ABSTRACT

Shame is sometimes difficult to fathom. When South Korean university students were recently asked to name the three events that “arouse in you as a citizen (rather than a private individual) a sense of dishonor, disgrace, shame, and/or remorse,” they listed, in order of frequency, Japanese colonial rule, the International Monetary Fund loan, the Korean War, wrongdoings of former presidents, and the collapse of the Sung Soo Bridge and Sam Poong Department Store. One of the investigators, an American, found the Korean response bizarre. Why should occupation by an overwhelmingly powerful neighbor and acceptance of a loan to support a troubled economy be deemed sources of shame rather than anger or distress? Why should an approximately equal proportion of respondents consider the crimes of individual politicians, the Korean War-which preserved the existence of their country, and the collapse of a bridge and department store, as instances of national disgrace? Ghanaians, like Koreans, find in economic dependency a source of disgrace; success in

international sports, a basis of national pride. But Ghanaians rarely mention colonial exploitation, and they take the enslavement of their ancestors more lightly than do Westerners. That the field of collective memory contains too few surprises like these is a sign of its

provincialism. In the Western stockpile of collective-memory concepts, nothing makes these findings comprehensible, let alone generalizable. For the past quarter-century, it is true, many scholars around the world have labored over the sources and consequences of national memory, but efforts to build a collective-memory discipline have been confined to the West. The present essay addresses this imbalance by using non-Western memories as tools for widening existing concepts, and, in so doing, moving collective memory scholarship intellectually-not just topically-into a global field.