Narratives and Social Memory from the Perspective of Social Representations of History

Resumo

Social representations theory strives to build the connective tissue between the methodologically individualist natural science epistemology of cognitive science and neuropsychology with the inter-subjective and/or social constructionist epistemology of the social sciences and humanities. This chapter describes how the study of social representations of history (SRH) has used quantitative methods to provide empirical building blocks that I) assist in the process of cumulative hermeneutic interpretation, and II) operationalize social representations in new and sophisticated ways as a symbolic interface between individuals and groups. I) SRHs can be treated as narrative where a sequence of events provides the plot, and figures and groups provide heroes and villains central to a story about the making of an ingroup. Different spatial configurations of representations of the prevalence of events and figures in world history from different countries provide different narrative inference potentials (i.e., ability to generate conjectures about groupbased narratives). They can be treated as points of dialogue rather than descriptive facts, employed in the full awareness that their meaning changes with context, but nonetheless signify some inter-subjective consensus worth talking through. II) Alternatively, along more quantitative lines of inquiry, Latent Class Analysis is described as a technique that can 1) describe the numerical prevalence of a given representation, while 2) mapping alternatives and positioning an individual precisely vis-à-vis these alternatives without relying on pre-existing social categories that can then 3) be mapped onto other systems, including institutional, relational, occupational, or demographic systems. The analysis of figures in SRH is described using data from around the world.