History and Subjectivity
Ethos volume 28, number 4, December 2000
Edited by Geoffrey White
World War II Memorial on the mall, Washington D.C.
Photo credit:
Geoffrey White
This issue of Ethos, History and Subjectivity, marks a point in the recognition of history and memory as critical topics for anthropology’s traditional concerns with the study of self in society. As a teaching resource, it presents a number of well documented case studies that address the interrelation of cultural-psychological processes and collective representations of the past, especially those representations that have achieved the status of public histories. These studies address issues that link anthropology’s longstanding interests in constructions of self with the highly emotional and political debates that often surround historical discourse.
This was the last issue of Ethos published under the editorship of Thomas Csordas and Janis Jenkins. It owes its origins to conversations between them, particularly Csordas, and editor Geoffrey White about the importance of recent research on problems of historical memory. It can be read as a predecessor and companion to the newly published special issue on history and memory edited by Kevin Birth (The Immanent Past).
This volume can be useful for exploring points of difference and overlap in the various disciplinary and subdisciplinary approaches that now converge on problems of collective memory. By bringing together five authors who represent distinct fields and subfields, these studies represent the common interests, and variety of approaches that characterize current research at the intersections of psychological anthropology and cultural psychology.
The contributors to this collection all engage with the personal and cultural dimensions of collective histories, although using a variety of theoretical and methodological tools. Contributors include James Wertsch, a psychologist working in the Vygotskian tradition who analyzes history textbooks as cognitive practice; linguist Charlotte Linde who applies her work on life stories to understand the socializing effects of stories about heroic figures in corporate culture; linguistic anthropologist Keiko Matsuki who also uses narrative analysis to identify modes of self positioning in the personal storytelling of the Japanese war generation; and Regina Feldman and John Eidson, two cultural anthropologists who interpret public historical debates using the tools of cultural and psychological theory.
By focusing specifically on “histories”—the sort of discourse that has to some degree solidified in public and textual representations of significant events in the collective past, these studies bring the tools of ethnography (including linguistic and cognitive analysis) into the realm of public culture and debates about representations that seem to matter in formations of cultural and national identities. Hence, war memory as coded in textbooks, memorials, personal stories and even the exchanges of academic historians, loom large in this collection. Each study takes on problems of power and dissonance that mark the boundaries of personal experience and collective histories. In our current moment of world history marked by expanding theaters of war and violence, the lessons of past wars and collective memory taken up in this collection have continuing relevance.
