Generation and Small Group: Memory in Interactions

• In Event: 3551 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 13. Performing Social Identity

Abstract

The dominant approach to generational memory focuses on the generation as a social category for individual memories. This paper shifts the level of analysis to generational memory at group/community level. Generation as both a social-cognitive category and a cultural identity are embedded in, produced by, and reproduced by the constant flow of face-to-face interactions. The interactions among the group members are emergent processes of cultural creation, which may result in views and norms about the generational past different from public and individual memories. These emergent group processes inevitably lead to different ways of the groups to come to terms with the generational past. When individuals participate in group activities, their challenge is to reconcile their need for communal life and their difference from others in terms of their views of their personal and collective past. To meet the challenge, they create different “group styles” in presenting the past and dealing with relevant issues. In the group processes, memory entrepreneurs with various social features play a central role in shaping contents and forms of the group memories, but they have to negotiate with other group members in their interactions. The differentiation of the group styles indicates that “generation” is not a homogeneous whole but an amalgam of “generation units” which constitute a mosaic of their differential group responses to the same historical process. In this paper, I illustrate this theoretical approach in an ethnographic study of China’s “zhiqing” (sent-down youth, or educated youth) generation’s commemorative activities.

Author

• Bin Xu, Emory University