Family-patrimonial social memory: temporal subsistence and social resources

Modern discourse devoted to collective memory considers sociality as its specific quality, structure, functionality. Family and ancestral memory combines the highest levels of social memory and individual human memory. The author defines the structural characteristics: volume, resource, historical depth, duration, pulses, borders, filters, social code. Understanding of the content of social codes gives an idea of the possible reflection of the social community on the events, provides a degree of success of management decisions. Community's mental resistance is the mismatch of the content of a social code that defines routine daily practice and forced self-reflection as a response to traumatic events or actions of government institutions. This leaves mnemonic traces on the fabric of the social and cultural reality breaking the harmony of the mnemonic community atmosphere. Mnemonic traces are preserved on the micro- and macro-levels and processed in a distorted perception of historical events by community members; it is given to subsequent generations as a social experience. This distortion is socially differentiated and is a social fact, admitting the existence of memory errors, myths, renovations. Due to its operation, it updates the past experience of generations and is a powerful resource for correction of the future. This causes demands for the formation of an adequate memory policy that excludes such strategies as the policy of reproach and oblivion. In this case, the mnemonic atmosphere as part of the community's spiritual environment can be protected from dirt, which allows family and ancestral memory to exercise their creative and preserving functions of transferring social experience to the younger generations. Temporality as an important characteristic of family and ancestral memory determines the attitude of the community to the past, the present collective reflection, which has a direct impact on the future represented by the hypothetical fates of the younger generation. Common experience of a traumatic situation, based on ''pure'' feelings, not contaminated by the demand of ''correct'' understanding of the historical situation gives a powerful resource for the viability of future generations from the experience of feelings, actual life strategies. Sensitive attitude to the past generates traumatic family scripts that modally show in the fate of the descendants, who are doomed to an unconscious reproduction of mostly unpleasant events embodied in the fate of the older generations. This deprives the common experience of successful prosperous future, reduces the viability of the younger generations. Moving from the micro-level to the levels of collective consciousness, family ancestral memory forms the fate of the community that, abandoning pure experiences, chooses the path of further disadvantage and social trauma. Reliance on knowledge of resource capabilities of family ancestral memory determines the success of policies and future well-being of the community.

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