Un bonito y corto artículo aparecido en Scientific american acerca de la gripe española.Muy ponderado y que reflexiona también sobre el hecho de la memoria colectiva. Es interesante conocer algo de esto por los paralelismos que se buscan con la actual pandemia y consecuencias.
Recordemos que causo entre 25 y 50 millones de muertes a nivel mundial, y nadie parece querer recordarlo seriamente… para pensar…
Roediger°III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis, defines collective memory as “how we remember ourselves as part of a group°… that forms our iden- tity.” Nations, political parties, religious communities and sports fandoms, he explains, weave events from their collec- tive past into a narrative that reinforces members’ shared sense of who they are
Wertsch notes that collective memory seems to depend largely on narratives with a clear beginning, middle and end. “If there’s one cognitive instru- ment that is the most ubiquitous, most natural°… it’s narrative,” he says. “Not all human cultures have arithmetic number systems, let alone calculus. But all human cultures use narratives.”
Wertsch is not so sure. “In a matter of a few years,” he says, “we might forget this.” He suspects that how the coronavirus pandem- ic ends—and whether it is followed by other pandemics—will determine how COVID-19 appears in a nation’s collective mem- ory. “It’s only by knowing the end,” Wertsch says, “that we know the meaning of the beginning and the middle.”
El peón caminero 