Social Representations of world history and the future in argentine context

ZUBIETA, E.; SOSA, F .

Conferencia; XIV Conferencia Internacional sobre Representaciones Sociales (CIRS) y IV Jornadas Nacionales sobre Representaciones Sociales (JNRS); 2018

Universidad de Belgrano

For Halbwachs (1952/1992), collective memory reconstructs an image of the past consonant with the thoughts that predominate in a society, appealing to instruments such as collective frames. From a psycho-sociological perspective, collective memory is conceived as a "set of shared representations of the past based on a common identity of the members of a group" (Licata & Klein, 2005, p. 243).Returning to Wertsch (2002), Liu and László (2007) remarked that cumulative historical experience results in the formation of cognitive narrative templates that structure and interpret new experiences based on recurring historical patterns. These templates summarize the major historical dilemmas that peoples faced throughout history, and impose a plot structure on a range of specifics characters, events, and circumstances. In this frame, different studies were carried out to analyze collective remembering of World History framed in the perspective of Liu (1999) and Liu et al. (2005, 2009) combining open and ended question about beginning, present and future, events and characters. Following the strategy of Cabecinhas et al. (2011), two studies were carried on in order to verify central biases in the representations of world history, and the differential content of historical narratives based on three questions concerning the beginning, middle and future of world history. Study 1 is based on an intentional sample composed by 178 college students (47,8% females, 52, 2% males; Age mean: 22,52; SD:4,51). Findings show that the top ten events in world history (last 1000 years) mentioned as more important are: Abolition of slavery, Women emancipation, Global heating, II World war, Creation/evolution of humanity, Discovery of America, I World war, Industrial revolution, Holocaust, and Fall of Berlin wall. It can be seen the prominence of Western-centrism (with some regional sociocentrism reflected in the discovery of America), but events related to Resistance to oppression (Liu et al., 2012) are more frequently nominated than those of Wars and Conflicts, or Historical Calamities. Finally, the recency bias is observed, 8 of 10 events occurred in the last 300 years. This data are similar to the ones obtained by Cabecinhas et al. (2011) from Africa, where a subset of events related with the promotion of human rights and struggle for freedom and independence was much more salient.Study 2 is based on an intentional sample composed by 388 participants - 73,7% males and 26,3% females; age mean 22,17 (SD:3,64); 45,9% (n=178) civil students and 54,1% (n=210) military students. Following the recoded historical events made by Cabecinhas et al. (2011), results shows that in the question about beginning, the elicited narratives are related to evolutionary origins of humanity (37.9%). Events like Jesus Christ birth, Big Bang or Universe Creation are mentioned, also America discovery. When asking about the present, the narratives turn into Wars and Conflicts (59.2%) mentioning events like II World War, I World War and Nazism. Finally, in the question about prediction for the future, still Wars and Conflicts remain with the greater frequency but changing in the content -wars for water, exhaustion of drinking water. It is also observed the increment of ?environment? as the second mentioned category (17.4%).