Doodle Five

A diagram emergent from an interesting conversation with two colleagues, Jarem Sawatsky and Aküm Longchari, on the subject of time and the integrated framework. The diagram suggests a set of embedded circles that flow toward the past as a way of exploring a more holistic understanding of the settings of cycles of violent conflict.

This starts with a circle that includes recent volatile events, which lifts out the most visible expressions of the political, military, social, or economic conflicts. The recent events circle then phases into a wider sphere, which we are calling “lived history.” The idea of lived history tries to capture a more expansive view of time. It is a history that has been directly experienced within one’s lifetime, one that people have directly seen, touched, and tasted. A third, wider circle of time moves into the context of memory, or “remembered history.” This is history kept alive and present by what is remembered from a group’s topographic map of time, the landscape of social memory which shapes and forms a group’s collective identity. Finally, the deepest history is the “narrative.” Narrative creates the formative story of who we are as a people and a place.