Archaeology of everyday life and social cognition

Abstract

This article is dedicated to the memory of Russian historian S.Obolenskaya. Her memoir about the Stalin era was one of the sources of my professional interest in social psychology. The following text is an attempt to understand the historical time, when «the stars of death were above us» (A.Akhmatova), from the perspective of social psychology in the scientific school founded by G.Andreeva. The article presents the analysis of everyday life, common sense knowledge and «banality of evil» (H.Arendt) in the paradigm of social cognition. Here are the key points of the research.1) Common sense knowledge is the active reflection of everyday life. 2) Social representation theory is the instrument of research of everyday life as the symbolic reality. 3) Social representations are the intersubjective forms of social cognition, which are reconstructed by the archaeological hermeneutics of phenomenology, psychoanalysis and discourse analysis. 4) The psychological archaeology of the everyday life transforms into the ethical and semiotic problem in the context of the historical and political violence, defined by the concept of collective trauma in modern social theory. 5) The problem of the symbolic representation of violence and trauma requires a paradigm shift in methodology (bridging social psychology and aesthetics). The last conclusion was predicted in the literature long before social theory and psychology (S.Obolenskaya, L.Ginzburg, N.Mandelstam).