How Nations Remember A Narrative Approach

How Nations Remember draws on multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to examine how a nation's account of the past shapes its actions in the present. National memory can underwrite noble aspirations, but the volume focuses largely on how it contributes to the negative tendencies of nationalism that give rise to confrontation. Narratives are taken as units of analysis for examining the psychological and cultural dimensions of remembering particular events and also for understanding the schematic codes and mental habits that underlie national memory more generally. In this account, narratives are approached as tools that shape the views of members of national communities to such an extent that they serve as co-authors of what people say and think. Drawing on illustrations from Russia, China, Georgia, the United States, and elsewhere, the book examines how "narrative templates," "narrative dialogism," and "privileged event narratives" shape nations' views of themselves and their relations with others. The volume concludes with a list of ways to manage the disputes that pit one national community against another.

James V. Wertsch studies language, thought, and culture, with a special focus on national memory and narratives. His publications include the authored volumes Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind (Harvard University Press, 1985), Voices of the Mind (Harvard University Press, 1991), Mind as Action (Oxford University Press, 1998), and Voices of Collective Remembering (Cambridge University Press, 2002), as well as edited volumes with Cambridge University Press on Vygotsky and memory studies. After finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, Wertsch was a postdoctoral fellow at the USSR Academy of Sciences and Moscow State University, where he studied with the neuropsychologist Alexander R. Luria. Wertsch has held faculty positions at Northwestern University, the University of California, San Diego, Clark University, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he has also been Vice Chancellor for International Affairs. He is a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Russian Academy of Education, and he holds honorary degrees from Linköping University and the University of Oslo. He is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and has served as a guest professor at the University of Oslo in Norway, Tsinghua University in Beijing, and at Fudan University in Shanghai.