Lay Historiography and differential positioning: ideological orientation, nationalism, and religion relevance

ZUBIETA, ELENA; BARREIRO, ALICIA VIVIANA; BOBOWIK, MAGADALENA; PAEZ, DARÍO

Sao Paulo

Congreso; 12th International Conference on Social Representations. The Challenges of Contemporaneity; 2014

Fundación Carlos Chagas

Psychology has studied traditionally memories from an individualistic-static memory model strengthening the idea of memory accuracy and its evocative power. However, during the last third of the last century, memory raise as a constructive activity questioning the accuracy of the past in the present update. These changes produced in the studies of memory an increasing agreement with the idea of memory as a social activity performed not in private but through the social conscience shared with others (Valencia, Momoitio & Idoyaga, 2010).The update of the MC studies from the 90s, its insertion into complex functional and intergroup dynamics, become an "object" of study with similar characteristics to those posed by the Social Representations Theory (SRT) (Haas & Jodelet, 2000). Consequently, memory becomes a key of what is at stake in conflicts. In this sense, CM is considered as a set of ?controversial? social representations (Moscovici, 1988).In the frame of everyday knowledge, or lay historiography, an empirical study was carried out with the aim to explore how people with no academic education in history ?apart from common obligatory schooling- conceive history, and to identify different conceptions according to religion relevance in life, ideological positioning and nationalism. Convenience sample was used composed by 375 Argentineans (age: M = 34. 05, SD = 13. 00). The 70% (n = 264) were female. The 57% (n = 214) were university students from social sciences, the 43% (n = 72) general population. Confirmatory Factor Analysis exhibit a model of eleven dimensions of universal history conceptions: Divine Plan; Laws; Great Men; Microhistory; Truth; Marxist; Technology; Progress;Suffering and decline; Cycle and Myth. Marxist and Truth obtain greater support, while Divine Plan and Laws are those with lesser consensus. When going further in anchoring process through no hierarchical clusters using ideological positioning, nationalism and relevance of religion some interesting findings showed up. More right-wing oriented and religious moderate participants agree with the conceptions of history as determined by Devine plan, objective Laws but also as describing the Progress of the humankind, and to a lesser extent as a result of acts of Great men. In contrast, nationalist left agree more with Marxist socio-structural conception of history more than other groups. As well as what happen between history records, the school, the everyday, and the academic (Rosa, 2004), tension and adjustments are observed within lay conceptions when taking into account grouping variables.