Abstract
Toward the end of the classic (1942) movie Casablanca, Captain Louis Renault instructs his men to ‘round up the usual suspects’ after a Nazi general is discovered dead under dubious circumstances. In this essay I would like to round up the ‘unusual’ suspects in the question of collective memory. For a great many theoretical and methodological reasons, scholars from different disciplines examine the work of agents of memory as well as the form and content of commemoration during official mnemonic times and spaces. The role of the media in this endeavor, however, is surprisingly much less prevalent and developed (Meyers, 2007; Neiger, Zandberg, and Meyers, this volume), in many ways simply taken for granted and thus overlooked. I would like here to focus on what I call ‘banal commemoration’, highlighting the role played by the media as the major social domain in which and through which these non-intrusive pieces of knowledge play themselves out. I will use the struggle over the commemoration of Yitzhak Rabin to introduce, address, and illustrate the notion of banal commemoration. Before elaborating on this concept and its social significance, a few words are in order about the present case study and the relationship between collective memory and commemoration.
1. I would like to thank Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Oren Meyers, Motti Nieger, and Eyal Zandberg for their helpful comments and support. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Center for Cultural Sociology Workshop, Yale University, October 2009.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Alfon, D. (1999). ‘This Book Contains My Anger’, Ha’aretz, January 20, Section D, p. 1 (in Hebrew).
Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities. London: Verso.
Ben-Yehuda, N. (1997). ‘Political Assassination Events as a Cross-Cultural Form of Alternative Justice’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology 38: 25–47.
Billig, M. (1995). Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.
Dekel, I. (2009). ‘Ways of Looking: Observation and Transformation at the Holocaust Memorial, Berlin’, Memory Studies 2 (1): 71–86.
Edy, J.A. (1999). ‘Journalistic Uses of Collective Memory’, Journal of Communication 49 (2): 71–85.
Fine, G.A. (2001). Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept, and Controversial. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Globes (2003). ‘He Went to Sleep as the Chosen Head of the Association’, July 1, p. 19 (in Hebrew).
Gorbachev, M. (1998). ‘A Unique Event in World History’, Ma’ariv, April 10, Passover Supplement, p. 23 (in Hebrew).
Halbwachs, M. (1980/1950). The Collective Memory. New York: Harper & Row.
Halbwachs, M. (1992/1925). On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hoskins, A. (2003). ‘Signs of the Holocaust: Exhibiting Memory in a Mediated Age’, Media, Culture & Society 25: 7–22.
Hutton, P.H. (1993). History as an Art of Memory. Hanover: University Press of New England.
London, Y. (ed.) (1999). ‘100 Most Eminent Jews of the 20th Century’, Yediot Aharonot, April 20, Independence Day Supplement, pp. 22–3 (in Hebrew).
Meyers, O. (2007). ‘Memory in Journalism and the Memory of Journalism: Israeli Journalists and the Constructed Legacy of Haolam Hazeh’, Journal of Communication 57: 719–38.
Nora, P. (1989). ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26: 7–25.
Olick, J.K. (1999). ‘Collective Memory: The Two Cultures’, Sociological Theory 17(3): 1–16.
Olick, J.K. and Robbins, J. (1998). ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices’, Annual Review of Sociology 24: 105–40.
Olick, J.K., Vinitzky-Seroussi, V., and Levy, D. (eds.) (2011). The Collective Memory Reader. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ong, W.J. (1967). The Presence of the Word. New Haven: Yale University Press
Ong, W.J. (2002). Orality and Literacy. 2nd edition. London: Routledge.
Oren, A. (2010). ‘To Investigate Before, Not After’, Ha’aretz, June 6. http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/1172541.html?=1
Plotzker, S. (2001). ‘Bibi, Benyamin’, YNET, August 14. http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,2-1016270,00/html
Schudson, M. (1989). ‘The Present in the Past Versus the Past in the Present’, Communication 11: 105–13.
Schudson, M. (1992). Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget and Reconstruct our Past. New York: Basic Books.
Schudson, M. (1997). ‘Lives, Laws, and Language: Commemorative Versus Non-Commemorative Forms of Effective Public Memory’, Communication Review 2 (1): 3–17.
Schwartz, B. (1996). ‘Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II’, American Sociological Review 61: 908–27.
Schwartz, B. (1997). ‘Collective Memory and History’, Sociological Quarterly 38 (3): 469–96.
Schwartz, B. (2000). Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schwartz, B. (2001). ‘Commemorative Objects’. In Neil Smelser and Paul Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2267–72.
Schwartz, B. and Schuman, H. (2005). ‘History, Commemoration, and Belief: Abraham Lincoln in American Memory, 1945–2001’, American Sociological Review 70 (2): 183–203.
Shilon, A. (1998). ‘The Happy Winner is: Eyal Golan’, Zman Tel Aviv, September 8, pp. 46–51 (in Hebrew).
Shoval-Shaked, I. and Mordechai, A. (1998). ‘Rabin’s Jacket Sold to the Lady in the Second Row, and Now We Can Turn to Dayan’s Eyepatch’, Yediot Aharonot, February 6, Weekend Supplement, p. 24 (in Hebrew).
Vinitzky-Seroussi, V. (2002). ‘Commemorating a Difficult Past: Yitzhak Rabin’s Memorials’, American Sociological Review 67: 30–51.
Vinitzky-Seroussi, V. (2009). Yitzhak Rabin’s Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Wagner-Pacifici, R. and Schwartz, B. (1991). ‘The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past’, American Journal of Sociology 97: 376–420.
Winter, J. and Sivan, E. (eds.) (1999). War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zelizer, B. (1995). ‘Reading the Past Against the Grain: the Shape of Memory Studies’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12: 214–39.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2011 Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vinitzky-Seroussi, V. (2011). ‘Round Up the Unusual Suspects’: Banal Commemoration and the Role of the Media. In: Neiger, M., Meyers, O., Zandberg, E. (eds) On Media Memory. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307070_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307070_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-32499-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-30707-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)