And once it is formed, it is difficult but still possible to integrate new information into the shared memory of the Saints, or the ideas that most Latter-day Saints would consider common knowledge. As noted above, Latter-day Saints widely share general knowledge of Joseph’s First Vision—religious confusion, James 1:5, Sacred Grove, prayer, two personages whose brightness and glory defied description—but have little or no knowledge of how they know this information. [9] James B. Allen, “Emergence of a Fundamental: The Expanding Role of Joseph Smith’s First Vision in Mormon Thought,” in Exploring the First Vision, ed. Memory, in all its guises, has been at the heart of historical inquiry over the past three decades. Fittingly, the University decided to place the statue in the atrium of the new Joseph Smith Building. These include the composition of the account in his Manuscript History by 1839 and Orson Pratt’s 1849 publication “Are the Father and the Son Two Distinct Persons?” This article was published in the Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star, and it was here that the term “first vision” first appears in the historical record. It might seem like there could be no downside to using visual arts as agents of collective-memory recursion. Until 2005, when the Church sponsored a new big-screen adaptation (again drawing upon the 1839 Manuscript History/Pearl of Great Price excerpt), Jacobs’s film was the sole motion-picture representation of the event. Collective memory refers to how groups remember their past. Some are basic such as shared lessons learned growing up, how to make a bed, take shower, or brush our hair. It was not a forgone conclusion that the Saints would form a shared memory of Joseph’s First Vision, nor inevitable that the one that formed was the only alternative that could have formed in the minds of most Latter-day Saints. The Galilee Baptists could appreciate the same painting and not share the collective memory it evokes in Latter-day Saints. The first of these to be completed, eventually known as the “Adams Chapel” in Richard Cowan’s native Los Angeles, featured the consolidated First Vision story in an ornate stained-glass window. The paintings, stained-glass windows, sculptures, and films that represent and tell the story of Joseph Smith’s First Vision are models of memory recursion, the use of consolidated memory to forge new memory. Pratt drew from the Manuscript History’s description of two divine personages—one the Father, the other his Beloved Son—as evidence for the Latter-day Saint conception of the Godhead. Individual memory is defined as a personal interpretation of an event from ones own life. It did not happen overnight, or even in the first decade of Church history. [17] Cowan and Homer, California Saints, 3. [15]“Christensen’s Grand Historical Exhibition,” L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. We ought to represent and share it in every appropriate way we can, but we also should work to maintain the integrity of the Saints’ shared memory of Joseph Smith’s First Vision. Understanding the psychological process of memory consolidation provides an avenue for examining the role of the First Vision and visual representations of it in the doctrine and culture of the Church today. A memory cell is an antigen-specific B or T lymphocyte that does not differentiate into effector cells during the primary immune response, but that can immediately become effector cells upon re-exposure to the same pathogen. Collective memories are important for societies; they influence attitudes, decisions, and approaches to problems. Indeed, the window was eventually moved from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City to serve as the centerpiece in the original Church History Museum installation, where it has both reflected and shaped the memory of the thousands upon thousands who have visited there and felt inspired by its message. 801-422-6975, 1839 Manuscript History Becomes Generalized Knowledge. Many think of long-term memory as a permanent “bank” within the brain. They convey large amounts of information efficiently and often with the emotion needed to forge meaningful, enduring memories. It was no sooner consolidated than the Saints put it to work in the recursion process, sharing it from generation to generation, using the most powerful visual and cinematic arts available, along with the historical records to rehearse the story vividly and with the emotion necessary for the memory to form and reform in successive generations. It took some sixty years from the vision itself for Latter-day Saints to consolidate the collective vision memory that is so widely shared today. They can convey meaning across cultures and language barriers. The goal of this chapter is to describe recollective memory and give an account of some of the characteristics of this form of human memory. “Then the bunny came out of the log,” she reported. During this time, the memory, which originally had varying possible versions and meanings, was interpreted and repeated over and over, especially by Orson Pratt and finally by John Taylor. Generations and Collective Memory synthesizes nearly three decades of research on—you guessed it—the relationship between generations (or birth cohort) and the collective memory of historical events. La notion de mémoire collective est issue des travaux de Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925) et La Mémoire collective (1950). [21] Henry B. Eyring, “Remarks Given at the Unveiling Ceremony of ‘The Vision,’” Religious Education History, Brigham Young University, 66–68. To them, presumably, the mural represented the peace and majesty of God’s creation, while to Latter-day Saints it represented the seminal event of their shared story. Inaccurate individual or collective memories are often formed quickly, without access to all the facts and details. any collection of memories passed from one generation to the next. We have to kinds of competing collective memory systems. The first is the shallow web. Joseph Smith had a remarkable vision, and through the processes of consolidation and recursion his story has become ours. At the outset, no visible force blatantly demanded which version of Joseph Smith’s vision would consolidate in the minds of the Saints and eventually canonize into their scripture, but Latter-day Saints would likely find it easy to believe in retrospect that the creation of this mutual memory was guided by inspiration. Immediately download the Collective memory summary, chapter-by-chapter analysis, book notes, essays, quotes, character descriptions, lesson plans, and more - everything you need for studying or teaching Collective memory. Once a memory arrives there, the mind stores it completely and indefinitely. Collective memory definition: the shared memories of a group, family, race, etc | Meaning, pronunciation, translations and examples These elements of the First Vision is generalized, unattributed knowledge. He is a first-rate scholar who is also an involved and gentle mentor. Over time the memory hardens, becoming a “truth” about the past that is hard to dislodge. [12] Richard L. Jensen and Richard G. Oman, C. C. A. Christensen, 1831–1912: Mormon Immigrant Artist, essay and catalog (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1984), 91. Many modern Saints can trace their first exposure to the vision, and perhaps even to the Church, to this very film adaptation, which rehearsed Joseph’s story visually, audibly, and with cinematic depictions of the vivid emotions that characterize the account in Joseph’s Manuscript History. Social scientists have studied collective memory for almost a century, but psychological analyses have only recently emerged. But according to Alin Coman, assistant professor of psychology and public affairs, there’s little research on the mechanics of how collective memories are formed. During the 2009 Greek sovereign debt crisis, political conflict erupted between the German and Greek governments; German car sales in Greece declined. Beginning with Joseph Smith but requiring a process that lasted until about 1880, the Latter-day Saints consolidated and shared a collective memory of Joseph’s vision. [2] Richard O. Cowan, interview by Steven C. Harper. The Israelites in this portion are slowly transitioning and transforming; from a newly formed people to a community aligned in and defined by national identity based on collective … These memory-recursion models remain important agents for remembering from generation to generation. [2] Richard remembers that at one point the painting had a caption written across the top in gold: “The Sacred Grove wherein Joseph Smith had his first vision.” When the Baptists acquired the building they didn’t keep the caption, for obvious reasons. I’m very pleased to acknowledge Elise Petersen as a coauthor, and I trust that Richard’s mentoring influence continues to be manifest in our collaboration on this chapter. Description . He believes that this particular collective memory created a negative view of the use of nuclear weapons, and has an enduring effect on the global public. The 1839 Manuscript History is the only vision account wherein Joseph Smith recalls the presence of two heavenly beings and identifies them as the Father and Son. We wish to thank Kendra Crandall Williamson for substantially editing and greatly improving this essay, and we also thank the editors and reviewers of this important volume for helping us refine this chapter. Life tables are used as evidence that a significant number of eyewitness to the earthly life of Jesus would still be alive when the Gospel were written. They found that individual recollections after the networked conversations were more similar than recollections from before the conversations. collective memory building in the context of China. The English phrase "collective memory" and the equivalent French phrase "la mémoire collective" appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century. (Courtesy of Wikicommons.). When the Saints rely too heavily on visual or cinematic arts as the catalysts of their memory, the problem of source amnesia can be compounded, largely because of suggestibility. Distortion can begin at a young age in the most impressionable minds. It is formed by millions of websites with easy to access information, created by individuals all over the world. These mechanisms can shape and reshape memory through a variety of means. During this stage, sensory information from the environment is stored for a very brief period of time, generally for no longer than a half-second for visual information and 3 or 4 seconds for auditory information. In individuals, the function of relating happens in the brain. Kenneth L. Alford and Richard E. Bennett (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center; Salt Lake City, 2015), 257–75. Collective memory research looks at how the past is remembered or represented in the present, how those representations change over time, and how political life is shaped by these forces. [13] Unfortunately, though twenty-two of the twenty-three original paintings survive today, the panorama’s first painting—Christensen’s First Vision—has not survived. The researchers tracked “mnemonic convergence,” or how many items were remembered or forgotten in common. During World War II, German troops occupying Greece carried out numerous massacres, often as reprisals for partisan attacks. collective memory, because the experience of “fresh contact” and “reflecting” has the effect that cannot be experienced again in one’s life afterwards. The Sacred Grove in Manchester, New York, where Joseph Smith spoke with God the Father and his Son Jesus Christ. Daniel L. Schacter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 220. The collective identity of a group are often expressed through the group’s cultures and traditions. This issue is worthy of investigation because it provides new insights into how collective memory is constructed and negotiated, considering that Wikipedia is an emerging place for collective memory building. Collective memories consolidate, by analogy, via the role of a person or persons memory scholars describe as a “selector or relater.”[4], As group members pay attention and relate emotionally to the choices made by the selector and relator, stable narratives form out of the variable parts of the social working memory. Many, it’s true, would cite Joseph’s history excerpted in the Pearl of Great Price, but few know where that text came from, or how, when, or why it was composed. Blight’s book is an intriguing work of history as well as a thorough investigation into the way collective memories are formed. [5] Joseph Smith authored four distinct accounts of his First Vision; the 1839 Manuscript History, excerpted in the Pearl of Great Price, is one of those four. [5] These and other selectors or relaters made choices that determined which memory items were available to the Saints to consolidate a new memory, decided how to relate those components together, and then rehearsed the memory among the Saints often enough for it to become general knowledge. That understanding came from the selection and relation of many elements, including the story as it was told by Joseph in 1839, published in 1842, excerpted in the Pearl of Great Price in 1851, and finally canonized by the Saints in 1880. Following that account closely, Christensen’s script notes Joseph’s reading of James 1:5 and his subsequent decision to pray in the woods; his experience with an unseen, evil power; his deliverance from that power by “a glorious light”; and his interaction with “two glorious personages,” identified as the Father and the Son.[14]. When individuals consolidate memory, they hold in their minds stable (already consolidated) and labile (not yet consolidated) components, and they combine these to construct more memory. Palfreyman identifies the woodcut in Rocky Mountain Saints as the earliest surviving First Vision image; Stenhouse, Rocky Mountain Saints, illustration prior to page 1. Moreover, the representations themselves—ranging from woodcuts and murals to films and coloring-book pages—reflect the extent of the 1839 narrative’s consolidation within the Saints’ collective memory. While several different models of memory have been proposed, the stage model of memory is often used to explain the basic structure and function of memory. America’s Collective Memory. But unlike Christensen’s comparatively primitive motion picture, the film combined sound and scenes more powerfully than ever before. [10] Samuel Ross Palfreyman identified the 1873 woodcut as the earliest vision image in “Mormon Roots in the American Forest: God, the Devil, and Angels in the Nineteenth-Century Hemlock-Hardwood Forest of New York” (student paper, Boston University, May 2012), 15–16; T. B. H. Stenhouse, The Rocky Mountain Saints: A Full and Complete History of the Mormons (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1873), illustration prior to page 1. Sensory memory is the earliest stage of memory. [23] Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “Seeing Beyond the Leaf,” Religious Educator 15, no. I could not have had a better one. a memory or memories shared or recollected by a group, as a community or culture. [1] See photograph from Forty-Eighth Street, PH 211, box 4, folder 26, Church History Library, Salt Lake City. Scholars studying these issues may not ... ‘‘a ‘collective memory’ ! Public memory is enshrined in memorials from the Holocaust memorial in Berlin to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. Memories can be interpreted through the lens of an individual, as well as the perspective of a group. Edited and translated by Lewis Coser. Even though this painting has been lost, Christensen’s script at least enables us to imagine how the painting visually represented Joseph’s experience as he told it in his 1839 Manuscript History. This literature has developed primarily outside of political science and thus International Relations, with most of the scholars coming from the humanities and other social sciences. E-mail Citation » Halbwachs opened the way for the sociology of memory with his argument that remembering is thoroughly social rather than psychological: our memories are formed and re-formed in social contexts, especially groups such as families, religions, and social classes. Memory is more mysterious, complex, and meaningful than we may think. The collective memory of a nation is represented in part by the memorials it chooses to erect. What are the implications of having a memory or history that clashes with the collective memory of others? He acted as a selector by choosing to begin his book with the story of Joseph’s vision as told in the Pearl of Great Price and by illustrating with the Adams Ward stained-glass window, and he acted as a relater by linking the vision to the story of Saints in California, showing that it was their genesis story, the seminal event of their faith. It movingly conveys the Saints’ collective memory of the vision. Several historical markers display the process of the Latter-day Saints’ consolidating a shared memory of Joseph Smith’s First Vision. Drawing on the now widely shared memory of Smith’s 1839 story, President Taylor told the story yet again: “The Father pointing to the Son said, ‘This is My Beloved Son in whom I am well pleased, Hear ye Him!’ Here, then, was a communication from the heavens made known unto man on the earth, and he at that time came into possession of a fact that no man knew in the world but he, and that is that God lived, for he had seen him, and that his Son Jesus Christ lived, for he also had seen him.” John Taylor, in Journal of Discourses (Latter-day Saints’ Book Depot, 1881), 21:65. The discourse will be structured in a manner which engages with the primary vectors of French memory regarding ‘les annes noires’. [18] Stewart Petersen, November 25, 2013, telephone interview by Elise Petersen. Thus this account became the dominant shaper of the Saints’ collective memory of the First Vision. Individual Memory and Collective Memory 23 first have difficulty re-establishing contact with him. Halbwachs prefers the term "recollection" to "memory" because of its obvious affinity to "collective" and to the way "collective memory" is formed, as though by means of collecting various blurred impressions (pictures) from various sources and molding them into a well-structured and stable memory. In fact, memory is not even a single thing but “an umbrella term under which congregate myriad phenomena.”[3] This essay is not about memory per se, but about the formation and reformation of a particular shared or collective memory among Latter-day Saints. Others are lesser known, like Richard Linford’s intriguing contemporary piece, Joseph Smith’s First Vision, completed in 2010. When I saw the invitation, I had a great desire to produce some work that would reflect Richard’s values and his influence on me. Once consolidated, the generalized knowledge can be efficiently and quickly accessed by the remembering group. Chicago: Univ. They helped create a connected network of memory, remarkably aiding millions of individuals in remembering a pivotal event that occurred nearly two hundred years ago. (Photo by Brent R. [11] The image, a woodcut by a J. Hoey, depicts a young Joseph at the moment the Father and Son reveal themselves to him. [6] The next marker is the 1851 publication of the Pearl of Great Price, including the excerpted Manuscript History story of the First Vision. ... 37% know that East Germany erected the Berlin Wall after the NATO alliance was formed, compared to 21% of younger adults and 28% of those 65 and older. Collective memory encompasses both the shared frameworks that shape and filter ostensibly “individual” or “personal” memories and representations of the past sui generis, including official texts, commemorative ceremonies, and physical symbols such as monuments and memorials. That is an uncommon combination that multiplies his contribution to the world. … Titled The Vision, the sculpture was commissioned by the BYU classes of 1945, 1947, 1955, and 1957. "We were surprised to find that the mechanism by which the memory is formed, is similar between bacteria and neurons, since these are evolutionary very distant systems." The discourse will be structured in a manner which engages with the primary vectors of French memory regarding ‘les annes noires’. Avard T. Fairbanks's sculpture "The Vision," pictured here, is located in the courtyard of the Joseph Smith Building at Brigham Young University. Elise Petersen was an undergraduate student majoring in history at Brigham Young University when this article was written. Individual memory is defined as a personal interpretation of an event from ones own life. As with the woodcut in Rocky Mountain Saints, Christensen’s visual representation, in combination with his verbal rehearsal (this time via lecture rather than written publication), is a manifestation of memory recursion. Finally, Halbwachs departs from a Durkheimian approach by adopting an instrumental presentist approach to collective memory. La mémoire collective fait référence aux représentations qu'un groupe partage de son passé.. S'il n'existe pas de consensus quant à la manière de la définir, l'expression « mémoire collective » consiste (au moins métaphoriquement [1]) à attribuer une faculté psychologique individuelle — c'est-à-dire la mémoire — à un groupe, comme une famille ou une nation [2]. [26], It is common to hear Latter-day Saints talk about, even testify of, elements of the vision that are suggested by artistic or cinematic representations rather than reported in Joseph’s memories. One way to see recursion occurring is to notice when visual representations of the vision began to appear and be used late in the nineteenth century, about the time the Saints’ collective memory consolidated and the 1839 account became scripture. Joseph Smith’s recorded memories of his vision, especially the one in his 1839 Manuscript History (excerpted and canonized in the Pearl of Great Price), is the most significant influence on how Latter-day Saints have formed a collective memory of his vision, but even after this, several key players have functioned as selectors and relaters, especially Apostles Franklin D. Richards (who selected this vision account for inclusion in the Pearl of Great Price) and Orson Pratt (who emphasized and taught about the vision more than anyone else in the formative period when the Latter-day Saints consolidated a collective memory of it). When two people talk about a piece of knowledge or past event, what they do and don’t discuss influences how each will remember it, says Coman. Research on collective memory is often based on theoretical concepts, the study of historical and archival sources, oral histories, case studies, interviews, surveys, and discourse analysis .