Collective memory
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- Work cat.: 2006010437: The politics of memory in postwar Europe, 2006:CIP galley (collective memory is created through communications with other members of society; creates bonds of solidarity with other people; tends to focus on catastrophes and their related traumas (e.g., slavery, Fascism, World War II, Holocaust, genocide, and human rights abuses); collectively shared representations of the past can be changed over time; focus on social, political and cultural factors; based on the society and its inventory of signs and symbols; subsumes individual experiences under cultural schemes that make them comprehensible and therefore meaningful; evolve through conflict and consensus; other terms: collective remembrance, social memory, cultural memory, national memory, public memory, vernacular memory, countermemory)
- 2006010427: Stern, S.J. Battling for hearts and minds, 2006:CIP galley (emblematic memory: a socially influential framework of meaning drawn from experience; draws out the great truths of a traumatic social experience; memory struggles about traumatic times that affected or mobilized large numbers of people create a symbolic process that blurs the line between the social and the personal; personal experience has acquired value as cultural symbol or emblem; if people demonstrate the connection between their own lives and a memory framework by "performing" memory in the public domain (through street rallies, protests, pilgrimages, media interviews, or legal petitions, etc.) a cultural echo effect becomes visible and adds credibility)
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique WWW Home page, March 28, 2006:(the concept of collective memory stresses less the institutional and political uses of the past -- the memory "policies" and strategies -- than the socially shared representations of the past; can be defined as an interaction between the memory policies -- also referred to as "historical memory" -- and the recollections -- "common memory," of what has been experienced in common)
- Wikipedia, March 28, 2006(collective memory: term coined by Maurice Halbwachs; collective memory is shared, passed on and also constructed by the group, or modern society; the collective memory of a nation is represented in part by the memorials it chooses to erect)
- LC database, March 28, 2006(cultural memory; emblematic memory; historical memory; institutional memory; national memory; public memory; social memory)
Collective memory is the shared pool of memories, knowledge and information of a social group that is significantly associated with the group's identity. The English phrase "collective memory" and the equivalent French phrase "la mémoire collective" appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century. The philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs analyzed and advanced the concept of the collective memory in the book Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925). Collective memory can be constructed, shared, and passed on by large and small social groups. Examples of these groups can include nations, generations, communities, among others. Collective memory has been a topic of interest and research across a number of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, and anthropology.
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