Research On Social Memory Of Southwest Associated University

The National Southwest Associated University(NSAU) was established during the period of the war against Japan. NSAU is well known around the world for training a many great talents under the condictions of shortage of facilities and difficult situation. Since the beginning of the 1980 s, NSAU became a hot topic due to its contemporary value for Chinese present higher education. Although the NSAU has disappeared for almost 70 years, it is never faded out from sight of the community, while remembered by kinds of social organizations in different means and ways.Since Maurice Halbwachs proposed the concept of collective memory, the "social" of the memory was gradually approved by scholars. Collective memory, social memory, cultural memory, etc, have become a popular term in social sciences and humanities fields. Sociology, anthropology, human geography, etc, are involved in the field of NSAU research, and provided a considerable amount of results with sustained attentions on NSAU for over 30 years, which provide a great deal of wealth of theories and methods for our study.In this paper, a insight into NSAU based on sociology and human geography was employed to further understand the heritage site of NSAU as the survey site. The methods of articipant observation, semi-structured interviews, questionnaires were used to collect a lot of first-hand information, supplemented by literature research,as well as literature researches to summarize the overall situation of NSAU social memory. Conclusions are drawn as following.Firstly, Kunming was transported from space to place to save a lot of memories for the teachers and students of NSAU during eight years. After the dissolution of NSAU, the heritage site of NSAU evolved into an important place to carry, build and disseminate the memory.Secondly, the situation of NSAU social memory, was mainly presented through the contents of memory, carrier and manner. NSAU social memory contents include: suffering memory, revolutionary memory, teaching and academic memory and so on. These social memory is carried in alumni, the heritage site of NSAU, and spreaded by the way of printing text, the mass media and other carriers, through word of mouth, memorial and other ways.Thirdly, there are a number of social memory subjects, Yunnan Normal University(YNU) is one of the more important. YNU has a collective memory of NSAU, this is part of NSAU social memory, but has its own characteristics. Firstly, there have been broken and out of touch, but ultimately continues today. Secondly, the collective memory of the expression and content show characteristics of the stage. Thirdly, the content of the collective memory have been constructed by teachers and students.