Colonial Williamsburg is the reconstructed capital of the colony of Virginia at the dawn of the American Revolution.1 It is one of the largest national heritage sites in the United States, and it is among the largest and most visited of the many similar twentieth-century recreations of the past that are by now a taken for granted, one might even say quintessential, element of the landscape of modernity.2 Like other similar sites, Colonial Williamsburg not only bills itself as a mimetic representation—an “authentic” replication—of an era in which diverse peoples were “becoming Americans,”3 it also claims that it is a place where contemporary citizens of the nation-state can reexperience a kind of personal identification with a national identity. Americans visit Colonial Williamsburg, immerse themselves in what the town has to offer, and emerge as somehow more American as a result.
As such, Colonial Williamsburg asserts that it turns “official history” into “collective memory”—to use the current terms of an increasingly interdisciplinary scholarly discourse. Yet, in many ways, the managers of the site treat personal memory as if it were anathema to history as they conceive it. People’s memories—of how the site “used to be,” of what they “know” about eighteenth-century America and its founding fathers—often get in the way of the site’s pedagogical mission. By the same token, those in charge of Colonial Williamsburg encourage their public to make a visit to the site a personally memorable experience. They do so, in part, because museum pedagogy grounded in what Huebner refers to as an ethical rationale demands a certain affective identification between the visitor and the site’s regime of knowledge. They do so, also, because they assume that visitors with fond memories of Colonial Williamsburg will become loyal customers—a vital constituency in the site’s ongoing efforts to maintain market share in the heritage and tourist industry.
The result, as we argue in the present chapter, is that Colonial Williamsburg tends to transform public history into private memory by collapsing the distance between the reconstructed past (the museum’s history lesson) and the visitor’s touristic or familial experience on the site. Visitors indeed remember their visits to Colonial Williamsburg, but their specific memories (as we sketch them below) would seem to have little to contribute to any “collective memory” of a “national history.”
Although one goal of this chapter is to challenge the terms of the conventional dichotomy between “history” and “memory,” let us begin by using the terms as they are often used. In conventional scholarly usage, “history” refers to the results of the work of professional historians, distinguished from “memory,” the layperson’s recounting of personally experienced events that historians may or may not come to consider “historical.” Elaborating on that distinction, we would say that history is for the most part not based on personal experience but on “data” derived above all from written sources, and further, that history is a narrative account of some past sequence of events constructed by a historian located at some considerable distance—a distance both personal and temporal—from the events or epoch being narrativized. Memory, by contrast, suggests a personal and direct connection between the person who remembers and the remembered events. Almost by definition, memory requires temporal absence combined with an imaging of personal presence. With memory, a person in the here and now remembers his or her participation in some past, there-and-then scene or event. That is, with memory, a rememberer represents himor herself as a figure or an actor or a character in a scene that is understood by the rememberer to be both temporally distanced (located in the past) and phenomenologically real (it “truly happened” and “I was there”). A final point of contrast between the two terms is that history is primarily associated with written evidence (so-called primary documents) and written results (history as book, as scholarly essay), while memory is thought of most frequently as an oral accounting.
In what follows, an outline of an ethnography of memory at Colonial Williamsburg, we explore memory making on the ground at Colonial Williamsburg. In doing so, we will discover the many (often unacknowledged) ways that individual memories become entangled with the site’s explicitly acknowledged project, one that echoes Schwab’s commonplaces of schooling: to teach an American history (based on a thorough reading of the best available documentation) to an American public. The entanglement of history and memory, as revealed in the ethnography, will lead to some final speculations about the problematic distinction between the two terms.
One of the most intriguing and significant features of Colonial Williamsburg is that it tells three stories about the past simultaneously. For us to write that Colonial Williamsburg “tells stories” is not to make an inadvertent analogy between what the site does as a purveyor of official history, on the one hand, and orality, on the other. With its hundreds of reconstructed and restored buildings filled with artifacts arranged in tableaux vivants, and its unending production of visual images (brochures, newsletters, glossy advertisements, coffee table books), Colonial Williamsburg is above all a stage upon which costumed employees talk to visitors about the eighteenth-century capital, about the twentieth-century reconstruction of the capital, and about history itself as a regime of knowledge. This talk—a blurred chorus of guided tours (with their more or less staged scripts), informal conversations, and formal lectures and performances—is what we refer to when we say the site tells stories. That oral storytelling is more often associated with memory than with history is only the first of the many entanglements we will discuss.
The featured story at Colonial Williamsburg is, of course, the official history lesson—that is, the information the museum conveys about eighteenth-century Williamsburg and, by extension, America’s colonial era. But there are two other stories at least as important as the first to our discussion of memory making. First, there is the story Colonial Williamsburg tells its public about its own founding. In the site’s origin story, early-twentieth-century Williamsburg is portrayed as a forgotten backwater—a casualty of modern capitalism, of the automobile, of transregional mobility. The once illustrious town’s drift into oblivion prompts a local but well-connected Episcopalian minister, the Reverend W. A. R. Goodwin, to cajole, without success, Henry Ford, and later, more successfully, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to bankroll the town’s architectural resurrection.4 Goodwin’s conversion of Rockefeller to his cause is assimilated into a larger counter-modern or romantic critique of industrial civilization: a good, even golden, past paved over by modernity’s juggernaut needs to be restored so as not to be forgotten, irretrievably lost.
In for-public-consumption versions of this origin story, Rockefeller’s motives are portrayed as intrinsically altruistic: the patron was a philanthropist whose financial contributions count as a farsighted patriotic sacrifice to the common good, even as a twentieth-century extension of the patriotism of Colonial Williamsburg’s revolutionary inhabitants. But Rockefeller’s various biographers suggest other motives on the part of the man who not only paid for the restoration but came to inhabit one of the town’s antebellum plantation households. In their analyses we get a sense of one of America’s plutocrats concerned with erasing popular memories—those of his family’s plebeian origins and of the taint “new money” had at the time of crude and brutal exploitation of American workers and the American public.5
Another crucial story the site tells concerns the nature of history itself. Here the primary images are of a place using cutting-edge research continuously to edit itself, to prune from its landscape inaccuracies and anachronisms, and to replace them with more accurate and truthful historical representations. Reconstructed pleasure gardens, researched and designed in the 1930s, are discovered in the 1970s to be rather more “colonial revival” than colonial, and they are then either ripped out and replanted or, at least, “interpreted” to the public as being inaccurate. Picket fences and “outbuildings,” well maintained since their construction in the 1930s, are determined in the 1980s to be too neat for the reality of eighteenth-century backyards, and their surfaces are subsequently less frequently painted to give the town a more accurate appearance. Another kind of anachronism has been apparent in the town’s inhabitants. From its beginnings, Colonial Williamsburg hired “hostesses”—tour guides— from among the local white gentry. These people, who cherished familial memories of an antebellum, slave-holding aristocracy, an aristocracy more closely tied to the South of the “lost cause” than to the continental United States, had to be taught to forget their personal connections to the site in favor of a more distanced historical understanding of eighteenth-century Williamsburg as a cradle of American nationhood.6 In addition, Colonial Williamsburg made often unsuccessful efforts to convince the local African-American community that the site’s urge to depict “servants” (in fact, they were slaves) for segregation-era white audiences would not cater to white prejudice.
In large measure, the site’s interactions with these local constituencies reveal its dominant orientation toward popular memory. In the beginning, both black and white local memories got in the way of the site’s pedagogical mission. Indeed, to this day, Colonial Williamsburg’s historical interpreters and managers constantly complain about the (“misguided”) resistance they face from public memory as they work to make the site more accurate, more true to the past. When they decide to change furnishings or wallpaper or paint color in several of the museum’s well-appointed exhibition buildings, visitors complain that they remember the houses differently, that the new colors are too bright and therefore not authentically old. Conversely, when the site tries to rusticate itself, to apply a patina of poverty or realistic sloppiness to exterior surfaces, visitors again complain because they remember a tidier and more bucolic village.
If historians at Colonial Williamsburg feel compelled to struggle against the recalcitrant memories of the site’s various publics, the institution’s marketing staff has generally encouraged the paying public to think of their sojourn at the site as memorable. Marketers recognize that Colonial Williamsburg depends on creating and maintaining a following—visitors who will return time and again, visitors who will instill in their children a taste for Colonial Williamsburg, visitors who, as they age and their incomes grow, remember the museum fondly and donate to it. For these reasons, when marketers communicate to this public, they are constantly using the word “memory” in interesting ways. Here, for example, is a letter (dated May 17, 1999) we received reminding us that our annual pass was about to expire. The letter begins, “Some of your fondest memories of the past year may have actually occurred in 1775—because last summer, you visited Colonial Williamsburg and immersed yourself in the 18th century.” After listing what we might enjoy, were we to visit in the upcoming summer, the letter stresses, “It will be a year to remember. So remember to renew now.”
In contrast to the historians, the marketers who wrote this promotional text celebrate and promote visitors’ memories. However, the content of memory— what is to be remembered—is left up to the imagination. “Memory” is simply another term for “experience,” the experience visitors have when they come to an attraction where, as is constantly repeated, history (whatever that may be) comes alive. In sum, Colonial Williamsburg’s marketers work at cross purposes to its historians. By packaging history as experience, they encourage precisely the kinds of anachronistic expectations the historians find so irksome. These historians, in turn, respond to such memories in ways typical of official or academic history. For many historians, memory is not to be trusted. It stands between the present and the past. In many ways, the job of historians is to destroy or at least transcend memory by creating history. This work, this duty, is a function of a pedagogical mission. It is also, as we now suggest, a function of the way Colonial Williamsburg legitimates itself in the educational tourism industry.
The institutionally mandated pedagogical mission of a museum like Colonial Williamsburg is to teach history. A museum’s connection to history, its possession of history, is crucial to the authority and prestige it wants to claim in relation to other types of institutions against which it must compete. Two of the most important of those competing institutions (from the perspective of those who work at and manage Colonial Williamsburg) are the university and the theme park. The theme park—epitomized by the sites of the Disney corporation—is both feared and admired by museums like Colonial Williamsburg. Theme parks are feared because they are aggressive and successful competitors for market share. That is, museums must compete for their audiences against all sorts of institutions which seek to entice the public to visit and thus to spend its leisure time—and the dollars that finance leisure time— within their premises. Competing in this market, history museums rely on the prestige that their possession of “real” history and their scholarly authority can generate. At Colonial Williamsburg, employees told us repeatedly that theme parks are not “real”—that the scenes and landscapes they construct are not factual because Disney and its ilk are not bound by any scientific rules of evidence or by historiographic standards of accuracy and documentation. Colonial Williamsburg and other history museums thus appeal to the public by saying, in effect, “our product differs from the products of Disney as fact differs from fantasy, history from myth. If you want the real thing instead of fakery, visit us, not Disney.”
Flanked on one side by theme parks, history museums are flanked on the other side by the university. In our research at Colonial Williamsburg, we found that historians working in history museums feel themselves to be looked down upon by historians in universities, and that such feelings are not unfounded. From the perspective of many scholars in the university, history museums are far too much like theme parks. That is, academic historians often see history museums at best as adjuncts to the “real” work of “serious” history ongoing in the academy, and at worst as popularizers, vulgarizers who have borrowed so much from Disney that they have become little more than theme parks.
History museums fight such prejudices and their own feeling of status inferiority by emphasizing the advantages of pedagogy based on artifacts that are either not used or not available, for the most part, in university teaching. As we have seen, to distinguish themselves from Disney, history museums claim possession of the “real thing,” with the emphasis on the word “real.” By contrast, to distinguish themselves from universities, history museums like Colonial Williamsburg claim possession of the “real thing” with the emphasis on the word “thing.” In a curiously anti-intellectual argument, they claim that museums specialize in an experiential, object-based kind of curriculum that is in some ways superior to learning processes based solely upon reading. “Come to the museum,” they say to potential visitors, “and experience history, three-dimensionally, personally, as you cannot experience it in schoolbooks.”
Let us note, provisionally, that within the frame of reference provided by the conventional definitions of history and memory, the idea of a three-dimensional, experiential approach to history is problematic. As we have seen, history is usually understood to be not personal experience but a distanced and considered recounting of past events based on ongoing scholarship. Constructing landscapes—“museumscapes”—intended to recreate, mimetically, a past historical scene collapses the distance between history and personal experience. Or, to put this another way, it leads visitors to such scenes to conflate their own experiences in the museum with historical experience or historical knowledge, as these are conventionally defined.
Despite the fact that history museums like Colonial Williamsburg stress to the public the three-dimensional, experiential aspects of the learning they offer, these museums insist that the knowledge they convey is, in fact, “historical” knowledge. That is, even though they claim that their medium of instruction is unique, they would not claim not to be doing history; rather, they say that they are doing good and legitimate history in a new way or in a way that differs pedagogically from the way history is done or taught in the academy. Moreover, much of the research that professional historians working in museums conduct is no different from the research that university-based scholars conduct: it is text-based. Thus much of the research that underpins the exhibits of a museum like Colonial Williamsburg involves archival research and the use of the data thus amassed to write historical narratives. Those narratives are then imposed on the tableaux of the public museum so that museum scenes and artifacts are used to tell the story historians have written (this statement must be modified in relation to archaeological research within museums, but that is not our topic here).
Thus historians at Colonial Williamsburg and other museums like it do not talk much about “memory” in the rhetoric they elaborate about their institutions. Colonial Williamsburg, in its own eyes, is a history museum, and both words,“history” and “museum,” are routinely used by the institution to describe itself. Indeed, its toll-free telephone number, established for the convenience of visitors and potential visitors, is 1-800-HISTORY. But if “memory” is all but absent from the stories Colonial Williamsburg tells about itself, it is central, as we shall see, to its marketing and the stories visitors tell abut the site.
As anyone who has studied museums on the ground knows, and as Elizabeth Vallance has indicated in an earlier chapter, it is notoriously difficult to learn about visitor responses to their museum experiences. At Colonial Williamsburg, our research focused on the institutional structure of the museum and on the relationship of that structure to the process of history making. Visitors were not our main concern, but we still found time to interview many dozens of visitors. To write this essay, we reviewed our visitor interview materials and found that they are full of memories, statements about memories, and interpretations of present-day museum visits (“present” referring to the moment of the interview) in terms of memories of past visits. There are also many assertions in these visitor interviews concerning the importance and meaning of “history.” Yet, on balance, we might argue that “memory” is more important in visitor responses than “history,” as the following examples suggest.
Often people’s memories of family visits to Colonial Williamsburg were explicitly associated with cherished objects purchased literally as souvenirs or remembrances. Sometimes they told us of objects they had purchased for themselves, objects that marked a memorable earlier period in their lives and thus accrued meaning over the years by connecting the rememberer to that past state of self:
I think it was the King’s Arms [Tavern] at that time, too. And I was so intrigued with this little saltcellar. So we went to one of the gift shops. And . . . we were very poor, so we scraped our pennies together so I could buy my saltcellar and my pepper shaker. And of course I treasure them. Since then, I’ve come back, and I have [bought] a lot of things—but nothing as meaningful as the little saltcellar and the pepper shaker.
Here, in what is one of the paradigmatic touring patterns at sites like Colonial Williamsburg (and one that such museums depend on and exploit), this woman is entranced by a museum object on display, then finds her way to the gift shop where, despite her poverty, she buys a replica of the displayed object. In other cases, treasured objects were given by elders to visitors when they were children. One woman told us, “My folks bought me this bracelet I don’t know how many years ago.” Such objects can trigger memories of deceased relatives and past relationships as well as of prior family trips to Colonial Williamsburg. Thus, through the objects it sells, the museum becomes a site of family memory.
Even without reference to purchased objects, many visitors experienced Colonial Williamsburg in terms of remembered family visits to the site—visits understood to be connected together as a series (“our first visit ten years ago” or “the last time we visited”) that might span three generations. Listen to “Bob,” an elderly teacher, explaining to us why he returned many times over the years to Colonial Williamsburg:
I’m not sure it’s history. Although in my case, my dad lived in Rochester [New York, the home of Eastman Kodak]. And he was fascinated by travel and by this place as it grew up ... So it’s been a part of the family, in that sense. George Eastman and Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Ford and those kinds of folks were part of the vocabulary—not the friendships or contacts, but in Rochester, with George Eastman, we had to watch what he was doing every day.
This is an unusually “dense” memory because it suggests not merely a family history of interest in and visits to Colonial Williamsburg, but a familial connectedness to some of the most famous of American plutocratic families. Many other visitors remembered their families’ connections to the museum, though without any explicit mention of people like the Rockefellers. The following statement is typical: “I’ve loved this place ever since my parents brought me down here when I was a young boy ... This is the kind of a place that seems to draw me back, the history of it and so forth.” Here “history” is almost an afterthought—an idea to which we will return.
If many visitors mentioned having been taken to Colonial Williamsburg by their parents or others, parents with children in tow talked about their visit to the museum in terms of providing their children with memories. They might say, for example, that they had brought their children to Colonial Williamsburg when the children were very young and that now, several years later, they were bringing them again to reinforce and add to the children’s memories from previous visits as well as to introduce them to history lessons that the children had been too young to assimilate on prior visits. One couple explained to us that they were visiting the museum explicitly to encourage their daughter to remember history lessons she’d learned but forgotten!
Mother: She [her thirteen-year-old daughter] has been here [before], it’s been about four years now, and so she’s seeing things she doesn’t remember at all. And she did her social studies project this year on Williamsburg.
Daughter: Mom, that was last year.
Mother: Yes, it was last year.
Interviewer: What did you write about?
Father: It was mostly—I don’t mean to answer for her—but it was mostly pictures . . . We had some 8 × 10s made so that they could be seen . . . and pamphlets from Colonial Williamsburg.
Mother: And of course she’s forgotten a lot of what she even did in the report now, and so we’re trying to point out: This is what you talked about!
Note how thoroughly history and memory are entwined here. The parents are concerned not simply that their daughter learn history; they seem to want to reconnect her to knowledge she once possessed but later forgot. They want her to remember what she once knew, perhaps as a way to reestablish a legitimate claim to the historical knowledge Colonial Williamsburg can convey— or, more generally, because they want to ensure the continuity of their fashioning of her as a culturally respectable person. The parents’ desires have the strength of Huebner’s ethical rationale. Another kind of remembered connection to the past, as mediated by the museum, concerns the association of Colonial Williamsburg scenes with a past understood in terms of biographical or familial time. In such cases, people use the museum to remember their own childhood or that of their ancestors. For example, we had a long conversation with the father and grandfather of a three-generation family that was touring the site. Their encounter with a museum interpreter playing the role of a slave led, as we questioned them, to a spirited, thoughtful disagreement between the younger and older man. Both men rejected slavery, but the younger man went on to mount a moral critique of colonial society and of the American founding fathers. The older man, by contrast, defended the founders’ reliance on slavery by saying that it was a necessary evil—necessary, that is, to the creation of a greater good, the country that became the United States of America. Significantly, the older man responded to the slaves’ misery in terms of his own remembered experience of childhood during the Great Depression:
When I was a kid growing up, I knew nothing but depressions . . . so I can relate to her [the slave] in many ways.... In the fall, she said she did certain things— I did certain things in the fall; I remember I used to go out and pick these wild grapes, which we made jelly from . . . I related to that big fire going [i.e., at the site where the slave spoke to them]. Let’s put some more wood . . . on it. So in many, many ways, I lived, I’m sure not as bad as they did, but I can compare— there’s a comparison there.
In this case, an elderly visitor compares his own childhood experiences directly to the experience of slavery portrayed at Colonial Williamsburg. We frequently spoke to younger people, especially children, who related Colonial Williamsburg scenes to the way they imagined the childhoods of their parents or grandparents. For example, a thirteen-year-old boy on a formal school visit to the museum explained, in the face of our persistent questioning, that the history taught at Colonial Williamsburg allowed him to understand stories his parents had told him about their childhood: “because you hear your parents saying, back then, I had to walk fifteen miles to school—so it’s interesting to . . . see what we were like ...back then, before modern technology.”
Without sketching further examples, we might begin to elaborate a typology of memory experiences and memory narratives at Colonial Williamsburg and museums like it. We might note, for instance, the presence or absence of memorialized consumer objects (of a personal or domestic nature), or we might chart the span and “direction” of memories (elders remembering their own past, elders bestowing memories on children, children remembering their elders’ past). But given limitations of space, we turn instead to a consideration of the entanglement of history and memory and its significance for the history/memory distinction we sketched at the outset.
Because “memory” is a central preoccupation in both vernacular discourse and scholarly studies, it must be critically scrutinized rather than unreflectively exported as a social science model.7 In writing this ethnographic sketch we are assuming that studies of the production of “memory” at sites such as Colonial Williamsburg are good places from which to begin such a critique. At the risk of oversimplifying the explosion of writing on the topic of “memory” as it relates to “history,” we would like to note an ongoing tendency to contrast the two terms in a specific way. Memory is associated with the popular and plebeian, history with the elite and official. In this conception, memory either lends itself to a certain academic populism or to academic elitism—that is, memory can be romanticized as a form of resistance against official historical discourses, or it can be exposed as misguided and naive.8
Our work at Colonial Williamsburg leads us to argue that the two terms, memory and history, are less easily dichotomized than standard usage suggests. For one thing, and here we are following Michael Lambek,9 both history and memory are culturally particular terms that refer to culturally particular genres.10 This means, first, that historical stories and memory stories are both narratives and, as such, one is not necessarily more objective than the other since both are shaped by certain generic conventions. This apparently banal observation has, we feel, several less-than-banal implications. For example, against those who argue that memory is the more subjective, and history the more objective, genre, we can counter that historians’ subjectivities are not at all irrelevant in the making of history, as anyone knows who has studied the ways cultural positioning and ideological inclinations influence historians’ professional work. On the other hand, to those who might see the subjective sources of memory—its “I was there” aspect—as a guarantor of a certain privileged objectivity, we can respond that memory is by definition always a retelling. It is a story or account in which the storyteller tells about herself or himself, but it is a story nonetheless, and thus, as many strands of twentieth-century psychology have argued, it is at once more than and less than “the whole story” or the objective truth. All of which is to say that although it may be useful to maintain a distinction between memory and history, that distinction ought not to be articulated as one of objectivism versus subjectivism.
We can make similar suggestions with respect to the oral/written distinction, a distinction publicly emphasized at history museums and one, moreover, which often maps one to one onto the memory/history distinction. As we mentioned briefly at the outset, sites like Colonial Williamsburg present a confusing picture of the relationship between oral and written knowledge and their transmission. To legitimate itself as a producer of historical knowledge, the site stresses the written, above all in the form of “documented” evidence. On the other hand, much—in fact, probably the far greater part—of teaching and learning occurs in an oral medium at the museum: frontline interpreters study historical documents and secondary sources, but they are largely “trained” in oral sessions by in-house staff; and those interpreters then teach the public almost exclusively via oral presentations. In pointing this out, we are not criticizing the museum’s reliance on orally transmitted knowledge. Rather, we are emphasizing the discrepancy between that all-pervasive reliance on the oral and the site’s public relations erasure of the oral in favor of written history.11
The memories of Colonial Williamsburg visitors suggest other ways to question any simple distinction between the oral and the written and between memory and history. For example, visitors to the museum may interpret the history presented there in terms of their memories of childhood or in terms of their parents’ storytelling about their own childhood. Or visitors may interpret the site in terms of what they can remember of a history they learned (probably with much oral, classroom transmission) as schoolchildren. We might even argue that the museum’s presentations unintentionally but nonetheless consistently collapse the distance between history and memory— a distance it otherwise seeks to preserve—precisely because its “product,” the three-dimensional “experiencing” of history, encourages the public to “remember” history as personal experience.
What, finally, of this museum’s, and most history museums’, claim to create collective memory and thus to serve a vital function in democratic societies? Is so-called collective memory a fair exchange for the local memories destroyed, as we suggested at the outset, when nonprofit corporations or government agencies take over historic buildings and districts and remake them as museums? An easy, obvious, yet not trivial response to such a question is that we are not at all sure what the phrase “collective memory” might mean. Strictly speaking, collectivities do not remember. If by the term we mean to indicate institutionally sanctioned and transmitted histories, histories that have enough social clout to reach masses of people, then we are talking about a phenomenon that is surely a hybrid one from the perspective of any neat history/memory distinction. For whatever it may be, collective memory (at least in the contemporary world) is fostered in socially complex interactions involving written documents and orally transmitted stories, occurring in a variety of contexts, from a sole individual reading a text, to a school group listening to a teacher tell historical stories, to a group of tourists experiencing three-dimensional but nonetheless documented history at places like Colonial Williamsburg and then telling stories about those experiences.
But putting aside such questions, and accepting “collective memory” as a useful term, it is still worth noting that neither the currently fashionable romanticization of memory against history, nor the more conventional dismissal of memory in favor of history, account for the types of memories we found among visitors on the ground at Colonial Williamsburg. With respect, in particular, to the romanticization of memory, it is often taken for granted that the antithesis of memory is not just history but “official”history. Official history is the photograph, as Milan Kundera notes12 out of which the purged politico has been inexpertly airbrushed. Official history erases messy or unpleasant truths in order to make useful propaganda out of the past. Memory, by contrast, is the weed that grows through the cracks in a public monument’s foundations. Memory is the joke people tell behind the bureaucrat’s back or while the politician is making his speech. Memory is what lies beneath the hastily covered over patch of earth. Memory contests and resists official history. And this is one reason why it has become so fascinating to current scholarship. Memory is what we can recover in order to give voice to the disenfranchised, the oppressed, and the silenced.
Yet in this essay we have suggested that memory, collective or individual, at Colonial Williamsburg is an unlikely candidate for such romanticization. Indeed, the memories people related to us were above all memories of consumer desire or memories of family history experienced as a comparative accounting of lifestyles.
Nevertheless, it might be said that such memories contest the site’s official mission and its official history, albeit in ironic ways. Thus such memories seem to be unaffected by the project of shaping collective memory that Colonial Williamsburg announces in its promotional rhetoric. In this rhetoric, Colonial Williamsburg is “a brick-and-timber embodiment of a revolution in the rights of man,” where visitors can “stride in step with patriots” and “walk in freedom’s footfalls.” This rhetoric, which usually borrows from the incandescent language of high Protestantism and links it to high-minded patriotism, justifies the existence of Colonial Williamsburg as a pilgrimage site in an American civil religion, the kind Robert Bellah so aptly described.13 By its own accounting, Colonial Williamsburg is a patriotic shrine. And its visitors should reflect on profound moral principles, renew their dedication to them, and leave the shrine better citizens. If nothing else, then, the kind of individual memorializing visitors do at Colonial Williamsburg suggests that the site’s claims about its capacity to shape public memory in predictable ways is an exaggeration.
Visitors’ memories call into question whatever claim the site can make that it has succeeded in its pedagogical mission to teach a history that is to some degree disruptive of complacency. Visitors tend if anything to domesticate the site when they turn it into a memorial. But the gap between the site’s claims and visitor memory is not because visitor memories are somehow separate from the site, somehow intrinsically intractable or at odds with official history. Rather, as we have suggested in this essay, such memories are as much a product of the site’s own unexamined pedagogic routines as of anything else. Indeed, in privileging visitor “experience” as a necessary pedagogic medium, Colonial Williamsburg turns public history into private memory.
1. The authors conducted twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork at Colonial Williamsburg between January 1990 and August 1991. Their research was supported by the Spencer Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the University of Virginia. The results are reported in Handler and Gable, The New History in an Old Museum (London: Duke University Press, 1997).
Colonial Williamsburg, first opened to the public in 1932, is today run by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, a nonprofit corporation that includes a for-profit component that manages the site’s hotels and restaurants. The museum itself occupies the restored portion of the city of Williamsburg, Virginia, a 173-acre “Historic Area” with over one hundred gardens, eighty-eight “original” buildings, an additional fifty major buildings, and a few hundred smaller “outbuildings” that have been reconstructed according to archaeological and documentary evidence. The foundation employs over three thousand people, and visitors number close to a million a year.
2. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
3. Colonial Williamsburg, Teaching History at Colonial Williamsburg (Williamsburg, VA.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1985), 2.
4. Philip Kopper, Colonial Williamsburg (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 139–55.
5. Peter Dobkin Hall, “The Empty Tomb: The Making of Dynastic Identity,” in Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth-Century America, ed. George Marcus and Peter Dobkin Hall, 255–348 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992).
6. Andrea Foster, “They’re Turning the Town All Upside Down”: The Community Identity of Williamsburg, Virginia, Before and After the Reconstruction (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1993), 122–67.
7. Eric Gable, “Review of How Societies Remember, by Paul Connerton,” American Ethnologist 19 (1992): 385–86; Marilyn Strathern, “Nostalgia and the New Genetics,” in Rhetorics of SelfMaking, ed. Deborah Battaglia, 109–13 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
8. There is a vast and growing literature on memory, both collective and individual. Although the present chapter concerns institutionalized history making and thus, to some extent, socalled collective memory, our primary ethnographic concern here is the personal memories of visitors to Colonial Williamsburg. In our analysis, we have drawn on the essays collected in Jonathan Boyarin, ed., Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) as well as in Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1996), though of course Freud is foundational (though perhaps unread these days) to any work on personal memory.
The literature on collective memory can be roughly divided among that which focuses on the invention of history and the politics of history making, on the one hand, and on memory as socially embedded. In the latter approach, typified by Paul Connerton in How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Maurice Halbwachs in On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), the term “memory” seems to us to stand in for terms like “the social” and “culture.” Indeed, we are suspicious of the way “memory” has become a fashionable term in the transdisciplinary world of cultural studies, broadly conceived. Studies that we found to mediate usefully between these various approaches to memory (and to history) include Thomas Abercrombie, Pathways of Memory and Power: Ethnography and History Among an Andean People (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998); Joanne Rappaport, Cumbe Reborn: An Andean Ethnography of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Richard Werbner, ed., Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power (London and New York: Zed Books, 1998).
9. Michael Lambek, “The Past Imperfect: Remembering as Moral Practice,” in Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, ed. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, 235–54.
10. Richard Parmentier, The Sacred Remains: Myth, History, and Polity in Belau (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 4–10.
11. Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
12. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. M. H. Hein (London: Penguin, 1981), 3.
13. Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).