| Chapter : | Introduction |
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nation is bound not only by what its citizens remember in common, but also by what they have collectively forgotten: “L'essence d'une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses” (42; see also Candau 95). The nation needs its myths, at least in part, to mask the truths of its own past, which requires us to consider the question of reality within the concept of social representations (see Summers-Bremner 273–274).
Barker's work is infused with the fantastic and the uncanny, a recognition that human reality is heavily influenced by the irrational, and that human beings themselves, individually and in groups, can and do move through different, multiple, sometimes contradictory realities. Everyday reality, as it is created and maintained through representation, is also irrational, and what we call “real” has no basis in fact, as Dena E. Eber and Arthur G. Neal remind us:
Reification becomes a political question when human beings forget their collaborative role in the creation of reality, as though the social world were a thing in and of itself, a “dehumanized” world that must be accepted as it exists. This sets the stage for maintaining the status quo through appeals to myth, memory, tradition, and habit. It leads to the notion that people “are no longer understood as world-producing but as being, in their turn, products of the ‘nature of things’…That is, man is capable paradoxically of producing a reality which denies him” (Berger and Luckmann 106–107). It is within this reality of everyday life, a reality that has forgotten its fabricated origins, that ways-of-knowing and ways-of-being become conflated, and it is in association with such