Family victimization and memories of a geopolitically contentious past: variations by nation, ethnicity, and citizenship

• In Event: Collective Memory & Heritage

Abstract

We bring together two strands of sociological research: one emphasizing the links between collective memories of past events and current identities based on nation, ethnicity, and citizenship, the other focused on the role of direct family ties to participants in historical events in shaping variation among individuals in the present-day awareness, salience, and valence of those events. We do so by asking: do direct family ties to people victimized by the same past have different effects on present-day memories of that past across national, ethnic, and citizenship cleavages? We derive theoretical expectations for systematic variation in the effects of family victimization across identity categories situated within a present-day ecology of conflicts. We test these expectations by analyzing a survey of young adults conducted in Estonia and Russia in 2009, a time of heightened geopolitical conflict between the two countries driven, in part, by contention over representations of the Soviet past. Our latent class analysis of the rich set of questions about views related to the pro-Soviet geopolitical historical narrative promoted by the Russian government demonstrates considerable heterogeneity both within and across five identity groups defined by combinations of nationality, ethnicity, and citizenship. While nation, ethnicity, and class identities moderate the impact of family victimization on memory in theoretically intelligible ways, they do so incompletely (there is heterogeneity within each category) and interactively (in contrast to additive approaches prevalent in prior literature).

Authors

• Theodore P. Gerber, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Zheng Zhang, University of Wisconsin-Madison