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Intergenerational Transmission, Discourse, and the Recent Past
Last year, I heard a report on the radio about a study of Czech deer that still avoided the Iron Curtain a quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War.1 Tracking 300 deer showed that the animals maintained the boundary even though the electric fences dividing the Czech–German border had been taken down. Despite the fact that the land is now a forested part of a national park with no barriers, the deer continue to stay on “their side” of the border. Since the life expectancy of deer is about 15 years, none of the deer now living would have encountered the physical barrier. How do they learn these boundaries? The scientists involved in the study believe that the fawns learn these boundaries and movement patterns by following their mothers. Thus, the territory remains the same for new generations, because of the reproduction of embodied practices. The story is a metaphor for the main goals of this book. I seek to reveal how intergenerational transmission of recent history occurs and how, in this process, youth construct a historical identity.
Intergenerational transmission of the past in human lives can explain why we can remember things we have not directly experienced. For example, how can we remember the Iron Curtain, if it disappeared before we were born? As members of a group, we learn to remember what is of concern to most members, or the nearest members. Collective memory2 is the space where intergenerational transmission operates. In communities shaped by exile, political persecution, state terrorism, and emigration, the transmission of memories of the past affects the construction of group identity and forms of participation. Disruptions in processes of intergenerational transmission can explain why younger generations do not feel as if they are part of a national group or engage in political processes. How do young people who did not live certain events learn about them? How does this learning process affect their understanding of themselves as historical beings? How do they connect their personal futures with their national or family’s pasts?
These are important questions when attempting an understanding of cultural reproduction and change. Continuity across generations enables groups to pass on social knowledge accumulated through time by the community. This type of sharing of knowledge enables communities to build on their pasts to construct a future, and simultaneously constructs a sense of belonging or membership that ensures individuals’ allegiance to the group. So, intergenerational transmission processes impact the sustainability of a group, as well as its identity. At the individual level, intergenerational transmission contributes to a sense of self as a historical being. Our personal trajectories are linked to those of larger historical processes. Understanding what makes us similar to and different from others contributes to the construction of a self-image. These dual processes of identification and differentiation are part of the identity construction that youth undergo, and help them understand their place in society, their family, or a particular interest group. However, in cases of conflictual and violent pasts where there is no consensus on what to pass on to younger generations, the legacy of the past becomes problematic.
Recent debates about the meaning of contested pasts – such as fascism in Europe, apartheid in South Africa, or state terrorism in Latin America – reveal the challenges of coming to terms with the past. Present debates about the past are part of the struggle to shape the future. Deciding how to remember these painful pasts, understanding the roles of different social actors in these events, and what these events mean for us today are situations that parents, politicians, and scholars have to deal with. Investigating how contested pasts are transmitted enables us to shift focus from the legitimacy of representations to the space in between generations in a process of meaning making. Focusing on how the discursive process of intergenerational transmission occurs foregrounds the coconstructed and intersubjective nature of what is passed on. Simultaneously, putting our lenses on younger generations who were not direct participants in the events, allows us to better understand their roles in shaping the cultural transmission processes. Which of the competing social memories is taken up by youth? How do they make meaning of the past? In what ways is the past (re)made by youth in these transmission processes?
In this book, I explore how a contested recent past is remembered by younger generations who were not direct participants in these events. The particular case investigates what Uruguayan teenagers know about the civil–military dictatorship (1973–85),3 what discourses come into play in shaping these views, and the role of discourse in intergenerational transmission.
Intergenerational transmission
The intergenerational transmission of the past is a communicative process (Welzer, 2010). This transmission is semiotically mediated and supported by an interpretive community (Wertsch, 2002). The transmission occurs in embodied and discursive practices. In this book, the focus is on discursive transmission. This process requires participants’ work and active engagement in meaning making, resulting in the transformation of discourses about the past (Kaës, 1996; Koselleck, 2001; Halbwachs, 1992; Welzer, 2011). “Discourses are made by the social and cultural interactions of many actual, individual speakers over a period of time” (Lemke, 1993: 2). The intersubjective nature of these processes requires conceptualizing discourse, not only as instantiated texts, but also as social practices. Discourses are produced, distributed, and consumed in social and cultural contexts.
Discourses that youth engage with shape their identity and their understanding of the recent past. These discourses about recent history occur in diverse contexts, including the home, the school, and in popular culture (Wineburg, Mosborg, Porat, and Duncan, 2007), and constitute social practices where different interpretive communities construct views of the past and value orientations towards it. These experiences enable youth to become socialized into specific relations of alliance or opposition with regards to competing discourses about the past.
Discourses about the past not only construct particular representations of events, participants, and circumstances, but also orientations towards these representations of the past. When there are competing discourses, individuals need to negotiate differences in order to construct a sense of self and other as members of groups. How do Uruguayan teenagers construct a sense of themselves as members of a national space and orient to political ideologies that imagine the future and the past of the nation in different ways? How is their understanding of the past affected by their participation in these social conversations?
This book intends to enrich our understanding of the transmission of traumatic pasts, contributing a discursive perspective. Adding to the growing scholarship on recent history from critical discourse studies (e.g., Anthonissen and Blommaert, 2007; Bietti, 2014; Flowerdew, 2010; Martin and Wodak, 2003; Oteíza, 2003; Richardson and Wodak, 2009; Schiffrin, 2001; Wodak and Richardson, 2013), this book provides a historiographical sociosemiotic perspective. This entails investigating how the past is produced and received across time and space. In addition, to this aim, from a critical perspective, the analysis integrates the exploration of uses of the past and its political effects.
Approaching the topic from a process perspective requires us to rethink traditional discourse analysis tools and focus on the circulation and reception of texts. This means expanding conceptual analytic tools such as intertextuality, recontextualization, and resemiotization to track the connections and constructions of meanings across time and space. These three related concepts refer to different types of transformations and circulations of discourses across time and space. Intertextuality refers to the links established between texts that precede or follow others in time. These links are established through shared and repeated semantic patternings (Lemke, 1995). Recontextualization is a linguistic process through which a text produced in a particular context of time and space is used in a different context (Bernstein, 1996, 2000). This process of delocation and relocation produces some forms of recognition that link the text back to its context of production, but simultaneously transform it to adapt to the new context. The concept of resemiotization (Iedema, 2001, 2003) complements the process of recontextualization by focusing on how resignification is affected by the change in semiotic mode. These three concepts are tools to historicize dimensions of ideational representation, axiological orientation, and semiotic organization. Through use of these concepts, we will be able to explore the processes of (re)appropriation of discourses about the recent past, and their reaccentuation (Voloshinov, 1973) and transformations when translated into other semiotic systems and contexts.
Additionally, a critical approach demands the exploration of discursive strategies as legitimation and identity construction resources. At the interpretation level, focusing on transmission as a situated discourse process indexes different meanings at various scales. The main contributions of this approach are to show how discourses of the past are transmitted and what semiotic resources are deployed to (re)construct the past. The actions and interpretations of a community produce the discourses about the past. This semiotic work not only represents the past, but also enacts orientations and organizes the respective meanings. The meanings are not in the texts, but in the complex processes through which semiotic relations between discourses and audiences/authors are established.
Learning about the recent past
Learning about the recent past is a socialization process realized through guided participation in situated activities which are mediated by semiotic systems (Rogoff, 1981; Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984; Lave and Wenger, 1991). This means that, in order to become members of a group, social actors need to participate in activities where they negotiate meaning, and adapt themselves or the activity to achieve social goals. Participating in the negotiation of meanings of the recent past connects youth and older generations, making the past relevant to the present.
Youth can make a substantial contribution to social change and cultural reproduction through their participation in social practices where the past is (re)constructed. Opportunities for such participation where they can make meaning of the past provide a space for developing legitimate ways of becoming members of the group. When learning about the past, youth might participate in a variety of social activities where they engage in semiotic work with more experienced members of the community. These activities could include: sharing family anecdotes, participating in a political event, attending a history class, talking with friends about the lyrics of a political song or even going on a school field trip to a museum. Research on the learning of recent history has shown that it occurs in diverse contexts including the home, community, school, and popular culture (Wineburg et al., 2007). For example, a growing number of studies have explored the role of family conversations in youth’s political socialization (George, 2013; Gordon, 2004; McDevitt and Chaffee, 2002; Ochs and Taylor, 1992). These studies have shown that teenagers take an active role in shaping the nature and direction of family political conversations. Researchers also found that discussions about news media and political events affect youth’s political interests (Dostie-Goulet, 2009). In the context of popular culture, work on the learning of history in museums has documented and revealed that conversations which visitors engage in shape their identities and their discipline-specific knowledge (Leinhardt and Gregg, 2002). Research on peer groups and siblings’ multiage socialization has also shown that practices such as play, storytelling, and gossip provide opportunities to learn community values and “appropriate” ways of interacting in local social groups (Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2011). All of these different contexts provide affordances to learn a culture while participating in it.
The process of socialization as a member of a group is culturally constructed and follows different trajectories according to the participants’ social and historical conditions. Memories of important political events and social changes are structured by age; specifically, early adolescence and early adulthood are the main periods in life which shape political memories (Schuman and Scott, 1989). Therefore, learning and knowing about a dictatorship are not the same for all youth. Not even those who live in the same neighborhood, attend the same school, or belong to the same family necessarily share the same representations or orientations to the past. Each individual enters the process in different moments that qualitatively affect their relations with meanings and affect their possibilities to negotiate, (re)construct, and understand the past (Wortham and Rhodes, 2012). The focus of this book is to understand the semiotic conditions that make possible the construction of meanings and what semiotic spaces are the ones recognized as relevant by youth themselves.
Generations and connections to the past
The construct of transmission as an intersubjective communicative process requires the specification of participants involved in the process. Generation, taken as a temporal unit, makes it possible to explore how influences from prevailing intellectual social and political circumstances are experienced by some individuals during their formative years and by others later in life (Manheim, 1928). Belonging to a generation means being subject to common influences (Manheim, 1928: 286). But this type of belonging is different from that of concrete social group membership. Being part of a generation means having a historical location, an identity that qualitatively influences forms of experience and thought in a limited section of the historical process (Manheim, 1928). The dialogue between generations permits the continuation and transmission of accumulated knowledge. However, youth can reorient to the culture’s heritage, forgetting and selecting from it. These different orientations to heritage enable one generation to distinguish itself from the previous one.
Members of a generation are similarly located in relation to the collective social process, but that does not mean they share an intellectual or practical orientation. “Youth experiencing the same concrete historical problems may be said to be part of the same actual generation; while those groups within the same actual generation which work up the material of their common experience in different specific ways, constitute separate generation-units” (Manheim, 1928: 304). Analyzing the different meanings an idea has for separate members of a generation can help understand to what degree a generation is divided into generation-units. For example, the meaning of the dictatorship will be totally different for conservative and liberal generation-units.
In generations impacted by painful social events such as the Holocaust or the Southern Cone dictatorships, studies have shown that the experience of time is altered, and this affects a generation’s capacity to distinguish itself from the older one. This produces a distortion of the chain of renewal and innovation between old and young (Prager, 2003). In these cases, the generational strain is avoided by adopting the past as it is experienced by older generations (Fried, 2004) or by adapting social memory to erase fractures in the social fabric (Welzer, 2010).
Understood through a sociocultural historical perspective informed by Vygotskian views, belonging to different generations entails that participants have different expertise. Language socialization studies have shown how experts socialize novices in practices involving parents and children or teachers and students (e.g., Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984). However, the socialization of novices affects experts also, as it is an apprenticeship for both participants (Pontecorvo, Fasulo, and Sterponi, 2001). These types of interactions support intersubjective sharing, which involves shared intentionality, joint attention, and joint commitments that produce a common ground (Tomasello and Carpenter, 2007).
Aleida Assman (2009, 2011) distinguishes two forms of transmission: intergenerational transmission and transgenerational transmission. Intergenerational transmission refers to transfer through the family of embodied experiences. Transgenerational transmission refers to national or cultural collective memory transmitted through symbolic systems. This type of transmission foregrounds the importance of spaces for collective remembrance where values that are important to the nation are passed on because they constitute what the nation has learned from particular historical events.
Marianne Hirsch (1997) coined the term “post-memory” to refer to the relationship between the memories of those who had experienced the Holocaust and the second generation of survivors who have fragmented and emotional connections to that past. Traumatic events such as the Holocaust pose a break in the transmission process that needs to be reconstituted. Post-memory strives to “reactivate” or “reembody” distant cultural and political social memory, reinvesting it with individual and familial forms of mediation (Hirsch, 2012). This affective investment ensures that memories are transmitted in powerful ways and constitute memories of a different nature. These second-order memories are not completely understood by those who inherit them. Post-memory is not an “identity position” but a “generational structure of transmission” (Hirsch, 2012); it refers to a type of relation between generations that produces a particular type of memory. Hirsch also makes a distinction between familial (identification with family members) and affiliative post-memory (identification with contemporaries) as different forms of identification in the transmission process.
Assman’s and Hirsch’s distinctions point to the importance of considering the context of transmission (family vs. culture, family vs. contemporaries, communicative vs. institutionalized), as well as the quality of what is transmitted (individual vs. group memories, protagonist vs. witness, cultural values vs. affective orientations, erased vs. marked, traumatic vs. “normal” experiences). However, the adoption of these categories that have been produced to describe particular experiences may not apply to other contexts (e.g., Faber, 2014).
Studies of the post-dictatorship generation in the Southern Cone (e.g., Fried, 2004, 2011; Kaiser, 2005; Levey, 2014; Llobet, 2015; Ros, 2012; Serpente, 2011) have shown the diversity of experiences for those within the second generation. On the one hand, the focus of some of this work has been documenting the transmission of memory from those who suffered state repression as a form of embodied communicative transmission in familial and contemporaries’ contexts (e.g., Fried and Levey’s work). But there has also been interest in how the “general population,” those not directly affected by the violence in the dictatorships, has appropriated this tra...
