Social media platforms that channel recollections in new and unexpected directions, material artifacts that conceal, contain, and transmit buried pasts over generations, ecosystems that bear witness to the violent and entangled legacies of living, the dead, and the more-than-human. How should we understand memory configured in such expansive and novel ways? A century after Maurice Halbwachs’ seminal texts on collective memory, this interdisciplinary and international panel explores the implications of restive histories and cutting-edge technologies for traditional theories of collective memory whose relevance for analyzing the social upheavals and experiences of the past century seems less clear. Even as neuroscientific and technological framings of memory are on the ascendance, our papers linger on questions of how memory is carried – and carried on – possibly in mass or in parts through acts of violence, landscape, and in novel technologies, and where the power to remember resides. We are bringing together, in conversation, sociologists and anthropologists across continents and generations to explore the relevance of Halbwachs, one hundred years later. What ideas, what tools, are available to think creatively about collective memory, i.e., about how social groups retain and remember the past, without losing sight of cohesion? How do traces of the past endure viscerally, atomistically, and narratively?
Sarah Wagner, The George Washington University "Failing to Remember in an American State of Denial: COVID-19’s Losses, Then and Now" How do we study the failure to remember? What does memory loss reveal about the relationship between individual, intuitive memory and more collective forms of remembrance? This paper takes up these questions through the example of COVID-19 death in the United States – as collective reckoning and through the specific conditions of isolated and unwitnessed death. It juxtaposes two moments in the brief history of the pandemic: the intense waves of death during the first two years (2020-2021) and the contemporary conditions of pandemic denialism under the current administration that ignores or silences calls to acknowledge the staggering toll of 1.2 million dead. The paper situates these bookended moments within the span of an ongoing (six-year) ethnographic research project examining COVID death, mourning, and memorialization, including what Geertz would call the “densely textured facts” of 20,000 inscriptions as part of the 2021 public commemorative installation, In America: Remember. On the one hand, these bookended moments map the temporal and ideological distance between the emergence (and recognition) of a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophic pandemic and its memory reconfigured through denialism. On the other, they illustrate the ethical and empathetic potentiality of individual experiences to evoke (or, at least, jog the memory of) collective loss.
Ethan Karnes, The George Washington University "When the Leaves Come Out: Camouflage, Social Forgetting, and Collective Action" In the fall of 1984, the United Mine Workers walked off the job in Matewan, West Virginia, initiating a selective strike against the A.T. Massey Coal Corporation. Though the violence of the strike echoed the Mine Wars of the early twentieth century, the conflict unfolded without any overt invocation of that past. Striking miners did not wear red bandanas as they would in later protests, and their picket signs made no mention of Mother Jones or Sid Hatfield. Even as they reenacted struggles waged by their parents and grandparents on the same narrow strip of road, the prevailing conditions of social forgetting rendered the memory of the Mine Wars unavailable. Literatures at the intersection of collective memory and collective action tend to prioritize memory as a symbolic resource that helps to define identity and motivate participation. In the contexts of social forgetting, however, the collective memories of past struggles on which contentious performances typically rely are unavailable. Under these conditions, I argue that the memory of the Mine Wars entered the strike through embodied tasks within the landscape. A repertoire of collective action shaped by the affordances and concealments of the mountains themselves. Camouflage emerges here as a central analytic. Drawing on the concept as a hunting technology grounded in intimate environmental knowledge, I show how camouflage enables one to blend across multiple epistemic communities. It reflects an understanding of one’s material, geographic, and social context, informing strategic decisions about when, where, and under what conditions aspects of the self can be revealed. This framing recasts social forgetting as an adaptive practice in which histories, identities, and affiliations are selectively hidden in response to shifting social and physical terrains. The natural camouflage of the mountain foliage symbolizes this concealment, evoked by my interlocutors’ refrain: “when the leaves come out.”
Tam T.T. Ngo, NIOD/KNAW, Amsterdam, The Netherlands - discussant
Sarah Daynes, University of North Carolina Greensboro "New Pilgrimage Narratives" In The Legendary Topography of the Gospel in the Holy Land (1941) Halbwachs is interested in what he calls legendary topographies (e.g. the ways in which collective memory symbolically organizes, interprets, and makes sense of space), which he distinguishes from historical topographies. He makes a central use of pilgrimage narratives, in particular that of the very early Le pèlerin de Bordeaux (circa 333AD), in order to show how memory is embedded in space. Pilgrimage narratives – like conversion narratives – have long occupied an important place in many faiths, and tended to obey a specific structure and form organized around the codification of the religious experience through the articulation of an itinerary from departure to return and the deployment of pilgrim’s voice (whether authentic or not). In contemporary pilgrimages, too, storycraft and storytelling have remained central to the pilgrim’s experience. But they are taking new forms. Almost a century after Halbwachs and the Pilgrim of Bordeaux, how have pilgrimage narratives changed with the use of new technologies, in particular image diaries (through social media or blogs)? And what does it mean for memory’s symbolic interpretation of place, and its embodiment in the land, landscape, and the pilgrim’s footsteps?
20260729T154520260729T1715America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires3.6. Maurice Halbwachs: New Uses, New Media, New MemoriesSV102MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
