The city of Freiburg, and more specifically its Vauban district, is commonly used as an example of ‘best practice’ urban sustainable development. I’ve now had the chance to visit, seeing Philipp Späth, who guided me round Vauban, and architect Wolfgang Frey, who showed me some of his projects in the Rieselfeld area and the new Bahnstadt district of Heidelberg (further down the Rhine valley).
There are plenty of impressions and reflections I could share. But I just wanted to relay one set of thoughts here. This was a mini-pattern in the stories I heard about gaining stakeholders’ support for new ways of doing things – approaches which, for example, weren’t accommodated within existing regulations, or innovative financing and management models. The point of interest wasn’t that a particular group of actors had been persuaded of a scheme’s merits, but rather that this group ended up mobilising successful achievements as evidence of their own progressive and forward-looking thinking. And, in some cases, even remembering the idea as their own – when in fact they had initially opposed it.
This brought to mind a book I read over the summer: Remembering Satan, by journalist Lawrence Wright (1994). The subject matter is entirely unconnected. Wright explores the widespread panic about satanic child abuse in the USA which began in the late 1980s, and drew on suspected victims’ recollections which only surfaced during extended interviews. He notes that no concrete proof of the satanic abuse phenomenon has ever been discovered. The point of connection, then, is around false memories – or rather, that it’s unhelpful to think about memory as being “like videotape” (p.199). Instead, memory is “reconstructive…it continually recreates itself, continually reinvents personal history” (p.199). He quotes Freud’s suggestion that:
“It may indeed by questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time.”
So I was thinking about the implications for certain types of research in my field, which involve a sort of ‘detective work’ using interviews to gain a critical angle on things like promotional materials or policy rhetoric – as if with the implicit ambition of accessing the ‘real’ story of how things came about. There’s a reality, of course, that humans tend to remember events selectively and in slightly different ways, and to patch this evidence together into narratives with quite divergent framings and chains of cause and effect. There’s never one uncontestable history – and even individual events repel definitive specification (Law, 2004). But what I’m thinking about is not so much the need to take all this multiplicity into account, and try at least to triangulate and so on. Rather, more specifically, I’m thinking about people’s tendency to take credit for successes when they narrate their own past in good faith – and to actually remember their own contributions to this success as matters of fact.
And this seems to link to Michael Herzfeld’s observation on the all-too-human tendency to self-aggrandise by positioning ourselves variously as skilful actors or faultless victims depending on the outcomes of events: “My successes are the result of my character…and my failures simply the effect of malign fate…, while your successes are attributable to a benevolent fate and your failures to ineradicable flaws in your character” (Herzfeld, 1987, p.139).
Freiburg im Breisgau, September 2022
References
Herzfeld, M. (1987) Anthropology Through the Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography at the Margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge
Wright, L. (1994) Remembering Satan: A Tragic Case of Recovered Memory. New York: Vintage Books.
robertcowley 