shevchenko, O., 2014. Double Exposure : Memory & Photography. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, pp.21-22.
In studying the important connections between photographs and the memory, Olick observed that collective memories are often formed and recalled from photographs as “not only is photography mnemonic, but memory is, in some ways photographic”. Photographs provide many people with the only visual information, and thus memory, they will have of important historic events or people they have not personally experienced. Therefore, it is in some ways imperative to have photographic documentation of history in order for it to be preserved in the mind in the way a personal experience is and to make it an integral part of one’s social identity.