Succession and Change in the Sociocultural Use of Memory: Building-in the Past in Communicative Action

Abstract

The study of memory as a cultural phenomenon is for the most part focused on the intentional social organization of past experience. However, the past features in unintentional ways in how we conduct our lives in the changing modes of narrative, figurative representation and in the fashioning and collecting of cultural artefacts. This paper provides analysis that illustrates how we can study such ‘in-builtness’ of the past in the present if we examine how people orient to and use dilemmas of permanence and change in talk and text. The argument is that we can examine ways in which people take account of continuity and change in the communicative organization of their accounts. Two ways in which this is accomplished are discussed: first, in the way people make claims concerning the past in terms of whether their experience was incidental or intentional when claiming the salience of the past for present and future circumstances; second, in the way people establish trajectories of significance and participation in terms of experience as both individually and collectively relevant. This provides an approach to the way of approaching succession and change as in-built in the communicative use of the past in the present.