Trust has never been a topic of mainstream sociology. Neither classical authors nor modern sociologists use the term in a theoretical context. For this reason the elaboration of theoretical frameworks, one of the main sources of conceptual clarification, has been relatively neglected. Furthermore, empirical research for example, research about trust and distrust in politics has relied on rather general and unspecified ideas, confusing problems of trust with positive or negative attitudes toward political leadership or political institutions, with alienation (itself a multidimensional concept), with hopes and worries, or with confidence. In their monograph on patrons, clients, and friends, Shmuel Eisenstadt and Luis Roniger (1984) use the concept of trust as roughly equivalent to solidarity, meaning, and participation. This makes it possible to show that unconditional trust is generated in families and small-scale societies and cannot be automatically transferred to complex societies based on the division of labour. Trust, then, needs for its reconstruction special social institutions; friendship networks and patron-client relations are examples for this adaptation. But this is merely to reiterate well-known statements about the division of labour and the need to reconstruct solidarity, about Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft. It does not give any new insight into the particularities of trusting relations. To gain such insights we need further conceptual clarification.

/pdf/familiarity-confidence-trust-problems-and-alternatives-45a0yu2o3y.pdf

Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives

Despite substantial work in a variety of disciplines, substantive areas, and geographical contexts, social memory studies is a nonparadigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless enterprise. To remedy this relative disorganization, we (re-)construct out of the diversity of work addressing social memory a useful tradition, range of working definitions, and basis for future work. We trace lineages of the enterprise, review basic definitional disputes, outline a historical approach, and review sociological theories concerning the statics and dynamics of social memory.

Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices

Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to power- ful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were never- theless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Focusing on the remembrance of the Holocaust, this essay elucidates the generation of postmemory and its reliance on photography as a primary medium of transgenerational transmission of trauma. Identifying tropes that most potently mobilize the work of postmemory, it examines the role of the family as a space of transmission and the function of gender as an idiom of remembrance. The guardianship of the Holocaust is being passed on to us. The second genera- tion is the hinge generation in which received, transferred knowledge of events is being transmuted into history, or into myth. It is also the generation in which we can think about certain questions arising from the Shoah with a sense of living

/pdf/the-generation-of-postmemory-44hwrlgygw.pdf

The Generation of Postmemory

From its very beginnings, the social study of culture has been polarized between structuralist theories that treat meaning as a text and investigate the patterning that provides relative autonomy and pragmatist theories that treat meaning as emerging from the contingencies of individual and collective action—so-called practices—and that analyze cultural patterns as reflections of power and material interest. In this article, I present a theory of cultural pragmatics that transcends this division, bringing meaning structures, contingency, power, and materiality together in a new way. My argument is that the materiality of practices should be replaced by the more multidimensional concept of performances. Drawing on the new field of performance studies, cultural pragmatics demonstrates how social performances whether individual or collective can be analogized systematically to theatrical ones. After defining the elements of social performance, I suggest that these elements have become “de-fused” as societies...

Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy*:

We start our chapter by introducing the notions of ‘critique’,‘ideology’ and ‘power’. These three concepts are constitutive for every approach in CDA, albeit frequently employed with different meanings.Therefore, it is important to clarify how they are conceptualized in the DHA.We then proceed with the delineation of other terms significant for our purposes, such as ‘discourse’, ‘genre’, ‘text’, ‘recontextualization’, ‘intertextuality’ and ‘interdiscursivity’. The second section summarizes some analytical tools and general principles of the DHA, while in the third section, we illustrate our methodology step by step by focusing on ‘discourses about climate change’. In the final section, we discuss the strengths and limitations of the DHA and point to future challenges for the field.

The discourse-historical approach (DHA)

Problem and Program In the third decade of this century, the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and the art historian Aby Warburg independently developed' two theories of a "collective" or "social memory." Their otherwise fundamentally different approaches meet in a decisive dismissal of numerous turnof-the-century attempts to conceive collective memory in biological terms as an inheritable or "racial memory,"2 a tendency which would still obtain, for instance, in C. G. Jung's theory of archetypes.3 Instead, both Warburg and Halbwachs shift the discourse concerning collective knowledge out of a biological framework into a cultural one. The specific character that a person derives from belonging to a distinct society and culture is not seen to maintain itself for generations as a result of phylogenetic evolution, but rather as a result of socialization and customs. The "survival of the type" in the sense of a cultural

/pdf/collective-memory-and-cultural-identity-3nxnwkq7du.pdf

Collective Memory and Cultural Identity

/pdf/das-kulturelle-gedachtnis-schrift-erinnerung-und-politische-1ixb0645y9.pdf

Das kulturelle Gedächtnis : Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen

Like consciousness and language, human memory is acquired through communication, socialization, and acculturation. It is, therefore, about both one’s brain and one’s social and cultural relations and comprises three dimensions: the personal, social, and cultural. Human memory is “embodied” in living personal memories and “embedded” in social frames and external cultural symbols (e.g., texts, images, and rituals) that can be acknowledged as a memory function insofar as they are related to the self-image or “identity” of a tribal, national, and/or religious community. Whereas the social or “collective” memory comprises knowledge commonly shared by a given society in a given epoch, cultural memory in literate societies includes not only a “canon” of normative knowledge but also an “archive” of apocryphal material that may be rediscovered and brought to the fore in later epochs. The formation of a canon of “classical” or sacred texts requires techniques of interpretation to keep accessible the meaning of the texts that may no longer be altered or multiplied. At that stage of cultural evolution, cultural memory changes from ritual to textual continuity. Cultural memory becomes complex, splitting into the “classical” and the “modern,” the “sacred” and the “secular.”

/pdf/communicative-and-cultural-memory-js2vf2zb8r.pdf

Communicative and Cultural Memory

Mnemohistory and the construction of Egypt suppressed history, repressed memory - Moses and Akhenaten before the law - John Spencer as Egyptologist the Moses discourse in the 18th century Sigmund Freud - the return of the repressed conceiving the One in ancient Egyptian traditions abolishing the Mosaic distinction - relgious antagonism and its overcoming.

Jan Assmann

Papers

Collective Memory and Cultural Identity

Das kulturelle Gedächtnis : Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen

Communicative and Cultural Memory

Moses the Egyptian : The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism

Das kulturelle Gedachtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identitat in fruhen Hochkulturen