Collective Memories at “Work”: The Public Remembering of Contested Pasts

Tota, Anna Lisa

doi:10.1016/s0195-6310(03)21003-6

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 5 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Olfactory claims have particular features that can allow them to be weaponized in the public sphere. Each of these can be imagined as a weakness: rationalists would argue that smells' apparently close relationship to emotion and memory should disqualify their use as evidence in rational debate, but of course scholars focused on emotion, and memory have shown, again and again, how central such "soft" and "personal" cultural structures can be to local, national, and international political deliberation and action (e.g., Ahmed 2004; Dromi and Türkmen 2020;Emirbayer and Goldberg 2005;Hochschild 2016;Tota 2003;Vinitzky-Seroussi and Teeger 2010). The fleeting nature of smells and the difficulty of independent confirmation allows claimants to leverage cultural structures that link olfactory experience with urgent public concerns.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Everyone’s Annoyed’: Leveraging Uncertainty in the Smell of Others

Gerber¹

2019

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Smell is typically considered the least of the senses, the lowest in a hierarchy privileging sight since the Enlightenment. The experience of olfaction is highly emotion-laden and tightly bound to memory and personal history, and Western smell vocabularies are notoriously poor: scentful experience seems poorly suited as a basis to enroll others in political projects, especially in contexts that privilege rational public debate. But smells can also spur us to immediate action. When do they prompt us to enroll others in that action, and how do we turn individual sensory experiences into convincing arguments? How does olfaction leave the realm of individual experience and generate consequential social change? This article shows how social processes of olfaction can be used to prompt social action. With an analysis of the complaints that legitimated the 2015 destruction of a shanty town in southern Sweden and a historical inquiry into the shared beliefs that allowed those complaints to make sense, I show how olfactory claims -claims based on personal experiences of smell -can leverage broadly shared norms, values, and meanings to demand social action. Despite the personal, emotional, and fleeting nature of olfactory experience (or perhaps thanks to those features, which disallow independent confirmation) it can easily be weaponized as a political tool. This article asks how individual sensory experience can have social impact, and shows how a fit between local olfactory cosmologies and the particular features of olfactory claims can allow them to be used to demand action.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Everyone’s Annoyed’: Leveraging Uncertainty in the Smell of Others

Gerber¹

2019

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Memory distortion has become a significant subgenre in memory studies in recent years (Kammen, ; Schudson, ; Tota, ; Zelizer, ). Phillips () noted that “If the existence of a healthy and functioning public is intertwined with the capacity for remembrance, then the gradual erosion by forgetting must represent a grave danger” (p. 4).…”

Section: Theory and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Phillips () noted that “If the existence of a healthy and functioning public is intertwined with the capacity for remembrance, then the gradual erosion by forgetting must represent a grave danger” (p. 4). A number of scholars have grappled with memory distortion from sociologist Anna Lisa Tota () and media scholar Barbara Zelizer (), who grappled with the idea of collective amnesia, to sociologist Michael Schudson (), who acknowledged the memory distortion that takes place through the process of distanciation, instrumentalization, conventionalization, and narrativization. In the last instance, Schudson (), like Hall () before him, argued that mediated sites of memory are inherently selective and “inevitably distorted” (p. 346).…”

Section: Theory and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sixteen Days of Glory: A Critical-Cultural Analysis of Bud Greenspan's Official Olympic Documentaries

Roessner

2014

Communication, Culture & Critique

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Filmmaker Jonah J. “Bud” Greenspan wrote, directed, and produced 43 films about the Olympics over the last four decades. Drawing on public memory literature and hegemony theory, the manuscript offers a textual analysis of Greenspan's official Olympic films and his representation of Olympism. Overall, the study involved the analysis of seven of Greenspan's official Olympic films, along with more than 50 video and print interviews with the American‐born documentarian housed at the George Foster Peabody Archives.

show abstract

“…The success of this strategy to secure acceptance of authority, however, depends to a great extent on many variables that are mostly related to the quality of discourse and the population's dominant beliefs and convictions (Omelicheva, 2016). Having effectively excluded or discredited its opponents, over time the group in power can eventually modify the population's beliefs and validate its own visions (Tota, 2003), which has happened, for instance, in the Soviet Union (Markwick, 2001). In such cases, the population may eventually accept as legitimate a regime once deemed unacceptable.…”

Section: Mechanisms Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Security and Religion: The Discursive Self-legitimation of the Chechen Authorities

Iliyasov

2021

J. Muslims Eur.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article analyses the official discourse of the Chechen authorities and posits that it reflects the government’s efforts as self-legitimation. This investigation seeks to identify the mechanisms exploited by the Chechen regime to boost self-legitimacy by examining the ‘News’ programme on the Chechen state television channel ‘Grozny’, which, in the authoritarian setting of Chechnya, became the government’s mouthpiece and a propagator of official discourse. To provide for the context and to boost findings, the study is complemented by a discursive analysis of one more historical-political television programme and a political advertisement that was broadcast by the same channel during the period in which the fieldwork took place. The collected data is processed using Critical Discourse Analysis.

show abstract

Collective Memories at “Work”: The Public Remembering of Contested Pasts

Cited by 6 publications

References 5 publications

‘Everyone’s Annoyed’: Leveraging Uncertainty in the Smell of Others

‘Everyone’s Annoyed’: Leveraging Uncertainty in the Smell of Others

Sixteen Days of Glory: A Critical-Cultural Analysis of Bud Greenspan's Official Olympic Documentaries

Security and Religion: The Discursive Self-legitimation of the Chechen Authorities

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About