Mémoire collective

La mémoire collective regroupe les 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) à attribuer une faculté psychologique individuelle à un groupe, comme une famille ou une nation. La mémoire collective est, selon Pierre Nora, . Ce concept fait l'objet de travaux dans de nombreuses disciplines, notamment la sociologie, l'histoire, la philosophie, l'anthropologie et la psychologie. Les travaux sur la mémoire collective ont été lancés par Maurice Halbwachs dans son ouvrage Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, publié en 1925. Dans son œuvre, Halbwachs a donné au concept de mémoire collective au moins deux sens distincts dont on peut retrouver l'influence jusque dans les travaux actuels. Dans le premier, la notion de mémoire collective renvoie à l'idée que la mémoire individuelle est systématiquement influencée par les cadres sociaux dans lesquels ell

Social Representations of Mexico City Historic Center: Heritage and Controversial Memories

Lesslie Astrid Herrera Quiroz

In this paper, we present the results of a research project that deals with the controversial memories of historic urban landscapes that have been designated as World Heritage sites by UNESCO. We observe - through the study of social representations of Mexico City Historic Center - how the World Heritage label transforms the meanings and memories of such landscapes. In the first part of this paper, the concepts of social representations and collective memory, and the role of heritage in the marketing of cultural memories are discussed. The empirical research conducted in Mexico City Historic Center is presented in the latter part of the paper. The focus will be on the analysis of interviews applied by combining different techniques and analytic methods commonly used in social psychology and geography. Research results show that different layers of city memories coexist in the social representations of Mexico City Historic Center nowadays, and that the World Heritage site designation recognizes and gives value to old cultural memories that become products for touristic consumption. This makes collective memories of social actors' struggle to survive when their neighborhood was being transformed into an open museum.

JOHANNES KEPLER UNIV, INST PAEDAGOGIK & PSYCHOLOGIE2020

Collective Memory and Resistance: Visual explorations in the Historic Centre and Films of Mexico City

Lesslie Astrid Herrera Quiroz

Today, institutionalised discourses surrounding heritage have social and physical impacts, with the potential to lead to a break between inhabitants' collective memory of popular neighbourhoods, and their transforming territories. In this context, the action of dominant groups can lead, through oppression, manipulation or threat, to erasing inhabitantsâ memories and everyday artefacts. However, the place itself, the physical medium of identity and memory, both collective and individual, allows inhabitants to resist a series of violent changes which affect them permanently. Hence, this thesis explores the interaction between collective memory, urban landscape, films and resistance; particularly how certain spaces and spatial practices considered as popular places of memory resist the city's transformations. The research was conducted in the Historic Centre of Mexico City (HCMC) and considers this famous perimeter as a good laboratory for analysing memory struggles. Directly related to this "concrete city", the research focusses on a body of films produced in Mexico City between 1919 and 1995 by Mexican cinema and reveals another city, the "cinematographic city". Relying mainly on visual methods and qualitative analysis of films and interviews, I compare research results with other sources, notably from history and urbanism. This thesis considers that the films, while revealing a socially complex cinematographic city, are foremost a major expression of past popular culture, and that the participants' mental maps exposing the concrete city are present forms of social representations. These cities result from the multi-temporal construction of the urban, within which the montage of landscapes varies with the passage of time and the meaning of each change opposes or overlaps the others (in their spatial dimensions and their social and political significance). The thesis thus identifies different types of landscapes inscribed in this palimpsest that constitutes the territory of the HCMC, and proves that, although the meanings evolve with time, none of them completely disappears; on the contrary, they always coexist. Many places of memory exist: on the one hand, the spatial typologies attributed to popular groups, the "Profane Heritage", and on the other hand, spaces imposed by dominant power structures, the official history adopted by force by all the city's inhabitants. These places differ as much in their specific sociability as they do in the physical elements and formal qualities transmitted to the inhabitants. Thus a concordance appears between the characterisation of the past and the present. Even after their complete or partial disappearance from the tangible world, popular places of memory retain their ability to resurface, concretely or cinematically. Despite this, in the context of the most recent urban and architectural projects concerning the HCMC, all the places of memory, expecially those informally recognised by the population, are in danger of disappearing. This thesis shows that, faced with this programmed erasure, resistance is organised through a network of tactics that manifest in a silent way, hidden, as an essential part of everyday life. These tactics are spacialised in places of memory by means of particular devices which endure, allowing the poorest inhabitants to continue to create in the heart of the city and history the defence mechanisms of their memories - resistant memory, memory to resist.

EPFL2019

Collective Memory and Resistance: Visual explorations in the Historic Centre and Films of Mexico City

Lesslie Astrid Herrera Quiroz

EPFL2019

La mémoire et la frontière. Repenser le cimetière de Thônex dans un territoire périurbain

Social Representations of Mexico City Historic Center: Heritage and Controversial Memories

Collective Memory and Resistance: Visual explorations in the Historic Centre and Films of Mexico City

La mémoire et la frontière. Repenser le cimetière de Thônex dans un territoire périurbain

Collective Memory and Resistance: Visual explorations in the Historic Centre and Films of Mexico City

Social Representations of Mexico City Historic Center: Heritage and Controversial Memories