Possessions and the Sense of Past

Objects that stir our memories include souvenirs, photographs, heirlooms, antiques, monuments, and gifts. Such possessions are used mnemonically to create, store, and retrieve a sense of past that is instrumental in managing our identities. It would be however to assume that the processes involved are those of cognitive information storage and retrieval. For mementos evoke nostalgic, affective, and often fanciful links to the past rather than more documentary cognitive linkages. Material memory processes operate intentionally as well as unintentionally, at both individual and aggregate levels of identity, with systematic differences over the life course. Although they appear to be pervasive and inescapable, such processes have been the subject of very little prior research. The present chapter offers some redress to this fundamental omission. Possessions and the Sense of Past. About ACR Join ACR Conferences ACR Grants JACR ACR Films TCR Resources When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste: Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night, And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe, And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight: Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before. But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restored and sorrows end. (Shakespeare 1609/1961). In his thirtieth sonnet, Shakespeare foreshadows much of what I shall say about possessions and sense of past. From the opening courtroom metaphor until the final couplet, the mood is one of wistful recollection of former friends, lost loves, departed places, and unattained ambitions. But the final couplet, appropriately, closes the sonnet on a joyful note. Such is the bittersweet, sad but longing, nature of nostalgia (Belk 1990, Davis 1979, Starobinski 1966, Stewart 1984). And it is nostalgia that provides the initial key to understanding the use of possessions in providing a sense of past. NOSTALGIA AND MEMORY Before the development of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, intergenerational legacies in the form of family heirlooms and portraits were restricted to the upper class (Ames and Ayres 1985). In contemporary societies, the most pervasive establish a sense of past are snapshots. Snapshots have democratized self images and from the start of photography they have been available to nearly all social classes. They also ostensibly offer the possibility of accuracy in these images (Belk 1989). Quite unlike the veridical representations and documentary precision sought in scientific photographs however, the snapshot aims at another sort of truth that is more akin to poetry (Tibbetts 1981) or magic (Kaufmann 1980). The snapshots that fill our drawers, slide trays, and family albums do not present an honest portrait of our everyday lives. They are heavily biased selections of important moments involving family gatherings, holiday celebrations, vacation trips, new possessions, and such rites of passage as weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, and graduations. Our snapshots of these selected and posed gatherings are then further edited before entering our wallets, purses, picture frames, and family albums. It is these selective repositories that portray the selves we wish to preserve for the future -our own and that of our descendants (Boerdarn Martinius 1980, Chalfen 1987, Milgram 1977, Sontag 1977). In reflecting on these repositories filled with pictures of ourselves and loved ones, we are guided to the staged impression that the times depicted were always totally happy ones. Not only do the people appear happy, but the cars were new, the houses decorated, and the places visited were only the most scenic or historic landmarks. Only occasionally, as in the damage photos that residents of a recently flooded community showed me, are the momentous Limes inherently sad ones. Rather, it is the realization that these happy times lie in the past, that the people are older and perhaps dead or departed, that produces the nostalgic wistfulness captured in the sonnet. The associations and memories themselves are joyous, thanks largely to judicious editing. It is the fact that things past are past that tempers this joy and produces the bittersweet emotion of nostalgia. Among the photographs that were found to produce nostalgia for informants were such themes as my first car, the cars we left at home (for a traveling family), a truck we used to own, the children, our wedding. my parents, a dog that I used to have, our old house, and when we lived in Africa. These photos have in common, besides their pastries, their focus on persons, places, and objects as things experienced or possessed. That is, they share a tendency to make of the past a possession that can be savored, handled, treasured, and kept safe from loss. For the most part, this is done knowingly, so that these photographs can produce and reproduce the bittersweet emotion of nostalgia. That photographs, as well as other mementos, tend to provoke nostalgia-laden memories is both inescapable as well as largely invisible within the vast psychological literature on human memory. The major reason for this neglect is that the -overwhelming majority of memory research has been conducted in laboratory contexts with memory tasks divorced from daily life, friends, and family (see Neisser 1982). Ignored by all but a few (e.g., Neisser 1989) are those rare exceptions like Korosec-Serfaty’s field study (1974) which found that French attics acted as a family memory box, Bachelard’s (1964) analysis of the wardrobe as an intimate place for secret memories, and G. Stanley (1899) early study of his visits to the farms and houses of his childhood in order to examine the memories these places and their various artifacts might bring to mind: … through every room of which I slowly went alone, note book in hand, memories crowded very thickly with the opening of every new door, and seemed almost to affect the vividness of sense impressions. The old parlor paint never looked so white, the castellated stove, almost never used except on Thanksgiving Day, was still there; on this side lay my grandfather and here my aunt in their coffins; the old mirror with its wide frame still had the little crack in the comer, which was even better remembered than the mirror itself-, the smaller long narrow one with its gilt and black frame and the gaudy flowers painted in the glass of the upper part; the red table which still showed my ink spot on it; the old daguerreotypes; the carpet; wall paper; mahogany sofa; the same old black books … were well remembered images in this room unvisited for at least thirty years (p. 498). … several dress and bed quilt patterns; the little red and lettered cup; my penny banks; a curious old firkin; -of a good many of these I could write a brief treatise were I to characterize all the incidents and especially the feelings which they brought to mind (p. 506). While Hall has turned much of his nostalgic experience into words, it is not words but emotion-laden images which are the direct product of such memento-cued memory (Bartlett 1932). Such images are not necessarily visual, as Agee and Evans (194 1) found: All these odors as I have said are so combined into one that they are all and always present in balance, not at all heavy, yet so searching that all fabrics of bedding and clothes are saturated with them, and so clinging that they stand softly out of the fibers of newly laundered clothes. Some of their components are extremely ‘pleasant,’ some are ‘unpleasant’; their sum total has great nostalgic power (p. 155). Even the recent more ecological studies of memory have not considered such topics as souvenirs, snapshots, and heirlooms (Neisser 1988). The external memory aids that have been examined are those that aid prospective memory (e.g., shopping lists, reminders for what Casey (1987) calls “remembering-to” -rather than retrospective memory (Harris 1978/1982). No doubt many of us would prefer to think of ourselves in the rational utilitarian way in which most memory research portrays us. One woman (WF 60) first insisted that she had no strong attachments to sentimental possessions and that everything she owned could be replaced if it were lost. later in the interview she lamented the recent breakage of clay handprints made by her children in kindergarten, calling it a “casualty” and “a sentimental thing.” She again retreated to a utilitarian posture in saying that she is unconcerned with what happens to her things after she is dead. Except, she went on, she would want her children to keep her china and silver heirlooms, the walnut furniture she and all the family photographs. She also recalled that she is preparing a genealogical photo record of her family and that she has saved all of her children’s toys for the past 40 years.