Robin Wagner-Pacifici

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past

The problem of commemoration is an important aspect of the sociology of culture because it bears on the way society conceives its past. Current approaches to this problem draw on Émile Durkheim and emphasize the way commemorative objects celebrate societys former glories. This article on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial deals with the way society assimilates past events that are less than glorious and whose memory induces controversy instead of consensus. The Vietnam War differed from other wars because it was politically controversial and morally questionable and resulted in defeat; it resembled other wars because it called out in participants the traditional virtues of courage, self-sacrifice, and honor. The task of representing these contrasting aspects of the war in a single monument was framed by the tension between contrasting memorial genres. Focusing on the discursive field out of which the Vietnam Veterans Memorial emerged, this analysis shows how opposing social constituencies articulated the ambivalence attending memories of the Vietnam War. Ambivalence was expressed not only in the Vietnam Veterans Memorials design but also in the design of Vietnam War monuments later erected throughout the United States. These efforts to memorialize a divisive war, along with attempts in other nations to come to terms with the difficulties of their past, call into question Durkheims belief that moral unity is the ultimate object of commemoration. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and devices like it come into view not as symbols of solidarity but as structures that render more explicit, and more comprehensible, a nations conflicting conceptions of itself and its past.

Theorizing the Restlessness of Events1

This article offers a theoretical and methodological system for a sociological analysis of the restless nature of historical events. This system, political semiosis, is able to identify and assess the performative speech acts, the demonstrative orientational specifications, and the mimetic representations required to advance historical transformations. The features of political semiosis structure the flow of historical events by managing the specific media and generic forms that are the vehicles through which events take shape. Political semiosis provides a method for analyzing both the circulation and the materialization of events. The exemplary case of September 11 illuminates this approachs capabilities.

Memories in the making : The shapes of things that went

Studies of collective memory have paid insufficient attention to the diversity of its forms. This article addresses both the issue of forms of collective memory and the crucial relationship of forms to content. The claim of the article is that meaning emerges and is sustained through the dynamic interaction between the content of historical events and the forms of collective memory available to those intent on their preservation and public inscription. Both the “comic book,” Maus,and the Unified Team of the 1992 Winter Olympics provide opportunities to gauge the salience of generic conventionality or anomaly in collective memory projects, on the one hand, and the salience of generic endurance or impermanence on the other. Three fundamental aspects of collective memory—event, code, and translation—are clarified by this analytic framework.

Ontologies, methodologies, and new uses of Big Data in the social and cultural sciences:

In our Introduction to the Conceiving the Social with Big Data Special Issue of Big Data & Society, we survey the 18 contributions from scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and highlight several questions and themes that emerge within and across them. These emergent issues reflect the challenges, problems, and promises of working with Big Data to access and assess the social. They include puzzles about the locus and nature of human life, the nature of interpretation, the categorical constructions of individual entities and agents, the nature and relevance of contexts and temporalities, and the determinations of causality. As such, the Introduction reflects on the contributions along a series of binaries that capture the dualities and dynamisms of these themes: Life/Data; Mind/Machine; and Induction/Deduction.

Toward a computational hermeneutics

We describe some of the ways that the field of content analysis is being transformed in an Era of Big Data. We argue that content analysis, from its beginning, has been concerned with extracting the main meanings of a text and mapping those meanings onto the space of a textual corpus. In contrast, we suggest that the emergence of new styles of text mining tools is creating an opportunity to develop a different kind of content analysis that we describe as a computational hermeneutics. Here the goal is to go beyond a mapping of the main meaning of a text to mimic the kinds of questions and concerns that have traditionally been the focus of a hermeneutically grounded close reading, a reading that focuses on what Kenneth Burke described as the poetic meanings of a text. We illustrate this approach by referring to our own work concerning the rhetorical character of US National Security Strategy documents.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Narratives of Violence

. . . in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting (think of Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula), stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversations. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives . . . narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: It is simply there, like life itself. (1977, p. 79)

Prolegomena to a Paradigm: Narratives of Surrender

This article seeks to develop a paradigm for understanding the sociological meaning of narratives of surrender. Surrenders are boundary events in time and in space. Coming at the end of conflicts, surrenders are transitional and transformative occasions during which the emotional and symbolic landscapes of power are traced and highlighted. They mark the site of trauma and, depending on the manner in which they are accomplished, can alternately emphasize the degradation of the vanquished or the magnanimity of the victor. Surrenders are analyzed as simultaneously historical events, symbolic events, and political events.

Negotiation in the Aldo Moro Affair: The Suppressed Alternative in a Case of Symbolic Politics

I would like to thank the following people for their support and critical commentary during the preparation of this paper: Bruce BeIIingham, Harold Bershady, Fred Block, Charles Bosk, lliaurizio Pacifici, hiagali Sarfatti-Larson and the editorial board of Palitics f~ Society. ON March 16, 1978, Aldo Nloro was kidnapped by the Red Brigades in an ambush that killed his five bodyguards. At the time, Moro was the president of the Christian Democrat Party in Italy. He had been, in five separate postwar governments, Italy’s prime minister. On the day he

Temporal blindspots in Occupy Philadelphia

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the disjunctive temporalities of Occupy Philadelphia’s political constituencies. Drawing on both an ethnographic participant observation study of the Occupy Philadelphia movement and Philadelphia’s neoanarchist political communities, and on recent social scientific theorization of events, the paper argues that contradictory ideas about temporal timescales, momentum, duration, sequences, and rhythms of tactical and strategic action problematized interaction and coordination among movement participants. These points of coordinative disjuncture can be traced back to differences in participants’ ideas about prefigurative politics and strategic temporalities. Limning the temporal expectations and experiences of social movement participants, this paper contributes to the examination of both linkages and disjunctures between eventful temporalities experienced in moments of protest and in social movements with diverse timescales.

Response to reviewers of What is an event

Let me begin by thanking my book’s three readers for their astute, engaged and intellectually expansive reviews. I have learned from them and been prompted to think both about what the book may hav...