Social Thinking and History

Front matter

Cultural Dynamics of Social Representation

SOCIAL THINKING AND HISTORY

A SOCIOCULTURAL PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON REPRESENTATIONS OF THE PAST

Introduction

The sociocultural approach 6 A brief introduction to a complex history 11 Three sociocultural perspectives 13 Semiotic theories and perspectives 13 Dialogical theories and perspectives 14 Mediated activity theories and perspectives 16 Epistemological and methodological implications 17 Sociocultural psychology in this book 20

Social thinking 27

Social cognition and reasoning 28

Social representation theory 31

Discursive theories 32

Ongoing debate 34

Social thinking for a realist sociocultural perspective 35 Collective memory 36

The historical roots of collective memory 37

Collected memory 38

Psychosocial memory 40 viii

Contents

Collective remembering 41 Discursive approach 42 Mediated approach 43 Narrative approach 45

Thinking about the collective past: beyond collective memory

Moving beyond collective memory 52 The problem with collective memory 52 A (not so) new vocabulary 53 Thinking about the collective past 54 A model of how we think about the collective past 54 Going further 56

Action 56 Other 58 Self 60

Tools and signs 61 Studying how we think about the collective past 63 Research questions 63 Methodological note 64

Parliamentary debates on immigration 71 Analysing references to the collective past in interactions Results 74 History of immigration 76 History of the French Republic 78 Discussion 6&2 Constructing meanings 82 Negotiation of meanings 84 Conclusion 86

Trajectories of remembering 92 Explaining differences 92 Trajectories and development 94

Analysing trajectories 96 Case 1: Dominique 98 Case 2: Genevieve 101

Contents ix

Ruptures and resources 104 Personal world philosophies 106

Resources and processes to think about the collective past

Historical thinking 109 A Dialogical Experiment 111 Rationale 111 Design 112 Analysis 115 Thinking about the collective past 115 Summary of the data 115 Resources 116 Media 116 Commonly held knowledge 118 Witness accounts 119 Processes 121 Analogies and generalisations 121 Imagination, identification, and perspective taking 125 Emergence in representations of the collective past 127 Four elements 127 Meaning 127 Sense 129 Factual knowledge 130 Schemas 131 A model of how we construct representations of the collective past 132 Conclusion 134

Conclusion

How we think about the collective past 138 Representing the collective past in interactions 139 Developing unique representations of the collective

past 140

Constructing representations of the collective past 142

Collective memory from a sociocultural perspective 143 Collective memory as a symbolic resource 143 Collective memory as constructed in dialogues 144 x Contents

Collective memory as a developmental process 144

Collective memory as a thinking process 145

Collective memory as a tool to think about the world 145 Implications for education, policy, and society 146

Index 150

Figures

3.1 Thinking about the collective past (TCP) as oriented, culturally mediated, and dialogical action

4.1 Key to the figures

4.2 References to the collective past in the parliamentary debates

4.3 References to events linked to immigration

4.4 References to events linked to the French Republic

5.1 Trajectory of remembering

6.1 Model of how we construct representations of the collective past

Tables

6.1 Summary of the vignettes presented to the participants 113 6.2 Processes to think about the collective past 122

Series editor’s introduction

Psychological processes in social representation: a step ahead

Books — rather than the never-ending flow of journal articles — bring the serious reader a deep feeling of intellectual satisfaction. This book is precisely of that kind — its author explores how people understand and relate to the history of their societies. By adopting a sociocultural psychology perspective, the author is able to take into account the social and cultural dimensions of psychological processes that are involved in the dynamic act of representing historical material by our contemporary ordinary persons who are merely in contact with history via school education and social media. The author also builds her theoretical argument on the literature on collective memory, history education, social representations, and social cognition. The present book is an excellent example of interdisciplinary scholarship in practice.

The present book marks an important forward movement in the development of the social representation theory. Ever since the passing in 2014 of the hegemonic intellectual father of the theory, Serge Moscovici, the question of what next? has been haunting the community of social representation researchers. This is not an easy question to answer for people dedicated to the study of specific aspects of social representation as it is a difficult task to match the erudition and wide focus of the originator of the theory. One possible — and intellectually fruitful — perspective is the study of making sense of history by ordinary persons who face their own futures in their contemporary societies. It is, in a way, history-for-the-future that can be investigated through the social representing of the past.

Constance de Saint Laurent is one of the younger generation researchers of social representation who is at the forefront of this new direction in social representation research. Her work demonstrates the unity of careful attention to details of phenomena together with theoretical issues that still need to be resolved. She brings to the field a systematic developmental perspective — bringing the work on social representations out of its traditional place in social psychology. That developmental perspective is deeply dialogical in its nature. These two perspectives xiv Series editor’s introduction together — applied to the phenomena of understanding history — mark her unique contribution to the study of social representation.

The value of the concept of social representation (as a process of representing) has always been its simultaneous functioning at both levels — of the society and individual persons. This has also created a theoretical lure to see the form of such representational processes isomorphic between the levels. Thus, my personal ways of dealing with the uncertainty of a virus that is pandemic are assumed to match those of collective agents such as my family, community, or country. This isomorphism may be desired by the politicians — as it is easier to introduce social control under conditions of such unity of meanings of their commands and the interpretations of the masses of their followers. Doubts are not allowed under these conditions. To mobilise masses of people against a common enemy leaves little leeway for dissenting versions of social representations.

Human history is filled with examples where the natural basis for thinking — doubt — is suspended. We live right now in the middle of one of these events. The overwhelming acceptance of economically disastrous measures under the current (March 2020) coronavirus pandemic illustrates the reduction of psychological resistances under conditions of dramatically presented threat. The “body count” of the infected and the dead — together with displays of the life-saving efforts of medical staff — is presented on all television screens. Social representations of other similar virus attacks are readily made. The panic that has emerged builds upon the dangers similar to the SARS virus attack in 2003 (9 per cent lethal outcomes of the infected) while the 2020 virus reached 3—4 per cent range. Comparisons with the “Spanish flu” of 1918-1919 have also been made. The generalisations made from the rapid day-by-day growth of numbers of infected persons are used to elicit proliferation of the collective feeling of discomfort with uncertainties — which is then used socio-politically to introduce a variety of measures that severely limit the normal ways ordinary persons lead their lives. The latter accept these measures as givens — for the collective good of being safe.

There is, however, an interesting difference in the social presentation of epidemics. While the coronavirus becomes socially presented in the context of fear, the similar quickly proliferating ordinary influenza virus is left without attention. Nobody worries about the “seasonal flu” going around — no businesses are closed because people sneeze or cough as a result of that ordinary infection, but the new “dangerous virus” requires drastic socio-political measures that hinder the whole economic structure of the world. How is such generalisation — leading to hyper-generalisation (Valsiner, 2020) of collective fear — possible?

There may exist forgotten collective experiences of the past that are not directly brought into the dialogue about the present but “linger on” somewhere in the background in the current meaning-making about the present and the future. There is in Europe the “silent representation” of danger that is built on the devastatingly (about 90 per cent) lethal outcomes — that of plague that recurrently devastated cities. Representing the past may entail a dialogue between preferential and “silenced” social representations in accordance to the socio-political needs of the time. Some

Series editor’s introduction xv representations (e.g., that of the plague) may be overly emotiogenic and are kept out of present discourse, while others instead are used (“Spanish flu”) to frame the social events of today in the framework of the discomforting but action-prone versions of the history of the past. Collective memories matter, but they are guided by the societal memory-makers.

By the time the present book reaches its audience, the current virus attack will hopefully be an event of the past, becoming an object for socially representing our past. Yet we are left with the discomforting memories of our recent past — the power of panic escalations. Yet what is needed is a psychological “vaccine” precisely against such escalations without allowing the existing mechanisms of resistance (Chaudhary, Hviid, Marsico, & Villadsen, 2017) to have a role in moderating an avalanche of socially presented fear. Social representation theory in its new versions may be precisely the arena where such antidotes to public fears can be conceptualised. Processes of social representing involve suggestions encoded into the representation used (e.g., “health hazard”) together with a resistance strategy that allows the person(s) to neutralize or begin to turn the fear into a challenge and start to enjoy it. The death rate of climbers who have reached the summit of Mt. Everest since it was first ascended in 1953 is 6.5 per cent (280 out of 4000') which is at least equal to or higher than that of the coronavirus lethal outcomes. Yet this statistic has not led Nepal or China to close down the hazardous activity of climbing.’ Of course, the relatively few (in contrast to virus-affected) numbers of people who have not only resisted the idea that mountain climbing is dangerous but made it important for their personal life accomplishment indicates that hazardous activities can be turned into desirable and pleasurable ones.

The dialogical nature of social representations in action is crucial for further development of the theory. Social representations are symbolic resources when put into the act of representing the past. The use of such resources makes it possible to flexibly present the same actual event (or historical figure) in possibly completely opposite ways. Napoleon Buonaparte can be made into a hero or a criminal, who — if he were living in the twenty-first century — would be summoned to the Hague to be tried for “crimes against humanity.” Fortunately for him (as a real person) he is long dead — but not forgotten. The process of utilisation of symbolic resources is the core of a developmental view on social representation. The present book provides ample evidence for how that process is organised in a society. It will be an intellectual pleasure to read it, at a time where such pleasures are becoming increasingly rare.

Jaan Valsiner Frankfurt-am-Main, March 2020

Notes

1 www.liveabout.com/death-on-mount-everest-755907 2 Yet on 15 March 2020, the Nepalese Government did close it for two months citing the coronavirus, claiming that with the thin air already making breathing hard, the possibility xvi Series editor’s introduction of coronavirus would make it more hazardous. www.businessinsider.de/international/ mount-everest-closed-spring-climbing-season-nepalese-government-coronavirus. China had also stopped issuing climbing permits.

Chaudhary, N., Hviid, P., Marsico, G., & Villadsen, J. W. (Eds.). (2017). Resistance in everyday life: Constructing cultural experiences. Springer Nature.

Valsiner, J. (2020). Hyper-generalization by the human mind: The role of sign hierarchies in meaning-making processes. PsychoSozial Verlag.

Acknowledgements

A book is always, to a certain extent, a collective endeavour. This is particularly true here. Over the years it took me to conduct the research presented here, to write the doctoral dissertation that stemmed from it, and to finish this book, I have benefitted from a wealth of support without which none of this would have been possible, and for which I am forever grateful. First and foremost, my family has been a continuous support emotionally, intellectually, and financially, throughout my studies and beyond. They have also often been the inspiration for this work, from the stories of “the war” that lulled my childhood, to their constant love for debate and discussion. This book would not exist without them. I am forever grateful for the opportunities they have given me.

I would also like to thank Tania Zittoun, who has supervised the doctoral dissertation from which this work stemmed, for her direction, input, and feedback. Beyond my thesis, she has offered me invaluable opportunities, collaborations, and the freedom to pursue my own goals. I have been extremely lucky to have her as a supervisor and as a guide during this intellectual journey. I would also like to express my gratitude to the colleagues with whom I shared this journey: Stéphanie Breux, Martina Cabra, Fabienne Gfeller, Hana Hawlina, Sophie Lambolez, Déborah Levitan, Léonie Liechti, Gabriel Macedo, Teuta Mehmeti, and Gail Womersley, as well as all the colleagues with whom I have had the pleasure to work while conducting this research.

I have also benefitted from a wealth of discussions with wonderful researchers, whose thinking and feedback have enriched my work. In particular, I would like to thank Sarah Awad, Ignacio Brescé de Luna, Alex Gillespie, Michèle Grossen, Pernille Hviid, Jack Martin, Cathy Nicholson, Sandra Obradović, Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont, Jaan Valsiner, Jakob Waag Villasden, and Brady Wagoner, the members of the Kitchen seminar in Aalborg, the Studio in Neuchatel, the Cupsynet Doctoral Network, and the COST Action Network on representations of history. This research would not have been possible without the constant debates and discussions I had the pleasure of being part of.

I would also like to thank Gabriela Ungureanu, for all her help, her support, and her constant good mood. She has been my lifeline when trying to balance professional and family life, and she has allowed me to enjoy both and sacrifice neither.

xviii Acknowledgements

Iam extremely grateful to the people who took part in my studies and to those who made the fieldwork possible. The Théâtre Océan Nord and the Academy of Special Education in Warsaw welcomed me and supported me in realising the various studies presented in this book, and I thank them from the bottom of my heart. In particular, I would like to thank Adeline Rosenstein, Maciej Karwowski, Iza Lebuda, Léa Drouet, and Isabelle Nouzha, without whom this project would not have been possible.

I would also like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation, the University of Neuchatel, its Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences, its Institute of Psychology and Education, as well as the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences for their financial support at different stages of this work. I am particularly grateful for the SNSF Postdoc.Mobility grant P400PS_ 180686, thanks to which I have been able to write this book, and to Knowledge Unlatched and Routledge for offering to make it open access.

Finally, I would like to thank Vlad Glaveanu, for his support, his encouragements, and his feedback. You have been there every step of the way, you have listened and discussed every section of this book, and, more importantly, you have always believed in this project even when I didn’t believe in it myself. I am forever grateful to have you in my life.

Introduction

References to history abound in everyday life, to the point that they often go unnoticed. We hear them in political discussions, where heads of states seen as undemocratic or discriminatory are routinely compared to Hitler, or overly opaque administrations are likened to the USSR. It is in the customary mention of the economic crisis of the 1930s every time the 2008 crisis comes up, or in the references to the Middle Ages and cavemen to characterise attitudes and behaviours we consider to be backward. No matter how ill-conceived most of these comparisons are — the Middle Ages, for instance, were truly not the dark ages many imagine — they help us anchor complex social issues into better-known examples in the past. In doing so, they allow us to make sense of the social world we live in, and to communicate with others about it. And this is possible because we do share a general representation of cavemen built on what we have learnt in school and, perhaps more fundamentally, on what we have seen in movies and on TV. That is, our representations of the past are often, in a large part, the product of popular culture uses of history, partial memories of what we have heard in school, and everyday mentions of the past that verge on reflexes more than on thoughtthrough comparisons.

Yet, the specific ways in which we remember history, where we have been, and how it brought us to where we are today, matters for a number of reasons. First, and at a very pragmatic level, it matters for questions of reparation and reconciliation: Agreeing on a common narrative about the past after a conflict means agreeing on who should carry the blame and pay reparations, who was victimised and who should now be protected. Second, remembering history matters for ethical reasons: We have a duty to remember those before us, especially those who participated, through their life or through their death, to the construction of the world as we know it today. Commemorations, thus, are an important part of social life, crystallised in various social institutions, from history museums to war memorials.

Third, the way we remember history plays an important role in how we understand the present. On the one hand, it can justify and explain the status quo by including it in a continuous narrative. On the other hand, it can serve as the basis for social critique by de-naturalising the present situation and highlighting the

2 Introduction social and cultural conditions under which it was forged. This is, for instance, the work of Foucault’s genealogical method (e.g., Foucault, 1993): By uncovering the historical roots of a phenomenon, not only does it become possible to shed a critical light on its existence, it reminds us that it is not a “natural” category but a recent historical development. Fourth, remembering history matters for the lessons it may teach us for the future. Indeed, what better source of knowledge about humanity, societies, and civilisations than our collective past? Being able to learn from the past has become an object of popular wisdom, as in the maxim: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

These two last consequences of the way we represent the past — for the present and for the future — imply that how we understand history is not the product of simple reconstructions that aim at reflecting the reality of what happened as best as possible. Quite often, on the contrary, lay representations of history are constructed, mobilised, materialised, and transmitted for social and political purposes (e.g., Liu & Hilton, 2005). From the politicians who want to impose a specific vision of the world and its future (e.g., de Saint Laurent et al., 2017), to the everyday glorification of the past to feel better about one’s social group (e.g., Favero, 2010), our uses of the past reflect more the underlying motivations of the speaker than the factual reality of what happened. This is the aspect of historical representations that has been the most studied in psychology, under the heading of collective memory. Studies on the topic have highlighted the role of collective memory in intergroup conflict and international politics (e.g., Delori, 2011; Rosoux, 2001), in creating often exclusive social identities (e.g., Raudsepp & Wagner, 2012), or in political rhetoric (e.g., Tileaga, 2013).

What the research on collective memory has thus shown, globally, is that we do not learn from the past but instead use it to defend our own interests. The danger is double here. On the one hand, not learning from history means repeating similar mistakes, being blind to important societal signs, and ignoring the past experiences that could allow us to better anticipate the future. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, constructing and propagating glorified versions of the past means defending some of the most negative aspects of our societies — implying that periods characterised by slavery, sexism, segregationism, colonisation, or extreme poverty were actually a golden age one should be nostalgic for — and refusing to see our role in the status quo. By defending a version of the past where we are systematically the heroes championing justice, equality, and human rights, we become blind to the dynamics by which injustice, inequality, and dehumanisation are made possible, and how we, through the societies we live in, participate in them.

The ways in which we distort the past have very real consequences in the present, in particular, in terms of political decisions. Slogans like “Make America Great Again” during Trump’s campaign or “We want our country back” during the Brexit one are direct references to glorified pasts that, in reality, correspond to periods of segregation or colonisation. Historical comparisons have abounded during both campaigns, be it in the discourses of politicians or of electors. In the

Introduction 3 months preceding Brexit, for instance, the comments posted below online articles were full of references to the “EUSSR” or the “Nazi European Union” (de Saint Laurent et al., 2017). See this Guardian comment thread published a few days before the vote:

USER 1: The EU is a bad idea implemented fraudulently and waste fully [sic]. It’s the USSR of the 21st century.

What followed this rather polite version of the EUSSR argument is, however, much more interesting:

USER 2: The USSR subjegated [sic] the whole of Eastern Europe by military force, brutally crushing revolts in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. It also sent millions of its own citizens to the Gulag. How is this similar to the EU?

Delusional.

USER 3: He obviously never lived in a Soviet vassal-state in the heyday of the USSR. I did: so for me the comparison with the EU is laughable beyond words. I’ve never been woken at 3:00a.m. to look up the barrel of a Europoliceman’s pistol during a raid in search of subversive literature, as happened once to my sister-in-law. Such incidents were so commonplace as to be hardly worth mentioning.

A better comparison might be the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a sclerotic, bumbling, bureaucratic organisation which never inspired much affection among its subjects — but which everyone missed terribly once it was gone.

USER 4: I think the Austro-Hungarian Empire had similarities to the European Union, but was also rather similar to the United Kingdom.

The comments from User 1 are quite symptomatic of both what has been found in research on collective memory, and of the discourses that surrounded the EU referendum at the time. However, the replies from other users were not the oddity in political discussions on social media, yet they have been completely overlooked by research on the topic — and to a certain extent by the media and political commentators in general, who tend to portray social media debates as caricaturally poor. Here, on the contrary, users draw on their knowledge and experiences of history to reflectively construct a comparison of the current situation of the EU with past events.

It is this active construction and use of representations of the historical past that this book aims to study. In other words, my objective is to explore how people actively think about history as a social object and employ it to understand the world they inhabit. It is also to show that reflective accounts of the past are not the prerogative of historians and intellectuals — in contrast to “lay” people who would blindly repeat self-serving narratives — but that, on the contrary, people do try to pay justice to the past and learn from it. The resources they have available for this, and the

4 Introduction demands of the social context within which they find themselves may of course vary widely, and we do not all attempt, all the time, to be reflexive about history. Writing this book, for instance, has made me very critical of the narratives I have been taught in school about France, my home country, being the historical champion of human rights, while completely overlooking the meaning of its colonial past. But it does not mean that I have not overused, like many of us have in the past few years, the comparison between the 1930s and the current rise of populist politicians, no matter how much I have read how inaccurate this parallel is.

Yet, studying the more “reflective” side of collective memory matters, for two reasons. First, it is by understanding how people construct and discuss more thoughtful accounts of the past that we can encourage them to do so in the future. Instead of focusing solely on the “dangers” of collective memory, I believe we need to understand how people use and build complex representations of the world they live in. Second, no picture of collective memory would be complete if it failed to consider the wide spectrum on which it can manifest itself. Indeed, how can we understand a phenomenon if we primarily focus on its role in problematic social phenomena — such as nationalism or intergroup conflict — and overlook the other functions it may play in social life?

In order to study how people actively think about history and construct representations of it, I propose to adopt a specific theoretical perspective: That of sociocultural psychology. This approach considers the person as a thinking agent — and not as the passive recipient of problematic representations of the world — embedded within a specific social, cultural, and historical context — and thus with different tools, different objectives, and different understandings that participate in how she represents the world. Because this perspective understands human psyche as characterised by intentionality but does not lose sight of context within which the person develops and that shapes how she thinks, it is particularly adapted for our aims.

In Chapter 1, I introduce the sociocultural perspective adopted in this book and the theoretical principles upon which it rests. I summarise its main axioms: 1) the interdependence between person and culture; 2) intersubjectivity as constitutive of the self; and 3) the self as a developing agent; and I present a brief summary of its history. I discuss in more details three main approaches that have been developed within the sociocultural tradition and that illustrate its axioms: the semiotic, dialogical, and mediated activity perspectives. I conclude this chapter with the methodological and epistemological consequences of the sociocultural approach.

In Chapter 2, I discuss in turn the literature on social thinking and on collective memory, as well as how it can be articulated with the sociocultural perspective. This includes work on social cognition, social representations, discursive psychology, collective memory, and collective remembering. This serves as the basis of the theoretical perspective outlined in Chapter 3. In this third chapter, I start by arguing why we need to move beyond the term “collective memory” — considering it both misleading and ambiguous — and by proposing a new vocabulary, speaking instead of Representations of the Collective Past (RCP) and of

Introduction 5

Thinking about the Collective Past (TCP). I then introduce a model of how we think about history, bridging together the literature on sociocultural psychology, social thinking, and collective memory.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 each explore, empirically, different aspects of the model. In Chapter 4, I look at the role of social interactions in constructing representations of the collective past. More specifically, I analyse the references made to history in a series of parliamentary debates on immigration in France and how different political groups respond to each other. In Chapter 5, I present a study on the development of our relationships to the past, reconstructing the trajectories of intellectuals and artists who have become particularly critical of how history is represented in their country. And in Chapter 6, I propose a Dialogical Experiment to explore the resources and processes used when people think about the collective past. By confronting the participants with different perspectives on an event, this study allows me to highlight the tensions and elements that participate in the emergence of representations of the collective past.

In the concluding chapter, I take stock of the findings of the preceding chapters and discuss what the sociocultural approach brings to our understanding of collective memory. Finally, I highlight the practical implications for education, policy, and society, of the findings, theories, and concepts introduced in this book. What I hope to have shown by then, is how representations of the collective past are constructed, mobilised, and contested, as well as at times, blindly repeated, to understand the complex social world in which we live. And thus, that encouraging reflexive accounts of the past is not, after all, just a fool’s errand.

de Saint Laurent, C., Bresco de Luna, I., Awad, S. H., & Wagoner, B. (2017). Collective memory and social sciences in the post-truth era. Culture & Psychology, 23(2), 147—155. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354067X17695769

Delori, M. (2011). Le poids de la mémoire sur la politique étrangère. Politique Européenne, 34(2), 231—241. https://doi.org/10.3917/poeu.034.0231

Favero, P. (2010). Italians, the “good people.” Reflections on national self-representation in contemporary Italian debates on xenophobia and war. Outlines. Critical Practice Studies, 12(2), 138-153.

Foucault, M. (1993). Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. Gallimard.

Liu, J. H., & Hilton, D. (2005). How the past weighs on the present. Social representations of history and their role in identity politics. British Journal of Social Psychology, 44, 537-556. https://doi.org/10.1348/014466605X27162

Raudsepp, M., & Wagner, W. (2012). The essentially other. Representational processes that divide groups. In I. Markova & A. Gillespie (Eds.), Trust and conflict. Representation, culture and dialogue (pp. 105—122). Routledge.