Memory as a network of affects : bridging the humanities and social sciences to understand the social spaces of storytelling

This chapter explores how various human and non-human agencies shape the ways in which three different social and cultural groups construct, ‘feel’, remember and relate to recent histories and remote pasts interconnectedly. Interconnectedness, in this sense, is a relationship of reciprocal growth and influence in which multiple agents (human and non-human) feed on each other and draw upon each other’s affordances to function as a system. Community is such an example. I especially draw on Pauketat’s idea that communities should be framed as a “quality of places, experiences, practices and human bodies” (2008: 249) – a holistic and multi-agency entity. The book’s broad themes of socialisation of space and ‘relatedness’ come into their own in my approach to these linked-up workings through the lens of more-than-representational frames – affect, memory and the imagination. These are networks of affects and memory that are profoundly socially-embedded and shifting in the social and political consciousness of groups as much as they are intensely felt emotionally and through the body. They are also closely linked to temporality and place, two intrinsic factors shaping affects, memories, and the imaginaries of individuals and communities.