Social Memory, Public Memory, and Marginality: The Case of the “Death in Migration”

Abstract

Memory is a source of ‘immunization’ for individuals (psycho-cognitive memory and biological immune system) and for communities (De Martino). We can consider culture as the memory of society. Particularly, the cultural memory of disasters plays a fundamental role. Ideally, it should help to reduce the vulnerability of societies to the risks of recurrence of natural/technological/social catastrophic events. However, memory is not an exact process, but a selective and reconstructive one (Bartlett). Furthermore, the memory of society is multiple and continuously exposed to the risk of distortions, interpretations, and manipulations. Social memory (Halbwachs) is the broader sphere of communicability that delimits the arena in which the different collective memories (of groups) compete for the relevance and plausibility of their own discourses. It will correspond, with good approximation, to the term “public memory”. In particular, the media and journalism play a very important function, as public memory is a memory of the public sphere (Habermas) and, somehow, the public sphere is itself memory (Jedlowski). This presentation aims to compare two social memories of a single catastrophic event in which a marginal social category was involved: migrants illegally crossing the Mediterranean Sea. The research focus concerns a watershed event of the recent migratory phenomenon: the Lampedusa shipwreck that took place on the 3^rd October 2013. The goal is to show how collective and public memory contrast each other. We will discuss two cultural and communicative processes located along the oppositional materialization/dematerialization axis. In the article we will reinterpret the evidence collected in the research carried out in 2014 on the Lampedusa shipwreck that took place on 3 October 2013 in order to reflect on the dynamics between different types of memories in the framework of the memory of disasters. We assume that they can be deeply distortive as they promote interrelated memory bias.