What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification -- the scaffolding of information infrastructures. In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis. The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.

https://www.reciis.icict.fiocruz.br/index.php/reciis/article/download/794/1436

Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

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

WELCOME TO THE MEMORY INDUSTRY. In the grand scheme ofthings, the memory industry ranges from the museum trade to the legal battles over repressed memory and on to the market for academic books and articles that invoke memory as key word. Our scholarly fascination with things memorable is quite new. As Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins have noted, "collective memory" emerged as an object of scholarly inquiry only in the early twentieth century, contemporaneous with the so-called crisis of historicism. Hugo von Hofmannsthal used the phrase "collective memory" in 1902, and in 1925 Maurice Halbwachs's The Social Frameworks of Memory argued, against Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, that memory is a specifically social phenomenon. But outside of experimental psychology and clinical psychoanalysis, few academics paid much attention to memory until the great swell of popular interest in autobiographical literature, family genealogy, and museums that marked the seventies. 1 The scholarly boom began in the 1980s with two literary events: Yosef Yerushalmi's Zakhor: jewish History and jewish Memory (1982) and Pierre Nora's "Between Memory and History," the introduction to an anthology, Lieux de me'moire (1984). Each of these texts identified memory as a primitive or sacred form opposed to modern historical consciousness. For Yerushalmi, the Jews were the archetypal people of memory who had adopted history only recently and then only in part, for "modern Jewish historiography can never replace an eroded group memory." For Nora, memory was an archaic mode of being that had been devastated by rationalization: "We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left." Despite or perhaps because of their elegiac tone and accounts of memory as antihistorical discourse, these works found an amazing popularity and were quickly joined by others. In 1989 the translation of Nora's influential essay in a special issue of this journal and the founding of History and Memory, based in Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, showed the crystallization of a self-conscious memory discourse. A decade later the scholarly literature brims with such titles as "Sites of Memory" or "Cultural Memory" or "The Politics of Memory. "2 The emergence of memory as a key word marks a dramatic change in linguistic practice. We might be tempted to imagine the increasing use of memor as the natural result of an increased scholarly interest in the ways that popular and folk cultures

On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse

The archaeology of the contemporary past is becoming an important subfield within the discipline and one attractive not only to archaeologists but to social scientists and artists. The period that started with World War I, here identified as “supermodernity,” has been characterized by increasing devastation of both humans and things and the proliferation of archaeological sites, such as battlefields, industrial ruins, mass graves, and concentration camps. The mission of a critical archaeology of this period is not only telling alternative stories but also unveiling what the supermodern power machine does not want to be shown. For this we need to develop a new kind of archaeological rhetoric, pay closer attention to the materiality of the world in which we live, and embrace political commitment without sacrificing objectivity.

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Time to destroy. An archaeology of supermodernity

This essay argues that archival paradigms over the past 150 years have gone through four phases: from juridical legacy to cultural memory to societal engagement to community archiving. The archivist has been transformed, accordingly, from passive curator to active appraiser to societal mediator to community facilitator. The focus of archival thinking has moved from evidence to memory to identity and community, as the broader intellectual currents have changed from pre-modern to modern to postmodern to contemporary. Community archiving and digital realities offer possibilities for healing these disruptive and sometimes conflicting discourses within our profession.

Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms

Empire of Love

A multidisciplinary work, Memory of the Modern examines stock markets, tango dancers, vagabond murderers, neurology, monument destruction, and colonial policies to document how individuals and institutions shaped memory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wonderfully written, the book studies these diverse "memory-sites" to show how memory and history are fought over, shaped, and put to personal and ideological use.

The Memory of the Modern

This work takes a look at the human impact of World War I by examining the ways in which the French remembered their veterans and war dead after the armistice. Arguing that memory is more than just a record of experience, this cultural history offers a perspective on how commemoration of World War I helped to shape post-war French society and politics. Daniel Sherman shows how a wartime visual culture saturated with images of ordinary foot soldiers, together with contemporary novels, memoirs and tourist literature, promoted a distinctive notion of combat experience. The contrast between battlefield and home front, soldier and civilian was the basis for memory and collective gratitude. Post-war commemoration, however, also grew directly out of the search for the remains of hundreds of thousands of missing soldiers, and the sometimes contentious debates over where to bury them. For this reason, the local monument, with its inscribed list of names and its functional resemblance to tombstobes, emerged as the focal point of commemorative practice. Sherman traces every step in the process of monument building as he analyzes commemoration's competing goals - to pay tribute to the dead, to console the bereaved and to incorporate mourner's individual memories into a larger political discourse.

The Construction of Memory in Interwar France

Asia, the Pacific Islands and the coasts of the Americas have long been studied separately. This essential single-volume history of the Pacific traces the global interactions and remarkable peoples that have connected these regions with each other and with Europe and the Indian Ocean, for millennia. From ancient canoe navigators, monumental civilisations, pirates and seaborne empires, to the rise of nuclear testing and global warming, Matt Matsuda ranges across the frontiers of colonial history, anthropology and Pacific Rim economics and politics, piecing together a history of the region. The book identifies and draws together the defining threads and extraordinary personal narratives which have contributed to this history, showing how localised contacts and contests have often blossomed into global struggles over colonialism, tourism and the rise of Asian economies. Drawing on Asian, Oceanian, European, American, ancient and modern narratives, the author assembles a fascinating Pacific region from a truly global perspective.

Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures

Unlike Britain, whose empire has been studied from numerous perspectives, the French empire has received comparatively little attention, particularly with reference to how France and its colonies perceived the French outposts in the Pacific. Spanning Paris, Tahiti, New Caledonia, Indochina, Japan, Panama, and other island groups, Matt Matsuda argues that, far more significant than the French administrative or political presence in the Pacific, was the French Pacific-especially the waters of the Pacific itself-in the scientific, literary, and artistic imaginations of both colonizers and colonized. Initially, the book follows the traces of French naval officer and writer Pierre Loti and his powerful patron Juliette Adam as they "romance" a popular overseas empire that for both reflects back upon their highly emotional ideas of the nation. In Panama, romantic Jesuit ruins, isthmian peoples, and a French canal project illuminate Saint Simonian communities of love plotting to conquer the Pacific transit with a passionate Gallic nationalism. In the Pacific islands of Wallis and Futuna, church fathers confront the sacred and profane alliances of a martyr's love that will create the first saint in the South Seas. Tahiti situates the reader where violent warfare and erotic loves for Tahitian "natives" are implicated in battles and alliances between the Queen and french Naval officers struggling for control of the Society Islands. In the penal colony of New Caledonia settler communities face local Kanak resistance to the affective politics of an imperial administration involving itself in making love-matches and households to serve the needs of colonialism. A chapter on Indochina examines how love of country, possession of the "native," and colonial marriage are consistent figures in the French articulation of the Southeast Asian colony, and how these same figures are reiterated by Vietnamese both in colonial collaboration and armed resistance. The concluding discussions engage Japanese and French debates on the nature of political, economic, civic, and sentimental life east and west, and the possibilities of love in modern states as they mutually struggle to define what is common to all of the above studies: conflicting engagements with love for and against the empire in the Pacific. Through a wealth of primary sources, Matsuda describes the empire through the eyes of Tahitian monarchs, Kanak warriors, French politicos, prisoners, and Central American laborers, among others. He argues that French imperialism in the Pacific, both real and imagined, was registered most forcefully in the language of desire and love-for lost islands, for untouched people, for promised wealth and riches, and for carnal pleasure. Empire of Love promises to be an imaginative and ground-breaking work in imperial history, as well as in the growing field of Pacific Studies.

Matt K. Matsuda

Papers

Empire of Love

The Memory of the Modern

The Construction of Memory in Interwar France

Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures

Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific