Remembering and forgetting by the social environment: relations between collective and personal experiences

BARREIRO, ALICIA; ENDSELFF, INGA

Gaibu, Pernambuco

Workshop; IV International Workshop Serrambi: Imagining the past, constructing the future; 2016

Aalborg University y Universidad Federal de Pernambuco

This work presents some theoretical developments to understand the way people remember and forget their collective past by their interactions with the physical environment. Meanly such developments come from the Social Representations Theory and Developmental psychology. To this aim we analyze findings from two different studies. On one hand, we analyze a study about the sociogenesis of the social representations of an historical process describing the narrative expressed by different symbolical resources (monuments, names of streets, commemorative objects and museum exhibitions). On the other hand, we considered some findings from a study on remembering by drawing maps, assuming that when the individual draws a mental map, the person is not just objectively drawing elements which they don?t have a relation to. The persons drawn map shows how the environment is perceived from a personal perspective. During this process the person is imaging himself/herself into the environment or specific place that they are drawing. In analyzing both research projects we trying to explain the complex relations between collective and personal process in remembering, since this process implies the articulation between collective created symbolic resources with the personal history of each individual with them.