Remembering Mum and Dad: Family History Making by Children of Eastern European Refugees

Abstract

This article explores the memory-making of descendants of post-war displaced persons from Eastern Europe now living in Australia. Their processes to uncover their parents’ wartime, refugee and settlement pasts are mediated through public and personal forums. Accordingly, this analysis is framed by a theory of post-memory, which considers the narrative effects of living in close proximity to (the sometimes concealed) stories of their parents’ displacement and family separation. This cohort search for a wider frame to articulate their parents’ pasts as Eastern European (mainly Polish and Latvian) refugees, which is lacking in public discussions around immigration to Australia. They complicate and in some cases undermine celebratory narratives of migration to Australia and of family settlement. On an intimate level, their parents’ experiences are deployed as a means to grapple with their alternative family structures and less-than-conventional childhoods within immigration centres or camps, which were influenced by discriminatory policy for non-British migrants, and single mothers in particular. When adopting a collective lens, these histories are projected onto wider historical understandings of the immigration scheme, which these descendants of displaced persons seek to complicate.     

The Nature of Social Pasts and Their Use as Foundations for Situated Action

In this paper social pasts are considered to be foundations of everyday interpersonal life, including everyday situated action. We distinguish social pasts from culture by noting that the former involves recognition of specific joint acts and social placements while the latter involves recognition of ties to acts and placements in general. We further distinguish shared pasts–which refer to specific and previous joint acts or social placements that interactors constructed together–from common pasts–which refer to specific and previous joint acts or social placements that interactors constructed with others. We assess the importance of using either common or shared pasts in the course of completing and simplifying complex and everyday transactions so as to create an appearance of routine-ness in relation to constructing these acts.     

“Such Hatred Has Never Flourished on Our Soil”: The Politics of Holocaust Memory in Turkey and Spain

In this article, we analyze local Holocaust Remembrance Day (HRD) ceremonies promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in Spain and Turkey. We investigate whether these memory practices have the potential to lead to a cosmopolitan engagement with the host countries’ own pasts. Focused on the same memorial events in highly contrasting and diverse national contexts, this article examines how supranational memory discourses are adopted and reinterpreted within the nation‐state framework. Our ethnographic observation of the commemorations and analysis of the speeches between 2011 and 2018 in Turkey and 2005 and 2018 in Spain show that the Spanish ceremony can be defined as porous and to a certain degree open to multivocality—given the participation of different mnemonic communities—while the Turkish one is sealed and does not allow for the possibility of disrupting its self‐congratulatory national memory narrative. Paradoxically, in both cases, especially in Turkey, the national legitimation profiles are bolstered by the universal frameworks that Holocaust memory provides. Even though memory travels transnationally, the nation‐state still is the most powerful translator of this past. This results in the rendition of pre‐Holocaust nostalgic pasts as a multicultural heaven where different groups, including the Jewish community, lived in harmony.     

ON SEMIOTICS AND SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM

The place of semiotics within symbolic interactionist thought is discussed. The works of Barthes and Baudrillard are examined in terms of their implications for (1) an interactionist theory of the cultural object and (2) an interpretation of consumer relations in the postmodern period. The narrative texts of advertisements for Jack Daniel's Whiskey ** 1 Grateful acknowledgment and appreciation is given to the Jack Daniel Distillery for permission to use their advertising text as it appears on their product.
and Dewar's White Label Scotch *** 2 Grateful acknowledgment and appreciation is given to Dewar's for permission to use their advertising profile of Gary Jobson.
are analyzed in terms of the political economy of the sign suggested by Baudrillard and Barthes. The implications of this analysis for the symbolic interactionist theory of the object and language are discussed. The subject matter that now confronts us supersedes symbolic interaction; rather it is the process surrounding the autonomization of signs; signs that stand for—and refer to—nothing but themselves.     

Responding to a Traumatic Event: Restoring Shared Pasts Within a Small Community

This paper describes reactions by regular patrons of a family restaurant to an armed robbery that occurred within its premises. One of the victims, the restaurant's co-manager, and these regulars participated in the construction of a narrative in order to restore their normal involvement within the community and to incorporate the profound disturbance of a robbery into the patrons' and manager's shared pasts. We discuss two different types of regulars who view this particular restaurant as a sacred place. In this context, we discuss particular discourse, appearance, and touch codes that support perceptions of the restaurant as sacred. To conclude, we discuss how regulars and management resolved this profound disturbance to establish shared histories in regard to the robbery and to restore communal relations within this restaurant.     

Recollection and Relocation in Immigration: Russian‐Jewish Immigrants “Normalize” Their Anti‐Semitic Experiences

This study conceptualizes the relationship between recollection of the past and relocation in the context of immigration. Combining symbolic interactionist and narrative paradigms, it explores how immigrants'representations of past experiences inform their identity construction and the process of entering the host society. Our interpretive analysis of personal narratives related spontaneously by eighty‐nine Russian‐Jewish immigrants in Israel and Germany reveals that they choose to “normalize” their anti‐Semitic experiences by representing them as secondary, expected, and “normal.” They do so via four narrating tactics of normalization: obscuring, self‐exclusion, vindication, and essentializing stigma. Each tactic devalues the cultural depiction (grand narrative) of anti‐Semitic experiences as transformative and traumatic. By normalizing their past, the immigrants deconstruct and resist the authority and moral commands of the national narrative they encounter in both societies. Putting forward normalization as an alternative interpretation, the immigrants claim ownership of their biography and cultural identity.     

Accounting for Trouble: Identity Negotiations in Qualitative Interviews with Alcoholics

This article combines a narrative approach on life histories, inspired by Paul Ricoeur, with the symbolic interactionist approaches of George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman. It focuses on “negotiations” in qualitative interviews with alcoholics, that is, narrative sequences in which the interviewee's line comes into conflict with the line of the interviewer. From a larger study of drinking careers among alcoholics in Copenhagen, two interviews are singled out for a more detailed analysis. The two interviewees did not live up to the (implicit) expectations of the study: the presumptions (a) that persons contacted at institutions for heavily addicted alcoholics do indeed identify themselves as alcoholics and (b) that alcoholics are interested in structuring their life histories according to the development of their drinking problems. By struggling to defend an alternative identity for themselves than the one the interviewer had in readiness for them, the interviewees laid bare the (problematic) therapeutic framework of the study.     

Interaction Theory in the Federal Republic of Germany: Development,Current Position,Themes, and Problems

After the end of World War II in West Germany, action and interaction theories and phenomenological sociology occupied only fringe positions. At the end of the 1960s, criticism of the prevalent neopositivistic research methodology, systems theory, and the rapidly spreading critical theory increased. This, coupled with the positive reception given symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology from the United States, caused interaction theories to flourish. Today they are among the four or five main schools of thought in West German sociology. In methodological work, the “interpretative” or “communicative” social research of the time developed the narrative interview and life history method. Group discussion and participant observation were also used for interactionist social research. A survey of the subjects interactionists have covered in their research shows how widely interaction theory has been applied. The main themes of current interaction theory are: (1) conceptualizing the difference between unpremeditated behavior and meaningful action, (2) formulating a theory that covers both “structure” and “action”, and (3) developing an interactionist macro theory. The future of interaction theory is analyzed and assessed optimistically.     

INFORMATION POOLS AND RACIALIZED NARRATIVE STRUCTURES

The concept of narrative structures is theorized as cultural master frames and is distinguished from the concept of story, which refers to anything reported that contains a plot. Drawing from the literature on African American folklore, the Church's Chicken story was presented to respondents as an instance of conspiracy and contamination narrative structures. Data show that story availability and believability are clearly race-based. The data ground a model of racialized narrative structures in which story content and story believability are conflated. It is argued that believability is not solely a function of storytelling performance and competence insofar as narrative structures prefigure believability. Racialized narrative structures are discussed as one element of the deep racial gulfs in America that co-exist with increases in cross-racial contact and friendship patterns.     

The Unlived Life Is Worth Examining: Nothings and Nobodies behind the Scenes

This paper explores how people talk about the things that have not happened in their lives. I argue that we can perform reverse biographical identity work upon our unmade selves by exploring the meanings of unlived, non-experience. Challenging one's own rehearsed life story is an act of narrative self-transgression, involving negative responsibility assumption. Drawing on my symbolic interactionist theory of “nothing,” I consider how negative social phenomena (no-things, no-bodies, and non-events) are interactively accomplished and retrospectively made sense of in personal accounts. Themes of lost opportunities, silence, invisibility, and emptiness emerge from an analysis of twenty-seven stories. These tales reveal a mixture of emotions: not only sadness, stigma, shame, and regret, but also relief, pride, acceptance, and gratitude. Narratives of nothing are often ambivalent in tone, reflecting the complexity of storied life behind the scenes.     

David R. Maines: Embedding Symbolic Interactionism at the Heart of Sociology

David R. Maines was a key founder of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and a champion of symbolic interactionist sociology. Maines fought against characterizations of symbolic interactionism as astructural and “subjectivist.” He was adamant that symbolic interactionism offered vital perspectives on the study of social structure and organization, and that it was compatible with a variety of research methods. He played a vital role in developing narrative sociology and bringing narrative scholarship from communication studies to sociological audiences. In this retrospective on his life and career, I detail what Maines saw as the five central features of symbolic interactionism: (1) interpretation and meaning, (2) communication, (3) temporality and process, (4) agency, and (5) dialectical thinking. I then examine four interrelated themes of Maines' sociological contributions: (1) temporality, (2) debunking myths about interactionism, (3) mesostructure, and (4) narrative sociology. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/YodjvXbo51Q .     

The Temporality of Emotion: Constructing Past Emotions

Symbolic interactionists have developed a rich literature on emotion that has advanced our understanding of the socially constructed nature of emotions and has provided a wealth of understanding about emotions and emotional life. Left unexplored, however, has been the temporal nature of emotion. Similarly, interactionists' renewed interest in time and temporality has not focused on emotion. In this article I describe the implicit leads in these two literatures that need to be pulled together to make the linkage clear. Drawing on the work defining emotions as social objects and on George Herbert Mead's theory of the past, I describe how emotional pasts are used as foundations for situated actions. I also explain how we use the emotional pasts in four areas: the individual level, individuals in interaction, collective behavior, and the social structural level. This linkage provides insights for understanding how we use emotional pasts when we construct and enact behavior. I argue that emotional pasts are important tools used in the interpretation and construction of present emotions, to situate selves and others, and to construct the social order.     

Confucian or Communist,Post‐Mao or Postmodern? Exploring the Narrative Identity Resources of Shanghai's Post‐80s Generation

Thirty years after the post‐Mao reforms, twenty years after the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, the next generation of “comrades” is emerging in China. They are called the Balinghou, or the “Post‐80s” generation, referring to the cohort born between 1980 and 1989. This article is taken from a broader study on the narrative resources that Shanghai's Post‐80s young adults call on to construct their identities, given the historical situation in which they live. Symbolic interactionism is useful for studying identity construction processes across cultural contexts, particularly in China where interactionist concepts have seen limited application to date. The discussion also explores the theoretical implications of structural elements that significantly alter the resources available for identity construction, such as the One Child Policy.     

Narrating political opportunities: explaining strategic adaptation in the climate movement

This article advances theory on social movements’ strategic adaptation to political opportunity structures by incorporating a narrative perspective. Our theory explains how people acquire and use knowledge about political opportunity structures through storytelling about the movement’s past, present, and imagined future. The discussion applies the theory in an ethnographic case study of the climate movement’s mobilization around the UN Climate Summit in Paris, 2015. This analysis demonstrates how a dominant narrative of defeat about the prior protest campaign in Copenhagen, 2009 shaped the strategizing process. While those who experienced Copenhagen as a success preferred strategic continuity, those who experienced defeat developed a “Copenhagen narrative” to advance strategic adaptation by projecting previously experienced threats and opportunities onto the Paris campaign. Yet by relying on a retrospective narrative, movement actors tended to overlook emerging political opportunities. We demonstrate that narrative analysis is a useful tool for understanding the link between structure and agency in social movements and other actors affected by (political) opportunity structures.

     

The Structure of Motives*

It is argued that decisions are processes that occur in the ordinary course of a human life and that actions taken in life, when they are not habitual, follow such decisions. Decisions are undertaken in the framework of socially validated identities and are accompanied by vocabularies of motive which serve to guide action as well as to justify them. How then are these decisions reached? These decisions are reached, it is argued, by using various objective structures and three cases—Astrology in Ceylon, the Cuban Missile crisis and the Azande Oracles are used to support this claim and to propose a dialectical and interactionist theory of the relationship between actor and motives. The availability of such objective structures allows an actor to use them to legitimize his lines of action as well as to justify them in any future challenges.     

Kafkaesque Bureaucracies as Natural Breaching Experiments: Interactional Failures and the Search for Institutional Agency

In accord with scholars who have suggested extending the symbolic interactionist perspective to investigate interactions with macrolevel structures, we argue that symbolic interactionism provides valuable tools to understand how bureaucratic breakdowns are interpreted by individuals. In this article, we use the experience of interacting with a Kafkaesque bureaucracy as a natural breaching experiment in order to outline the subjective effects of large‐scale institutional failure. In particular, we look at homeowners' interpretations of a flawed program initiated by the Obama administration to stem the tide of foreclosures. We conclude that persistent interaction failures with the bank divisions charged with modifying mortgages led frustrated and confused homeowners to question the nature of the bureaucratic interaction. This produced a search for a blame‐worthy agency and revealed the ways that agency was conceptualized in this complex and obscure institutional setting.     

In Celebration of Virginia Olesen's Uncanny Sociological Eye

Symbolic interactionism dwells deep in the intellectual bones of Ginnie Olesen, manifest in sundry ways across a long and ambitious academic career. Here, we briefly sketch her background and then trace her scholarship featuring her interactionist and feminist contributions in four main areas: professional socialization, women, health and healing studies, qualitative methods/feminist methodologies, and the sociology of emotions/interactionist social psychology of illness. We conclude with cherished memories.     

THEORY AND METHOD IN STATUS ATTAINMENT RESEARCH*

This paper analyzes a contradiction between theory and method in status attainment research. The authors argue that the Meadian social psychology adopted by the status attainment researchers is incompatible with causal modeling which they use as their principal analytic tool, because Mead's ideas are inconsistent with any method which assumes unidirectional causality. A symbolic interactionist interpretation of the process of status attainment is offered in place of the causal interpretation. The symbolic interactionist interpretation removes the contradiction between theory and method and is, in addition, shown to be compatible with current sociological knowledge of the process of education. Finally, it is argued that the symbolic interactionist interpretation is also compatible with American political language, while the causal interpretation is not, and that therefore the adoption of the symbolic interactionist interpretation would permit the findings of status attainment research to speak to the question of the degree of equality of opportunity in American society as that question is asked in American politics.     

Intergroup Encounters Between Jewish and Arab Students in Israel: Towards an interactionist approach1

The paper examines the relationship between self and society from an interactionist approach, within the context of intergroup encounters. One of the main dilemmas found in intergroup encounters is the tension that exists between the salience of the group identity versus personal and interpersonal dimensions. We suggest applying an interactionist approach to dealing with this debate, which emphasizes the situation in which the contact takes place. From this approach, the use of different types of intergroup encounters is discussed by comparing two types of workshops in which Jewish and Arab Israeli students met to work on the Israeli-Arab political conflict. The research questions are analyzed in regard to topics that are central to the Jewish-Arab conflict, such as the Holocaust and Al-Nakba (the Arab epithet for the 1948 war). This paper was written before the present crisis (2000/2002) in Jewish-Palestinian relations .     

Turning Points to Becoming a Tobacco Smoker: Smoking Initiation and Identity Change among Chinese Youth

In this study, we analyzed identity construction among young smokers in China, with three interconnected objectives: to theorize the turning points and career trajectory of smoking initiation; to account for their characteristics with interactionist processes; and to critically evaluate the applicability of classic typologies of identity change by Becker and Strauss. In-depth interviews with 24 late adolescents (ages 18–19) revealed a smoking initiation career path of four interconnected turning points, each characterized by interactionist processes. Smoker peers played a key role in facilitating overall career progression, and shame avoidance was crucial to their social dynamics. We also conclude that classic studies of turning points in general, and substance use specifically, are sufficiently broad and flexible to elucidate tobacco smoker identity construction in China, and facilitate a comparison of commonality and divergence among different “becoming” identities. The implications of these findings for tobacco control in China are discussed.