Integrating Collective Memory and Strategic Action: Socially Located Memories, Cultural Knowledge, and Muslim Rights Mobilization

• In Event: 3160 - Collective Behavior

Abstract

How do a diverse group of actors make a collective decision to act? Theories of action show that strategic decision-making is a cultural process in which mobilizing actors filter their perceptions of the political landscape and their imagined actions through shared interpretations of the social world, deciding on a strategy by anticipating what might happen. However, actors come to the table from different social locations, accessing different types of cultural knowledge to make sense of the relationship between past and present. Missing in theories of strategic action is an account of how these socially-located memories get invoked in group interactions, reshaped through the cultural knowledge that actors bring to the table, driving decision-making. Drawing on evidence from 40 focus groups with ~200 Muslim community leaders, organizers, and activists, I show that when actors are making sense of the present to decide how to act, they are drawing on memories, not just at the individual level in terms of things that happened to them personally but more centrally, on collective memories – the shared pools of dynamic cultural knowledge that constitute their social identities. As each actor draws on collective memories from their social location, they generate different feelings and perceptions of the issue at hand and subsequently, different strategic responses. However, this is also a dynamic process, and with new cultural knowledge, memories can transform.

Author

• Hajar Yazdiha, University of Southern California