Politics, Civil Society and Participation: Media and Communications in a Transforming Environment

Title chapter: Communication, generation and cultural memory: Insights from fieldwork in Vietnam
Author: Christina Sanko
Keywords: cultural memory, communication repertoires, generation, Vietnam
Abstract: The chapter examines the complex relations of communication processes, generations and cultural memory in the socio-cultural setting of North Vietnam. It critically reviews present scholarly work in the flourishing, but scattered, field of memory research in communication and media studies, and discusses links to Mannheim’s sociological concept of generations. The theoretical concepts of generation and cultural memory demonstrate several commonalities along the lines of time and space, experiences, perceptions and mediation processes as determining dimensions. The chapter presents an exemplary case study of a family in Hanoi and probes a respondent-centred empirical approach to describe these relations in terms of memory-related communication repertoires. The repertoire-oriented analytical framework proved to be an efficient tool to elicit and merge perspectives on memory and communication practices from the research material. The findings indicate on which occasions such practices can interlink, and how they contribute to the communicative construction of cultural memory and generations in Vietnam against the backdrop of individual biographies and perceptions.
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