Rethinking Memory in Theory

Modern historiography emerged in the 19th century, along with the rise of national movements in Europe. These attributed a central role to the collective past in order to mobilize the masses for their political goals. At the same time there arose a spontaneous popular aspiration for collective identity, in light of universal trends that were blurring the ethnic uniqueness expressed by reverting to the past. From its very inception, the Jewish National Movement Hibbat Zion turned to the collective past to advance its goals in the present. Their scholars sought to introduce national historical protagonists, to vividly illuminate periods of historical Golden Ages suited to the national ideology, and to elevate the national ethos. One of their activities was to reinterpret Jewish holidays and festivals, especially those that did not take a central place in the Jewish calendar, such as Lag B'Omer, Hanukka, and Tu B'Av (The 15th of Av). They sought to transform the historical memory of these holidays from a religious memory to a national memory, by matching historical military victories to pioneering projects in the Land of Israel on these dates. Tu B'Av was celebrated, in the last decade of the 19th century, as the harvest festival, commemorating the establishment of the agricultural colony Rishon LeZion and the beginning of Zionist settlement in the Land of Israel. It was similar to the American Thanksgiving - The national holiday with religious roots. However, in the 20th century Tu B'Av was relegated from the Zionist collective memory, as the holiday of the beginning of the Zionist settlement. In the proposed lecture I would like to examine the reasons for this, while comparing it with the reception of the myth of the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth, in the American collective memory.

Memory studies has gradually consolidated into a field during the last four decades. Maurice Halbwachs' seminal work on 'collective memory' (1925) has been the inspiration for many earlier contributions to the field. Since then, a whole set of mnemonic themes and respective conceptualizations have followed. To date, they comprise four waves of memory studies. Many of these concepts have been applied, challenged, or modified via illustrative case studies. However, there have been few efforts to tie them together in a theoretically generative framework. This paper is a preliminary (and iterative) attempt to address this lacuna. We start from the premise that memory studies require a processual approach, directing attention to the transformation of mnemonics on the background of social (and epochal) transformations. We deploy theory as a heuristic aid, rather than as a general (law like) proposition or a causal device. We propose a 'mnemonic matrix' that consists of two central axes: One is synchronic, and involves, among other things, the relational quality of memory (e.g., its dialogical nature) and a situational angle (e.g., the cultural dependency of meanings). The other is diachronic and addresses the path-dependent and dynamic nature of memory. These two axes are underwritten by mnemonic agents such as: Commemorations (from national to post-national); Legal Developments (from latent to explicit memory laws); Historiographies (changing relationship of history and memory); Generational memories); Media Transformations (technological developments and their implications). Together, they constitute evolving mnemonic matrices which, we suggest, should be treated as time-diagnostic tools allowing for the analysis of specific periods.

Archives have long been a source of knowledge production for sociologists, however there is limited sociological inquiry into "the archive" as a space where knowledge is both created and erased. Existing theoretical discussions about archives are concentrated on the opposition between official archives and counter-archives while this study aims to contribute to a relatively new approach emphasizing the variations between counter-archives. There is a significant question that should be asked at this point: How do counter-archives differ from one another in terms of their purposes, processes of construction, contents and functions in memorialization of difficult past? Based on fieldwork conducted in and around five civil society archives dedicated to memorializing severe human rights violations against Kurds in the 1990s, this study delineates three discernible approaches in the construction of counter-archives and discourses pertaining to addressing the historical aspects of the "Kurdish question" in Turkey.
The 1990s marked the peak of systematic and severe human rights transgressions perpetrated by both state and paramilitary entities against the Kurdish population in Turkey. The unsettling ambiance, where unresolved murders, enforced disappearances under custody, village evacuations, and torture in prisons became ordinary, concurrently facilitated the establishment of a novel regime of collective memory, by opening the way to civil society movements to start archiving these atrocities. As a deliberate or indirect result of this, the perpetrated atrocities in various manifestations are documented by several civil society movements, with distinct purposes and organizational frameworks. 
The first is the archives of human rights organizations recording state violence with legal aims. Although these institutions were not established for the purpose of memorialization, their work over time took the form of counter-archives. Secondly, victims' organizations formed by the victims of human rights violations or their families, unintendentionally constructed archives containing first-hand oral narratives, witnesses, visuals and material belongings of the victims. Lastly, research centers founded by academics and activists have been taking active role in memorialization. Founded with the direct purpose of doing memory work to create a base for confronting the difficult past, research centers conduct comprehensive research, standardize and digitalize existing archival materials collected by human rights and victims' organizations. Three types of archives are intertwined with one another and there are interactions among them including both cooperation and conflict.
In the 2000s, alternative forms of remembering Turkey's difficult past emerged in both academic and public spheres, different discources and the counter-narratives taking their roots from these archives have become more visible in the public sphere. This study aims to reveal the evolution and transformation of these discourses regarding coming to terms with Turkey's difficult past by evaluating these contacts, similarities and conflicts between three types of counter-archives. Situated in the intersection of social movements, archive studies, and memory studies literatures, this research aims to discuss the potentials, limits and transformative effects of civil society archives in the construction of the discourse of coming to terms with the difficult past in Turkey.

My goal in this paper is to conceptualize social memory from the point of view of the Theory of the Social Reduction of Contingency (TSRC). This theory articulates concepts of Niklas Luhmann's Systems Theory, Pierre Bourdieu's Theory of Practice and Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory. For this theory, social reality arises when the double contingency, inherent to every social encounter, is reduced by at least one of these Contingency Reducing Social Operators (CRSO) or a combination of them: communication; practical dispositions and capabilities and materiality. The concept of double contingency refers to the fact that, in a social encounter, neither ego nor alter can know what is in each other's mind and therefore can never be completely sure whether their respective proposals will be accepted or not. This contingency can be reduced through the above-mentioned CRSO. 
Since memory is selective, it is contingent because remembering a particular event is neither necessary nor impossible. From this point of view, I will analyze how the OSRC make memory possible in different realms of society, namely: interaction, organization, and functional systems. Each realm of society creates its own memory and uses it for different purposes, for example: while in interaction collective memory depends on the individual memory of those who participate in the encounter, in organizations it depends largely on archives. Finally, different functional systems produce different memories. Furthermore, I will pay special attention to the disputes around memory in the programmatic fields that emerge when there is more than one memory-program fighting to establish itself as the only "legitimate" memory.
Note: I'm sending this proposal to this tematic stream because I couldn't find any stream dedicated to theory.