The Idiom Of Memory

Memory, or more appropriately, acts of memory, are no longer restricted to signify a matter of cognitive process. The onus lies on the anthropological approaches and studies to investigate the study of memory as a social action which, by and large, includes the discursive means people use to actively and effectively represent and remember the past. Memory, a part of the collective domain, has often been deployed as a social and cultural framework within which attention can be focused upon the buried, erased and occluded aspects of the past. However, memory as a cultural tool is most poignant and effective when personalized in the stories of individual experience. Memory, the capacity to remember, recreate, and frequently, reconstruct one’s

In the wake of burgeoning globalization, a remarkable proliferation in the discourses of the past has been dutifully accompanied by an unprecedented expansion of memory studies in the global academy. The broader realm of memory studies has expanded its lens to include social practices that mediate collective identities (especially cultural, ethnic and national formations) and historical consciousness. Anthropological approaches which are capable of linking the affective textures of personal experience with the expansive domain of collective histories elucidate on the essentially social nature of memory. However, as a proper enumeration of the tenets of memory studies is beyond the scope of this paper, the intentional refashioning of the dynamics of memory (which, here, denotes a cognitive process of selection, interpretation and re – elaboration) will be enumerated upon. One can assert that the past has a robust and a significant future. Situated acts of memory and sites of memory are inevitably evocative and significant in that they are distinguished by ideologies and expressions of emotion that convey the comprehensibility and salience of meaningful past events for persons recalling them. The warp and woof of the Munrovian ouevre participates in and constitutes acts of memory and remembrance.

Claiming Munro to be a writer who unfailingly attempts to re – create and revive the ambience and texture of the past, she posits that Munro uses photography as an analogous means of deftly accommodating and bringing together the past and the present and the photograph as a means of re – considering and re – evaluating the past (York 17). Here, the knowledge of the past is not for theorizing or a matter of verification as the whole gamut of meanings implicit in the layered textures of the past is incomprehensible to all. By the medium of the photograph, the reader is permitted an illusion, of sorts, of reality but is still reminded that it is an illusion. However, while prose fiction is indeed an illusion, it has a concrete base in the author’s remembered experiences. York further suggests that Munro’s creation of a story from this visual artefact alone involves, for her, a revival and re – creation of a past deeply personal in nature as well as an attempt to capture and immortalize the mortal and the transitory (York 42). Munro generously uses photographs (family photographs in particular) to study and emphasize the paradoxical dislocation, disjunction and discontinuity between the past and the present. In “Something I’ve been Meaning to Tell You,” Et is astonished at chancing upon a photograph of Char and realizes the superficial change present – day Char has undergone from the visage of “the