Pieces of the Past

Abstract

Throughout this book we have explored how certain pieces of the past — personally made or inherited photographs, and recorded songs and music trailing their various associations of past times — are drawn upon and given meaning, value and significance in everyday life. These pieces of the past do not exist as isolated fragments somehow surviving over time, and do not operate on their own with no reference to each other. As mnemonic resources, they are arranged and used interchangeably in the common coinage of social encounter and exchange, as we look back and recall specific occasions, or as someone we once knew well is called to mind when a song from some distant decade is played on the radio. They may, at times, be found meaningful or given significance because of how they help us remember a particular situation or scene, a definite person or a general period, but their value and significance as vehicles or catalysts of memory also lies in the diverse ways in which they are, from a longer-term perspective, woven into the narratives we construct of the lives we have led, the narratives we share among the social groups we have been associated with, and the narratives that are assimilated into vernacular memory from across the varied range from local events to national and cross-national episodes and affairs.