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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

memory-texts, identity, Khmer Diaspora, displaced people, cultural frameworks

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Anthropology

Abstract

Displaced people present a problem for ethnographic research in that they generally lack stable socio-cultural contexts on which researchers rely for making empirical observations. This study shows how people produce memory-texts as a way of recontextualizing themselves in new or unstable social situations and establishes memory-texts as the empirical material necessary to produce analysis on displaced people. The discursive production of memory-texts is an activity displaced people engage in to recontextualize and stabilize themselves in shifting or new environments. Memory-texts are composed of the interface between defining moments in people’s lives and recent experiences and cultural frameworks. As an interdiscursive construct, memory-texts are not a pure reflection of historical events but rather a complex semiotic device created by bringing various elements of experience into discourse with one another to produce a unified text based on memorable experiences. This study demonstrates how people construct and use memory-texts in three ways. First, people combine different experiences into a unified mental text and then use that memory-based texts to evaluate categorize and generate meaning for experiences. Second, the combination of disparate experiences creates a formal pattern that is then projected to different social levels and situations in a kind of social fractal recursion, explaining how the construct of memory-texts forms the kind of flexible, context-relative identity observed in many refugees. Third, the memory-texts that successfully evaluate experiences and create identity can be adopted by group members from a similar background. Overtime, these memory-texts become highly rutinized tokens of group experience used in specific types of ways to evaluate group experiences and unify group identity.

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