Tailoring identities

Abstract

In the first part of this article, some consequences of telling truth about history in the Soviet Union and Russia are briefly described: crises of history teaching in schools, and ongoing ‘‘history wars’’ with the neighboring countries that have regained independence. In both cases, the problem is how to use historical knowledge in constructing identity narratives when the knowledge is contradictory. In this context, some issues analyzed in Carretero and Kriger’s and Tileagã’s work are discussed. Carretero and Kriger (2011) demonstrate that students in Argentina are largely unable to present a logically coherent story of the origins of their country. The difficulties the students experienced were related to the fact that the task they had to solve was highly artificial. They had to offer a high-level rational analysis of ideological texts which is not needed for the successful functioning of these texts. Tileagã’s (2011) paper is about how a former secret informer of the KGB-like organization in Communist Romania copes with the fact that his disgusting secret becomes public. In the coping process, the person makes use not only of his own memory, but also of his diaries as well as of the Securitate documents in the archives. All the three sources provide tools for reshaping identity and self-esteem, which can never be totally negative. Elaborating a typology of statements that people use in situations like this one would present further interest.