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Commemoration refers to the mobilization of symbols to awaken ideas and feelings about the past. The word commemoration derives from Latin (com (together) memorare (to remember): to remember together). Remembering together occurs in every sphere of life—family, association, occupation, community, and society—but its dynamics are most visible in the largest, societal, sphere. Commemoration is society’s moral memory, distinguishing events its members believe to be deserving of remembrance from those deserving of being merely recorded. Commemoration promotes society’s sense of itself by affirming its members’ mutual affinity and identity.
1. Commemorative Symbolism
Commemoration is based on the premise that historical meanings can be represented by means of objects and rituals, including scripture, icons, music, monuments, shrines, naming conventions, and ritual observances. These ‘cultural objects,’ embodying the meaning of the past in physical form (Griswold 1987), cover the social landscape:
(a) Commemorative scripture includes biographies, eulogies, poems, plays, and commentaries. Defining the moral rather than factual aspects of the past, commemorative texts are hagiographic and thus distinguishable from analytic history and chronicling.
(b) Music, consisting of anthems, hymns, and inspirational songs, aligns melodic and harmonic structures and lyrics to historical events in such a way as to dramatize the nature and extent of their significance.
(c) Icons, signs resembling what they represent, commemorate the past by bringing it to visual presence through paintings, statues, prints, photographs, motion picture film, and videotape.
(d) Monuments, including obelisks, antique temples, and war memorials, are designed to elevate the public imagination through grand structures bearing dramatic reference to grand events.
(e) Shrines—including birthplaces, residences, places of death, headquarters—play a key role in commemoration because they bring the individual into direct contact with sacred objects. Shrines are sacred because they are, by definition, ‘containers’ of relics (scrinium (case, chest)) associated with great events or used by great people.
(f) Naming practices make the past ubiquitous by incorporating its memory into the identity of businesses, streets, cities, towns, counties and states, rivers, and mountains.
(g) Commemorative observances (periodic performance of anniversary, centennial, and holiday rites) have been analyzed more extensively than other mnemonic forms, but their functions are no different: to maintain the vitality of the past, to prevent it from being forgotten and to revive what is essential in the collective consciousness. Through commemorative observance:
the group periodically renews the sentiment which it has of itself and of its unity; at the same time, individuals are strengthened in their social natures. The glorious souvenirs which are made to live again before their eyes, and with which they feel they have a kinship, give them a feeling of strength and confidence; a man is surer of his faith when he sees to how distant a past it goes back and what great things it has inspired (Durkheim [1915] 1965, p. 420).
Commemorative observances, together with scripture, music, icons, monuments, shrines, and naming practices, comprise sign systems representing past events, recommending them as being worthy of contemplation, affording individuals a common legacy and identity by making history tangible and accessible to all.
2. Commemorative Networks
The combination of commemorative symbols conveys meanings that differ from meanings conveyed by any one symbol. To activate the commemorative process through story, song, icon, ceremonial observance, or other symbolic forms, therefore, is to activate memories that include but extend beyond the persons and events commemorated. Commemoration works by constantly pairing symbolic objects with one another, and the significance of historical figures and events change as they are placed in commemorative networks composed of new objects absent in previous networks. During the Progressive Era (1900–1920), for example, visual images of George Washington were paired with contemporary and historical figures, including Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, with whom he could have had no actual contact. Commemorators identified him as one who would have supported Progressive Era reforms. In Washington’s own political values, in fact, they found progressivism’s roots. They named him the first Progressive and contrasted him with selfish businessman of their own time. The pairing processes fanned out broadly not only within a network of people whose prestige enhanced and was enhanced by Washington’s, but also to networks of events and structures (notably, political and economic reforms and relentless condemnation of plutocracy). In such mnemonic webs, existing beliefs about Washington were organized, their institutional roots deepened, and a new and autonomous collection of beliefs about him accumulated. Common features of people and events with which Washington was symbolically connected were generalized to Washington himself. In this way, Washington changed through the nineteenth century from a conservative symbol of the social and economic status quo in to a liberal symbol of social and economic reform.
Commemoration, as Washington’s case suggests, is a structuring process that partially overrides the qualities of its objects and imposes upon them its own content. The key to this process is not the mere act of pairing or coupling one historical actor with another; it is the attribution to one actor of qualities of other individuals located in the same network of memory. Commemoration is creative because it fills in what is lacking in its objects, whether historical figures or events, by attributing to them the qualities of other figures and events deemed similar.
3. Commemoration, History, And Collective Memory
Commemorative symbolism is distinguishable from the historiography on which it is based. History, as French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs ([1950] 1980) defined it, seeks an objective standpoint to assess the sequence, importance, mutual relations, causes, and consequences of past events. It is ‘situated external to and above groups’ and looks to the past independently of their immediate problems and concerns. Once established, Halbwachs believed, historical knowledge remains stable—its stream of facts and demarcations ‘fixed once and for all.’ In contrast, commemoration remains significant only so long as it remains relevant (pp. 80–1).
Traditional societies possess no history. History emerges as tradition ends, social memory fades, and commemorative symbolism loses credibility. Early Christian leaders, for example, read historical chronicles, but their followers were illiterate and had no conception of ‘historical preoccupations such as we think of them. … Their memories were tied to rites of commemoration and adoration, to ceremonies, feasts, and processions’ (Halbwachs [1941] 1992, p. 222).
Pierre Nora, a French historian, shares Halbwachs’ belief in the ultimate opposition between history and commemoration. Analytic history, according to Nora, deconstructs the sacred past; the lieux de memoire (sites of memory) reconstruct it. Lieux de memoire are ubiquitous and comprise every type of commemorative sign: not only monuments and shrines but also flags and anthems, sanctuaries and ruins, statues and busts, portraits and history paintings, coins and medallions, holidays and rituals (Nora 1997).
Two paths lead to two different notions of the past. History disenchants the past; commemoration and its sites sanctify it. History makes the past an object of analysis; commemoration makes it an object of commitment. History is a system of ‘referential symbols’ representing known facts about past events and their sequence; commemoration is a system of ‘condensation symbols’ (Sapir 1930, pp. 492–3) expressing the moral sentiments these events inspire. History, like science, investigates the world by producing models of its permanence and change. Commemoration, like ideology, promotes commitment to the world by producing symbols of its values and aspirations (Geertz 1973, pp. 193–233). The contrast between history and commemoration is not entirely clear cut.
History always reflects the ideals and sentiments that commemoration expresses; commemoration is always rooted in historical knowledge. Commemoration is intellectually compelling, therefore, when it symbolizes values whose past existence history documents; history is morally compelling when it documents events that can be credibly commemorated. Analytic history and commemorative symbolism are inter-dependent constituents of collective memory.
4. Theories Of Commemoration
Multiculturalism, postmodernism, and hegemony theory, each prominent in the intellectual environment of the 1980s, shaped the agenda for recent debates over commemoration and history. Whether commemoration is a process of construction or retrieval, con-tested or shared, a mirror reflecting the concerns of society or a lamp of practical guidance and moral precedent, a system of social attachment or social control—on these and related issues two theories have been brought to bear.
4.1 The Politics Of Commemoration
In the theory of the politics of memory, commemorative activities appear as contests among differently empowered communities. Producers of commemorative symbolism, (‘reputational entrepreneurs’ (Fine 1996)), manipulate the attitudes of their audience in the service of society’s privileged strata (Gillis 1994). The ‘invention of tradition’ was as a mode of social control during Europe’s democratic revolutions (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983); state histories and counter histories performed a similar control function in many authoritarian nations, while ‘official’ and ‘vernacular memory’ in the United States supported the interests of the elite and the masses respectively (Bodnar 1992). The second strand of the politics of memory literature assumes that power is diffused rather than concentrated and that commemorative objects emerge out of a context of cross-cutting coalitions, networks, and enterprises rather than a ruling elite’s interest in maintaining its privilege. The fate of artistic and presidential reputations, Holocaust memories, place-naming and monument-making, and the organization of museums exemplify commemoration’s role in pluralistic networks of interest and power (Olick and Robbins 1998).
4.2 Commemoration As A Cultural System
The theory of the politics of memory conceives commemoration as a reflection of power distributions, assuming that different elements of the past become more or less usable as resources of various groups fluctuate. Commemoration thus appears to be made and remade in the service of changing interests and needs. The theory of memory as a culture system, in contrast, conceives commemoration as a pattern of symbolic forms that articulate present experience and perpetuate present understandings of the world. Commemoration, in this theory, is less a construction of a manipulative interest group than a symbolic frame in terms of which people confer meaning on their experience and find direction for their conduct. Reputational entrepreneurs (Fine (1996)), thus, perform more like priests than like manipulators, seeking to reaffirm beliefs they share with their audience. Accordingly, commemoration is not only a model of society—a reflection of its needs, interests, fears, mentality, and aspirations—but also a model for society—a program defining its values and goals and a frame organizing and assessing the moral significance of its experience. Commemoration affects social reality by reflecting, shaping, and framing it.
The distinction between commemoration’s mirroring and modeling functions is analytic, not empirical: both aspects are realized in every act of remembrance. Commemorative objects must reflect current problems before they can program ways to deal with them, for people cannot be oriented by a past in which they fail to see themselves. It is commemoration’s relevance as a model, however, that renders it a useful mirror, for people have no reason to look for themselves in a past that does not already orient their lives.
The coexistence of commemoration’s modeling and mirroring functions is evident in its use. When Abraham Lincoln ran for the presidency, for example, Republican organizers ‘campaigned down’ to the people by mirroring their preferences with symbols of railsplitting and the frontier; but when Lincoln assumed the presidency, his supporters, wishing to portray him in a more dignified light, modeled his image after George Washington. They produced portraits of Lincoln gazing at a bust of Washington or standing beneath or next to Washington’s portrait in the presence of familiar symbols of state. Lincoln himself launched military offensives on Washington’s birthday and regularly compared his situation with Washington’s. When Lincoln died, eulogists keyed his memory to that of Washington; mourners placed portraits of Washington beside his coffin and purchased prints showing Washington welcoming him into Glory. People commemorated Lincoln, as they did other actors and events, in ways that affirmed their values and enriched their lives, enabling them to comprehend and cope with a complex world and to render their experience meaningful. Lincoln’s image was in turn modified by these new modeling and mirroring connections. Pairings of Washington’s and Lincoln’s images, as Emile Durkheim ([1915] 1965) would have said, ‘do not confine themselves to revealing the mental state with which they are associated: they aid in creating it’ (p. 262). Commemorative structures thus conferred on Lincoln’s images a meaning it would otherwise not have had.
5. Negative Commemoration
Traditional commemoration transmits positive images of the past. Negative commemoration, marking events weighing on the present generation as sources of shame and dishonor and articulating regret for harm inflicted, arose during the late twentieth-century in connection with the new recognition of minorities’ entitlements. Every real community, as is now recognized, is a community of memory, one that retells stories about men and women who have exemplified its ideals and values. Such stories include not only tales of shared suffering that create strong bonds of identity but also tales of suffering wrongly inflicted. Defined by these premises are the new commemorative politics of regret, embodied in new American narratives revealing George Washington as slaveholder and Abraham Lincoln as colonizationist wishing to deport the slaves he emancipated, and new shrines, monuments, and museums marking the era of slavery, maltreatment of minorities, and unpopular war (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991). As these new commemorative modes reflect the erosion of boundaries that once separated racial, religious, and ethnic groups and once justified aggression within and between nations, they affirm the state’s recognition of the dignity of every citizen.
6. Memory Of Commemoration
Commemorative symbols are neither direct portrayals of the events they commemorate nor products of the concerns of the generations creating them; they are parts of an ongoing process of meaning-making. Since commemorative symbols refer to the memory of their own genre, their meaning includes not only the event being commemorated but also how it has been commemorated elsewhere and in the past. In other words, commemorations are ‘path dependent’— shaped by their development as well as their referents. Therefore, differences between commemorations are not just matters of the politics of the present; they reflect the forms and media available at different times. Earlier commemorations affect the availability of resources and forms required for present commemorations (Olick 1999). Conceived in light of their generic predecessors, war memorials can be critical as well as reaffirming. The Korean War Veterans Memorial, as originally conceived by a supervisory committee hostile to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s antiwar inspiration, had to be uplifting, suggestive of honor, pride, and dignity, evoking admiration and gratitude rather than self-contempt and grief. It had to be utterly different from the Vietnam Memorial in design and message. The Memorial Committee rejected all designs failing to fulfill these requirements (Schwartz and Bayma 1999). Comparing commemorations in terms of the history of their genres helps to explain their differences and leads to deeper insights into the various ways society contemplates its past.
7. From The Politics Of Commemoration To The Semiotics Of Commemoration
Pulling together the threads of this summary, we see that knowledge of commemoration grows in spurts—a brace of writings in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, then a period of quiet, then an eruption of theorizing and research during the last two decades of the century. Emile Durkheim was the first sociologist to study commemoration and commemorative rites systematically, but it was Maurice Halbwachs, Durkheim’s student, who formulated the broader concept of collective memory and pioneered its empirical study in the 1920s and 1930s. Like other students of public knowledge and belief, Halbwachs was jaded by the intellectual climate resulting from the First World War’s destructiveness. A branch of the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of memory took root in a society where common values had eroded, large groups of people had become alienated from their own traditions as well as one another, and distrust infected all human relations. Halbwachs systematized doubt about the customary frames for understanding the past and the customary symbols for commemorating it.
Still an object of distrust and struggle, commemoration is widely conceived as a mask concealing the interests of the powerful; yet, this conception has new meanings because it is part of a new cultural environment. The 1960s and 1970s were years of disillusionment resembling those through which Europe passed when Halbwachs was writing. It was an era in which ‘conflict theories’ of social order replaced ‘consensus theories,’ an era in which traditional accounts of the past, as of everything else, were repudiated. Three overlapping intellectual perspectives—multiculturalism, postmodernism, and hegemony theory—articulate the connection between the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and contemporary interest in the ‘construction’ of the past, and these three perspectives still animate the politics of commemoration. During the last decade of the century, however, a new research trend arose, not replacing but superimposing itself upon and insinuating itself into the theory of the politics of commemoration. The ‘New Structural Memory,’ as Kerwin Klein (2000) calls it, arose in the United States and Europe, emphasizing texts and symbols and de-emphasizing older notions of memory based on the beliefs, attachments, hatreds, and fears of individuals. Michael Schudson’s Watergate in American Memory (1992) was one of the first efforts to define explicitly
The New Structural Memory, suggesting that perception of the past is not, as has been regularly assumed, a property of individual minds but is rather social, located in and shaped by tangible and even countable things—books, records, holidays, statues, souvenirs—in short, a varied and ever-changing assemblage of mnemonic objects. ‘Structural memory’ has, in fact, less to do with structures than with the devices by which commemoration addresses the problem of meaning. Social scientists at the turn of the twenty-first century focus more intensely on this problem—commemoration as a source of cognitive and moral orientation, inspiration, consolation, and purpose—than ever before. The semiotics of commemoration is taking its place beside the politics of commemoration.
8. Conclusion
The meaning of commemorative symbols derives from their relationship to other symbols and symbolic patterns. Historians, it is true, also combine previously discrete units of knowledge to produce new under-standings; but they do so within a methodological framework that defines proper and improper uses of evidence. In many places (mainly but not only in non-Western nations), historians trained in critical historiography still accede to pressures to produce gratifying images of the past (Shils 1981, pp. 54–62), but even in these nations history and commemoration, like science and ideology, remain different lines of work (Geertz 1973, p. 231): the former combines evidence, however selective or biased, to justify belief; the latter combines symbols to sanctify belief.
Commemoration and history are different but not separate lines of work, which is why they must not be radically distinguished. Commemoration ‘requires the support of groups delimited in time and space’ while history remains relatively autonomous (Halbwachs [1950] 1980, p. 84); yet commemoration cannot always be dismissed as a distortion of history. Commemoration is based on some invention and much exaggeration, but it is also constrained by the historical record: materials of the ‘invented’ past include facts as well as biases and interests. In democratic societies, at least, where all commemorative interpretations are open to criticism, constructions of the past must be undertaken within the limits of reality—limits no one can ignore without cost (Schudson 1992, pp. 205–21). Since the commemorative process starts with historical reality and improves it by de-emphasizing the in-essential and emphasizing what is necessary to round out the ideal, commemorative networks do not deny history; they valuate history; they identify and lift morally significant events out of the historical continuum and set them apart from and above ordinary ones.
If the relevance of the past should erode, however, what would be the fate of commemoration? The relevance of the past has diminished during the late twentieth century on two levels. First, the individual’s connection to his or her society and its past is weakened by the discrediting of its metanarratives—its great legends and myths. Since the key feature of metanarratives is embodied in a plot structure that interprets events in a way that can be widely under-stood and shared, people require them, collectively and individually, to make sense of experience. ‘Of what great story is my life and death a part?’ is the question they ask in their effort to define themselves and the meaning of their lives.
Second, as the stories that society tells about itself are discredited, the orienting past tense of the individual’s life is negated. Thus, ‘pure and unrelated presents in time’ and momentous ‘psychohistorical dislocations’—erosion of the bond that once linked men and women to vital symbols of their cultural tradition— are at the core of contemporary temporality (Jameson 1984, pp. 480–1, Lifton 1993, pp. 14–17). That diminished engagement with the past distinguishes the postmodern era is a reasonable claim; however, the adjective ‘diminished’ must be underscored, for ‘diminishings’ are more difficult to describe and comprehend than disappearances. The role of commemoration is an ambiguous role defined by a ‘residual’ pattern of reverence and a ‘dominant’ pattern of affectively neutral admiration for the past and an ‘emergent’ pattern of indifference (Williams 1987). At question is whether the residual pattern is destined to disappear or whether it remains because it is not residual at all, but rather because it represents a fundamental requirement of society.
As residual patterns of belief often reflect efforts to renew ties to a past that emergent patterns challenge, we witness in the United States a great surge of monument building, beginning in the 1980s—the very decade in which revisionist history (conceding only the sins of the American narrative to be grand) matured. Thus, the millions who continue to admire historical achievements, seek information about them, and commemorate them, include those driven by currents of reaction against the erosion of the past and of tradition.
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