MEMORY EXPERIENCE
The forms and functions of memory
‘. . . whatever takes place has meaning because it changes into
memory’
(Milosz 2001)
Human ability to retain and recollect a fact, event, or person from memory
has been a topic of considerable interest to both scientists and artists for
a long time. Yet, taking into account varieties of personal remembering
(ranging from remembering an emotional feeling, through remembering
where I left my car keys, or how to run the spelling check on my computer,
or the date of the Battle of Hastings or how my daughter looks), it seems
almost impossible to ﬁnd a common underlying conceptualization of the
process. Moreover, as its task involves summarizing, condensing or rewriting
past events, memory is a complex but fallible system of storing information
(Baddeley 1989: 51). Because of this difﬁculty in analysing memory we
should view this faculty as some kind of active orientation towards the past,
as an act of ‘thinking of things in their absence’ (Warnock 1987: 12). By
referring to the process of remembering as ‘memory experience’ (Warnock
1987), we focus on the uniqueness of memory as a ‘dialogue with the past’
(Benjamin quoted in Lash 1999).
Memory has many forms and operates on many different levels, and the
things that we remember are of many different kinds and are remembered
for many different reasons. For example, there is the memory of how to ride
a bicycle, which has been deﬁned as a procedural memory; there is also
the memory of such facts as that bicycles have two wheels and sometimes
a bell, which has been deﬁned as a declarative or semantic memory
(Baddeley 1989: 35–46). Another type of memory is personal memory or
autobiographical memory, which is the way we tell others and ourselves the
story of our lives. Although autobiographical memories are not necessarily
accurate, they are ‘mostly congruent with one’s self knowledge, life themes,
or sense of self’ (Barclay and DeCooke 1988: 92). When talking about
cognitive memory, we refer to remembering the meaning of words and lines
of verse: ‘What this type of remembering requires is, not that the object of
memory be something that is past, but that the person who remembers that
thing must have met, experienced or learned of it in the past’ (Connerton
1989: 23). Yet another kind of memory is habit memory, which refers to our
capacity to reproduce a certain performance and which is an essential
ingredient in the successful and convincing performance of codes and rules.
Habit is the mode of inscribing the past in the present, as present. In this
case, memory denotes a habitual knowing that allows us to recall the signs
and skills we use in everyday life. This kind of memory, like all habits,
is sedimented in bodily postures, activities, techniques and gestures. Such
conceptualization of the process of remembering, where memory ‘gets
passed on in non-textual and non-cognitive ways’ (Connerton 1989: 102),
allows us to study social remembrance by focusing on the performance of
commemorative rituals.
Habit-memory differs from other types of memory because it brings the
past into the present by acting, while other kinds of memory retrieve the past
to the present by summoning the past as past – that is, by remembering it.
Remembering submits the past to a reﬂective awareness and it permits, by
highlighting the past’s difference to the present, the emergence of a form of
critical reﬂection and the formation of meaningful narrative sequences.
Although remembering, like habit, can be seen as a constant effort to maintain
and reconstruct societal stability it, unlike habit, is also a ‘highly active,
effortful process’ (Young 1988: 97). While remembering, we deliberately
and consciously recover the past, so whatever memories ‘route into consciousness,
they need to be organized into patterns so that they make some
kind of continuing sense in an ever-changing present’ (Young 1988: 97–8).
Hence, memory, as the knowing ordering or the narrative organization of
the past, observes rules and conventions of narrative. For example, successful
narratives about the past must have a beginning and an end, an interesting
storyline and impressive heroes. The fact that memorizing is not free of
social constraints and inﬂuences suggests the importance of another type of
memory – namely, collective or social memory, which is our main concern
here.
This book focuses on similarities between the ways in which people assign
meanings to their common memories, while adopting the intersubjectivist
approach which allows us to avoid both theories rooted in social determinism
(which subordinate individuals totally to a collectivity) and visions of an
individualistic, atomized social order (which deny the importance of communicative
relations between people and their social embeddedness). Its
10 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING
main assumption is that remembering, while being constructed from cultural
forms and constrained by our social context, is an individual mental
act. Therefore, our intersubjectivist explanation of how we remember also
acknowledges that – despite the fact memory is socially organized and mediated
– individual memory is never totally conventionalized and standardized.
The memories of people who have experienced a common event are
never identical because in each of them a concrete memory evokes different
associations and feelings. The relation between collective and individual
memory can be compared to the relation between language (langue)
and speech (parole), as formulated by Saussure (Funkenstein 1993: 5–9).
Language, as a collective product, is separated from the variety of uses to
which particular speech acts may be put; thus it is, like collective memory,
an idealized system. Variations in individual memories, which can be compared
to the scope of freedom with which we use language in particular
speech, reﬂect the degree to which a given culture permits conscious changes
and variations of the narrator in the contents, symbols and structures of
collective memory.
Underscoring the intersubjectivity of memory, the sociology of memory
asserts that the collective memory of a group is ‘quite different from the sum
total of the personal recollections of its various individual members, as it
includes only those that are commonly shared by all of them’ (Zerubavel
1997: 96). The collective memory, as the integration of various different
personal pasts into a single common past that all members of a community
come to remember collectively, can be illustrated by America’s collective
memory of the Vietnam War, that is more ‘than just an aggregate of all the
war-related recollections of individual Americans’ (Zerubavel 1997: 96).
Moreover, the prominent place of the Vietnam War (rather than, for
example, the Korean War) in the memories of Americans also suggests that
the division of the past into ‘memorable’ and ‘forgettable’ is a social convention,
as it is society that ensures what we remember, and how and when we
remember it.
Memory is social because every memory exists through its relation with
what has been shared with others: language, symbols, events, and social and
cultural contexts. Much research illustrates that memory is intersubjectively
constituted because it is based on language and on an external or internal
linguistic communication with signiﬁcant others (Paez et al. 1997: 155). The
way we remember is determined through the supra-individual cultural
construction of language, which in itself is the condition of the sharing of
memory, as a memory ‘can be social only if it is capable of being transmitted
and to be transmitted, a memory must ﬁrst be articulated’ (Fentress and
Wickham 1992: 47). As the past is made into story, memories are simpliﬁed
and ‘prepared, planned and rehearsed socially and individually’ (Schudson
1995: 359). Any retrospective narratives’ chance of entering the public
domain is socially structured: ‘Within the public domain, not only the
MEMORY EXPERIENCE 11
recording of the past but active re-working of the past is more likely to be
transmitted if it happens in high-prestige, socially consensual institutions
than if it happens at or beyond the edges of conventional organization’
(Schudson 1995: 359). That remembering is social in origin and inﬂuenced
by the dominant discourses is well illustrated by Zerubavel’s (1997: 12)
example of cognitive battles over memory, which are typically between
social ‘camps’ rather than simply between individuals. The fact that major
changes in the way we view the past usually correspond to major social
transformations that affect entire mnemonic communities, as shown in
many studies of changes in attitudes to the past in postcommunist countries
after the collapse of communism (Szacka 1997), also provides the evidence
that remembering is more than just a personal act and the nature of political
power can inﬂuence the content of our memories.
Memory is also social because remembering does not take place in a social
vacuum. We remember as members of social groups, and this means assuming
and internalizing the common traditions and social representation
shared by our collectivities. Memory cannot be removed from its social
context, since whenever we remember something – for example, our ﬁrst day
at university – we also recall the social circumstances in which the event took
place: the city, the university, friends and so on. Moreover, collective memory
constitutes shared social frameworks of individual recollections as we
share our memories with some people and not others, and – in turn – with
whom, for what purpose and when we remember, all of which contributes to
what we remember. Furthermore, memory is social because the act of
remembering is itself interactive, promoted by cultural artefacts and cues
employed for social purposes and even enacted by cooperative activity
(Schudson 1997).
In today’s societies, which ‘are no longer societies of memory’ (HervieuLeger
2000: 123), social memory refers not so much to living memory but to
organized cultural practices supplying ways of understanding the world, and
providing people with beliefs and opinions which guide their actions. As
modern societies suffer from amnesia, we witness the transformation of
living memory into institutionally shaped and sustained memory (Assmann
1995). Cultural memory, memory institutionalized through cultural means,
is ‘embodied in objectivations that store meaning in a concentrated manner’
(Heller 2001: 1031). As ‘memory that is shared outside the avenues of
formal historical discourse yet . . . is entangled with cultural products and
imbued with cultural meaning’ (Sturken 1997: 3), cultural memory refers to
people’s memories constructed from the cultural forms and to cultural forms
available for use by people to construct their relations to the past (Schudson
1995: 348). These cultural forms are distributed across social institutions
and cultural artefacts such as ﬁlms, monuments, statues, souvenirs and
so on. Cultural memory is also embodied in regularly repeated practices,
commemorations, ceremonies, festivals and rites. Since the individual
12 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING
‘piggybacks on the social and cultural practices of memory’, cultural
memory can exist independently of its carriers (Schudson 1995: 347). Cultural
memory, as memory constituted through cultural means, comes close
to Warburg’s concept of the ‘social memory’ as communicated in visual
imageries (Assmann 1995) – a notion which is popular mainly in the vast
literature concerning museums, monuments, sculpture and festival culture in
art and cultural history.
This approach, therefore, suggests that collective memory is not limited to
the past that is shared together but also includes a representation of the past
embodied in various cultural practices, especially in commemorative symbolism.
Collective memory is not only what people really remember through
their own experience, it also incorporates the constructed past which is
constitutive of the collectivity. For instance, although citizens of Quebec,
whose licence plates proudly state ‘I remember’, do not really remember the
French colonial state, this past is a crucial element of the national memory of
Quebec. Thus, the notion of collective memory refers both to a past that is
commonly shared and a past that is collectively commemorated. As the
word ‘commemorate’ derives from Latin com (together) and momorare (to
remember), it can be said that the past that is jointly remembered and the
past that is commonly shared are the crucial elements of collective memory
(Schwartz 2000: 9). The fact that a commemorated event is one invested
with extraordinary signiﬁcance and assigned a qualitatively distinct place
in a groups’ conception of the past prompts some writers to assert that
if ‘there is such a thing as social memory . . . we are likely to ﬁnd it in
commemorative ceremonies’ (Connerton 1989: 4).
Memory’s essential role in social life is connected with the fact that ‘collective
memory is part of culture’s meaning-making apparatus’ (Schwartz
2000: 17). Our need for meaning, or, in other words, for being incorporated
into something that transﬁgures individual existence, grants enormous
importance to collective memory since it ‘establishes an image of the world
so compelling as to render meaningful its deepest perplexities’ (Schwartz
2000: 17). In this way, collective memory not only reﬂects the past but also
shapes present reality by providing people with understandings and symbolic
frameworks that enable them to make sense of the world. Because the
past is frequently used as the mirror in which we search for an explanation
and remedy to our present-day problems, memory, is seen ‘as [a] cure to the
pathologies of modern life’ (Huyssen 1995: 6). By mediating and paring the
past and the present, as well as providing analogies to events of the present
in past events, collective memory is strategic in character and capable of
inﬂuencing the present. In other words, as we search for a means to impose a
meaningful order upon reality, we rely on memory for the provision of
symbolic representations and frames which can inﬂuence and organize both
our actions and our conception of ourselves. Thus ‘memory at once reﬂects,
programs, and frames the present’ (Schwartz 2000: 18).
MEMORY EXPERIENCE 13
Furthermore, the importance of memory lies in the identity that it shapes.
The content of memory is subject to time as it changes with every new
identity and every new present, so memory and temporality cannot be
detached from each other. As self-identity presumes memory and because
perception hinges upon remembered meanings, two processes are at work
here. On the one hand, collective memory allows people to have a certain
social identiﬁcation, both on an individual and a societal level. On the other,
following the old sociological assertion that the present inﬂuences the past,
it can be said that the reconstruction of the past always depends on presentday
identities and contexts. Memory can also play an important role as a
source of truth. This happens where political power heavily censors national
history and where oppressed nations have a profound deﬁcit of truth. Therefore,
they tend to look towards memory for authentic stories about their
past. This inseparability of the content and form of memory and the issue of
power is well illustrated by the situation in Soviet Latvia from 1940 to 1991,
where people’s memories conﬂicted with the ofﬁcial version of history
and therefore they acquired ‘a central importance of the preservation of
authenticity and truth’ (Skultans 1998: 28).
Social memory is also the crucial condition of people relations, since both
conﬂict and cooperation hinge upon it. Groups’ cooperative attitudes are the
result of their ability to critically evaluate their respective pasts in a way that
secures tolerance and removes barriers to mutual understanding. On the
other hand, memory which is used to close boundaries of ethnic, national or
other identities and which accepts some versions of the past as ‘the truth’ can
aggravate conﬂicts. For example, the central memory of the Serbs, the lost
Battle of Kosovo in 1389, symbolizes the permanent Muslim intention to
colonize them and therefore is one of the obstacles to harmonious relations
between Serbs and Muslims (Ray 1999). Another very important function of
social remembering, which is best expressed in Karl Deutsch’s remark that
‘memory is essential for any extended functioning of autonomy’ (quoted in
Hosking 1989: 119), emphasizes the role of memory as helping us to ensure
and improve the conditions of freedom by mastering our democratic institutions.
Without memory – that is, without the checking of, and reﬂection
upon, past records of institutions and public activities – we will have no
warnings about potential dangers to democratic structures and no opportunity
to gain a richer awareness of the repertoire of possible remedies.
Memory, understood as a set of complex practices which contribute to our
self-awareness, allows us to assess our potentialities and limits. ‘Without
memory’, writes Deutsch, ‘would-be self-steering organizations are apt to
drift with their environment’ because they are unable to reassess and
reformulate their rules and aims in the light of experience. This statement is
supported by many empirical studies which show that the lack of interest in
the past and the lack of knowledge of the past tend to be accompanied by
authoritarianism and utopian thinking, and that ‘the root of oppression is
14 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING
loss of memory’ (Gunn Allen 1999: 589). However, we need also to remember
that since the nineteenth century, ‘memory has seemed the mechanism
by which ideology materializes itself’ (Terdiman 1993: 33).
Memory, functioning as organized practices designed to ensure the reproduction
of social and political order, is a source of ‘factual’ material for
propaganda. Its task is to provide social groups or societies with identities
and a set of unifying beliefs and values from which objectives are derived for
political programmes and actions. Memory, when employed as a reservoir
of ofﬁcially sanctioned heroes and myths, can be seen as a broad and always
(to some degree) invented tradition that explains and justiﬁes the ends
and means of organized social action and provides people with beliefs and
opinions. This role of memory has been important since the end of the
eighteenth century, when the new nation states started to construct their
citizens’ national identities with commemoration rituals, marches, ceremonies,
festivals and the help of teachers, poets and painters (Hobsbawm
and Ranger 1983). Thus, collective memory is not just historical knowledge,
because it is experience, mediated by representation of the past, that enacts
and gives substance to a group’s identity. In order to understand the production
of social memory we need to examine how a group maintains
and cultivates a common memory. One way to start studying the social
formation of memory is to analyse social contexts in which memories are
embedded – groups that socialize us to what should be remembered and
what should be forgotten; so-called mnemonic communities.
The communities of memory
In many languages ‘memory stands, originally, not only for the mental act of
remembering but also for the objective continuity of one’s name – the name
of a person, a family, a tribe or a nation’ (Funkenstein 1993: 30). These
groups – the family, the ethnic group and the nation – are examples of the
main mnemonic communities which socialize us to what should be remembered
and what should be forgotten. They affect the ‘depth’ of our memory;
they regulate how far back we should remember, which part of the past
should be remembered, which events mark the beginning and which should
be forced out of our story. The process of our mnemonic socialization is an
important part of all groups’ general effort to incorporate new members.
As such it is ‘a subtle process that usually happens rather tacitly; listening to
a family member recount a shared experience, for example, implicitly
teaches one what is considered memorable and what one can actually forget’
(Zerubavel 1997: 87). Mnemonic communities, through introducing and
familiarizing new arrivals to their collective past, ensure that new members,
by identifying with the groups’ past, attain a required social identity. Since
we tend to remember what is familiar – because familiar facts ﬁt easily into
MEMORY EXPERIENCE 15
our mental structures, and therefore make sense to us – groups’ identities and
collective memory are continuously reinforced. Due to a group’s mnemonic
tradition, a particular cognitive bias marks every group’s remembering.
Typically, such a bias expresses some essential truth about the group and its
identity and equips the group with the emotional tone and style of its
remembering. For instance, the partition of Poland in the eighteenth century
gave that country an essential identity as ‘the Christ among nations: cruciﬁed
and recruciﬁed by foreign oppression’, and through this established
prism of victimhood many Poles still interpret their national fate.
Furthermore, a group’s memory is linked to places, ruins, landscapes,
monuments and urban architecture, which – as they are overlain with symbolic
associations to past events – play an important role in helping to preserve
group memory. Such sites, and also locations where a signiﬁcant event
is regularly celebrated and replayed, remain ‘concrete and distinct regardless
of whether they are mythological or historical’ (Heller 2001: 1031). The fact
that memories are often organized around places and objects suggests that
remembering is something that occurs in the world of things and involves
our senses. This was well understood by the ancient Greeks (see Chapter 2).
Halbwachs, on the other hand, brings to our attention the fact that there are
as many ways of representing space as there are groups and that each group
leaves its imprint on its place. Arguing that our recollections are located with
the help of landmarks that we always carry within ourselves, Halbwachs
observes that space is ‘a reality that endures’, thus we can understand how
we recapture the past only by understanding how it is preserved by our
physical surroundings ([1926] 1950: 84–8). In The Legendary Topography
of the Gospels in the Holy Land, Halbwachs (1941) demonstrates the working
of memory. He shows how Jews, Romans, Christians and Muslims
rewrote the history of Jerusalem by remodelling the space according to their
religious beliefs. Hence, ‘When one looks at the physiognomy of the holy
places in successive times, one ﬁnds the character of these groups inscribed’
(Halbwachs [1941] 1992: 235). The discovery of several strata of memory
superimposed on the Holy Land leads Halbwachs to argue that memory
imprints its effect on the topography and that each group cuts up space in
order to compose a ﬁxed framework within which to enclose and retrieve its
remembrance.
The link between landscape and memory is also present in Benjamin’s
(1968) viewing of the city as a repository of people’s memories. Seeing the
urban landscape as the battleground for the past, where the past remains
open and contestable, he argues that the city can be read as the topography
of a collective memory in which buildings are mnemonic symbols which
can reveal hidden and forgotten pasts. Although the city offers us ‘an
illusionary and deceptive vision of the past’ as many real histories are
buried and covered (Gilloch 1996: 13), new events or new encounters
can help us to uncover the city’s true memories. So, memory and the
16 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING
metropolis are interwoven as memory shapes and is in turn shaped by the
urban setting.
The nation is the main mnemonic community, for its continuity relies on
the vision of a suitable past and a believable future. In order to create a
required community’s history and destiny, which in turn can be used to form
the representation of the nation, the nation requires a usable past. Typically
the creation of such a past is the task of nationalist movements, which
propagate an ideology afﬁrming identiﬁcation with the nation state by
invoking shared memories (Gellner 1993). Such movements owe their success,
therefore, to memory, which they effectively employ to establish a sense
of continuity between generations. The main way to shape societal aspiration
for a shared destiny is by the rediscovery of memories of the ‘golden
age’ and a heroic past (Smith 1997). In addition, appeals ‘to the earliest
individual memories of childhood – turns of phrase, catches of song, sights
and smells – and [linking] them to the idea of the historical continuity of
people, its culture and land’ (Wrong 1994: 237), contributes signiﬁcantly to
the success of nationalist movements. However, as nations need to establish
their representation in the past, their memories are created in tandem with
forgetting; to remember everything could bring a threat to national cohesion
and self-image. Forgetting is a necessary component in the construction of
memory just as the writing of a historical narrative necessarily involves the
elimination of certain elements. The role of forgetting in the construction of
national identities has been noticed by Ernst Renan, who, in 1882, insisted
that the creation of a nation requires the creative use of past events. He
pointed out that, although nations could be characterized by ‘the possession
in common of a rich legacy of memories’, the essence of a nation is not only
that its members have many things in common, but also ‘that they have
forgotten some things’ (Renan [1882] 1990: 11). In order to ensure national
cohesion there is a need to forget events that represent a threat to unity and
remember heroes and glory days. Renan’s interpretation of collective memory
continues to exert considerable inﬂuence on the way in which nations
articulate themselves in the twentieth and twenty-ﬁrst centuries. Anderson
(1983) argues that being reminded of what one has already forgotten is a
normal mechanism by which nations are constructed. He demonstrates how
national memories, themselves underscored by selective forgetting, constitute
one of the most important mechanisms by which a nation constructs a
collective identity or become an ‘imagined community’. Hobsbawm and
Ranger (1983: 14) show that states engaged in historical construction of
modern nations claim nations ‘to be the opposite of novel, namely rooted in
the remote antiquity’.
It has also been argued that our relation to the national past can be better
described not so much as remembering but as forgetting. Billig (1995) suggests
that established nations depend for their continued existence upon a
collective amnesia. In such societies, not only is ‘the past forgotten, but also
MEMORY EXPERIENCE 17
there is a parallel forgetting of the present’ (Billig 1995: 38). Forgetting,
however, can also be highly organized and strategic, as examples from less
open and democratic societies illustrate. Forced forgetting (Burke 1989) was
of particular importance in communist countries, where people understood
that ‘the struggle against power is the struggle against forgetting’ (Kundera
1980: 3). As the majority of communist regimes were also nation-building
regimes, they ‘went to great lengths to create new myths and to instill these
in society through . . . political socialization mechanisms’ (Cohen 1999:
27). They, like all new states, were busy constructing the national selfconsciousness
and used ofﬁcial ceremonies, education and socialization to
create and foster a single, national, Marxist-Leninist class-based interpretation
of the national history (Wingﬁeld 2000). Politically and culturally
oppressive states impose forgetting not only by rewriting and censorship
of national history, but also by the destruction of places of memory. The
Chinese communist government, for example, aimed to destory all places of
memory, such as temples and monasteries, after the occupation of Tibet in
1951.
In today’s societies, with their diversity of cultures, ethnicities, religions
and traditions, we are witnessing the fragmentation of national memory.
The processes of globalization, diversiﬁcation and fragmentation of social
interests further enhance the transformation of memory from the master
narrative of nations to the episodic narrative of groups. The denationalization
of memory, on the one hand, and an arrival of ailing and dispersed
memories, on the other, in the context of the growing cultural and ethnic
pluralization of societies, have provided a new importance to ethnic identities,
whose formation is based on traditional memory narratives. Among
all the groups in need of memory, ‘ethnic groups have had the easiest task,
for they have never entirely lost their cultural memory’ (Heller 2001: 1032).
Moreover, many forgotten elements can be brought to light, ‘fused with new
myths and stories of repression and suffering, or combined with heterogeneous
cultural memorabilia such as music, crafts, and religious lore’
(Heller 2001: 1032). As we witness the emergence of small, surrogate ethnic
memories and a growing reliance on the speciﬁc content of a group memory
to legitimize the group’s political claims, battles ‘for minorities’ rights are
increasingly organized around questions of cultural memory, its exclusions
and taboo zones’ (Huyssen 1995: 5). With ethnic memories surfacing in
afﬁliation with the politics of identity, which itself is a result of the increasing
importance of discourses of human rights in the global and postcolonial
world, memories of past injustices are a critical source of empowerment.
Today’s fascination with ethnic memory, in the context of the declining of
authoritative memories (traditional religious and national memories), poses
new challenges for democratic systems (see Chapter 6).
The family is another group that plays a crucial role in the construction of
our memories. As long as the family jointly produces and maintains its
18 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING
memory, its cohesion and continuity is ensured. The content of the shared
family’s narrative, symbolic of family unity across generations, reproduces
family traditions, secrets and particular sentiments. These memories,
objectiﬁed in old letters, photographs and family lore, are sustained through
family conversations, as past events are jointly recalled or co-memorized
(Billig 1990). Middleton and Edwards (1988) illustrated this process by
researching how families collectively remembered past events by talking
about photographs. As much research shows, children learn to remember in
the family environment, guided by parental intervention and shared reminiscence.
We do not remember ourselves as very young kids very clearly, so
we rely on the memories of older members of our family, with the result that
many of our earliest memories are actually recollections of stories we heard
from adults about our childhood. Our memory is more accurately described
as a collection of overlapping testimonies from our narrative environments,
which inﬂuence our memory’s emotional tone, style and content.
Presently we witness two processes: on the one hand, the growing impact
of what might be described as the quest for family roots; and on the other
the decline in the family’s capability to maintain a living chain of memory.
Family history was one of the most striking discoveries of the 1960s and has
given rise to the most remarkable ‘do-it-yourself archive-based scholarship
of our time’ (Samuel 1999: 169). This trend has been popularized by
the mass media, with many books and ﬁlms blending private and public
memories. The growing interest in telling a family story has been recently
assisted by new technologies such as the internet, where the numbers of
family websites devoted to the construction of families’ memory increases
daily. At the same time there is a trend that suggests that families are less and
less capable of maintaining their traditions due to changes in their structures
and memberships, and this reﬂects the wider fate of memory in modern
society. The decline of the extended, multi-generational family is leading
to the destruction of a social framework that ensured the transmission of
collective memories from one generation to the next. As family size and
stability declines, the depth of family memory also suffers.
All three communities of memory (nation, ethnic group and family) are
affected by the growing differentiation of society, the globalization of the
world and by the development of new means of communication. These
factors have also caused changes in the functioning of the institutions of
memory.
The institutions of memory
In today’s society, collective memory is increasingly shaped by specialized
institutions: schools, courts, museums and the mass media. The growing
number of ‘ideas, assumptions, and knowledges that structure the
MEMORY EXPERIENCE 19
relationship of individuals and groups to the immediate as well as the more
distant past’ (Sherman 1999: 2) is formed, interpreted and preserved by
public institutions. The ideological themes that pervade the rhetoric of
public authorities and the educational curricula, with history classes in
school being the main example, ‘tutor’ public memory and promote a
speciﬁc version of the past. Schools and textbooks are important vehicles
through which societies transmit the idealized past and promote ideas of a
national identity and unity. Textbooks have always been updated and
rewritten to present the acceptable vision of the past, and although now, due
to international pressures and national voices, textbooks are frequently the
subject of external and domestic scrutiny, in many national narratives past
events that could harm social cohesion and the authority of the state are still
underplayed. Where the state controls the educational and media system,
collective memory is fragmented, full of ‘black holes’, dominated by ideological
values and used to produce legitimacy for the ruling élite. For
example, in Tito’s Yugoslavia, the ofﬁcial sanctioned memory of World War
II, around which textbook narratives were structured, was a crucial element
in the creation of legitimacy, myth and identity for the new communist state
(Hoepken 1999). In such a situation, where the legitimization of social and
political order depends upon ofﬁcial censorship, socially organized forgetting
and the suppression of those elements that do not ﬁt the regime’s image
of past events, unofﬁcial and informal institutions as well an oral memory
transmitted informally, frequently with the help of jokes, gossip, doublespeak
and anecdotes, are essential to the preservation of collective memory.
Another institution which increasingly shapes our collective memory is
the legal system. The relationship between public memory and the law is at
the foundation of many countries’ original conceptions of themselves. For
example, such legal documents as the Magna Carta (UK) or the Declaration
of Independence (USA) are essential for understanding these societies’
origins and values. Not only is the legal system itself an enormously inﬂuential
institution of collective memory, but in many countries changes in collective
memory are legally induced. In all societies, to a considerable extent,
courts, through their input in deciding historical questions, form collective
memory. Postwar Europe saw many criminal prosecutions which aimed to
inﬂuence national collective memories, the Nuremberg trials being the main
example. Despite controversies and debates surrounding attempts to punish
state-sponsored mass murder and readdress national memories, the trials’
achievements for constructing the basis for new memories and a new order
cannot be overlooked. Today, due to the proliferation of the language
of human rights and the new strength of the politics of identity, we see an
increase in demands for governments to address historical injustices committed
in their name. Consequently, many nations, and not only those emerging
from their authoritarian past, use the legal system to bring justice and
to teach a particular interpretation of the country’s history (see Chapter 6).
20 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING
Legal attempts to construct collective memory are not without tensions
and difﬁculties (Misztal 2001) but because they allow for confrontation of
various memories, they can serve the periodic need to reawaken and
strengthen the public’s feelings of moral outrage.
A further important institution of memory is the museum. Museums
originated in the late eighteenth century as monuments to wealth and civic
patrimony, in the form of collections of material objects in courts and
churches. From the nineteenth century it was an educational imperative of
the emerging nation state to form national identity and ‘to elevate the working
class’ that was responsible for the opening of exhibitions to a national
public. Although museums have much in common with other institutions of
memory, their authoritative and legitimizing status and their role as symbols
of community constitute them as a distinctive cultural complex (Macdonald
1996). Museums are unusual not only because their development is connected
to the formation and honouring of the nation state, but also because
of their role in the social objectiﬁcation of the past and organized memory
around diverse artefacts.
Until recently, museums were mainly devoted to the preservation of a
memory that constituted one of the high points of a national history, and
therefore they were collecting ‘objects to which the observer no longer has a
vital relationship and which are in the process of dying’ (Adorno 1967: 175).
‘Museum and mausoleum’, in Adorno’s famous phrase, were associated by
more than phonetics. Today, however, their authority as the curators of
national treasures and the dictators of distinction and taste is challenged.
This is a result of several factors, such as the availability of new technologies,
the fragmentation and denationalization of memory and the development
of a popular passion for heritage – that is, for ‘the interpretation of the
past through an artefactual history’ (Urry 1996: 53) – resulting in an interest
in old places, crafts, houses, countryside, old railways and so on.
With many museums fundamentally transforming their practice of collecting
and exhibiting, their function now bears a strong relationship to
memory production (Crane 2000a). Thus, ‘the museum is no longer simply
the guardian of treasures and artefacts from the past discreetly exhibited for
the select group of experts’, but has moved closer to ‘the world of spectacle,
of popular fair and mass entertainment’ (Huyssen 1995: 19). In this process
of transformation from the position of traditional cultural authority to a
new role as cultural mediators in a more multicultural environment,
museums redeﬁne their strategies of representation of the past and ﬁnd
spaces for marginalized memories. This new opportunity for excluded
memories, in the context of the decline of the management of public memory
by the state, has resulted in the increased articulation of memory by various
agencies from civil society and the enormous explosion of heritage and conservation
organizations and movements.
Today, the most important role in the construction of collective memories
MEMORY EXPERIENCE 21
is played by the mass media (McLuhan 1962). Before the development of the
mass media, most people’s sense of the past and the world beyond their
immediate milieu was constituted by oral traditions that were produced and
reproduced in the social context of everyday life. The shift from relying only
on face-to face exchanges to depending on mediated interaction has profoundly
affected the ways in which people organize material for recall as
well as their modes of reconstructing the past (Thompson 1996: 95). Rapid
technological advancements in the ﬁeld of communication in the late nineteenth
and twentieth centuries and the creation of the mass audience have
ensured that the media is an extremely powerful instrument of ordering our
knowledge of the past. In the nineteenth century it was the press that was the
central means of communication and that provided people with images of
groups that they could identify with. The press helped the transition from
the local to the national by turning existing societies, through highlighting
the common past and a constant repetition of images and words, into
national communities (Anderson 1983). Now, the function of memorykeeping
and presentation is ‘increasingly assigned to the electronic media’
(Samuel 1994: 25). The nature of this media and their interest in meeting
public demands for instant entertainment are not without impact on the
content and form of representations of the past. Thus, the input of media
into how and what we remember is a crucial factor inﬂuencing the status of
memory in contemporary societies.
The shift from oral culture, through writing and print, to electronic processing
of the word has induced changes in the experience of time, brought
about a new conception of the past and created growing possibilities for
abstract thought. Thus, it can be said that the evolution of the role and form
of social memory has been shaped by technological changes in the means of
communication, and this is one of the most important factors structuring the
status of memory in modern society.
The status of memory
Our discussion so far suggests that we rely on many social frameworks,
institutions, places and objects to help us remember. The relationship
between memory and objects is rather complicated because material objects,
operating as vehicles of memory, can be of various types (e.g., dynamic or
stable). Moreover, they provide us either with images and words, or both,
while at the same time memory does not reside speciﬁcally in any image
or word. Not only does our ability to remember depend on images and/or
words, but how images work depends largely on their complex linkage
with words, since images have in part always depended on words for direct
interpretation, although images also function differently from words. If
words and images offer two different kinds of representation, we can expect
22 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING
that as ‘modes of representation change, both the relationship between
words and images changes as well as how we understand images and words
independently of each other’ (Zelizer 1998: 5). Thus, the dependence on
either words or images results in contrasting cultural values and also in
contesting roles of memory. In order to throw light on changes in the status
and meaning of memory, it is useful to have a quick look at discussions of
the cultural consequences of the shift from oral culture to literacy.
When discussing the role of memory it is often assumed that in an
‘oral’ society – that is, in a society where communication occurs in forms
other than written documents – culture depends upon memory and hence
memory is highly valued. A further argument is that the ‘rise of literacy’
threatens memory. The assertion that technological change means the
devalourization of memory has been a permanent element of the history of
memory since ancient times. Starting with Plato’s argument that the development
of writing itself is a threat to individual memory, the idea that
memory is in crisis has become the focus point of the centuries-long debate
about memory. However, many writers protest against misconceptions
about the value of memory in oral cultures and against the notion of
memory crisis with the rise of literacy (Ong 1983; Carruthers 1990; Le Goff
1992; Goody 1998).
These scholars argue that the distinction between oral and literary
societies is misleading because, as the continuation of the oral component in
literary societies illustrates, the possession of writing does not mean that a
society has ceased to be an oral culture as well. The majority of researchers
agree that the rise of literacy does not necessarily bring the devalourization
of memory and that learning by hearing material and reciting it does not
necessarily imply an ignorance of reading. The reliance on living memories,
associated with the oral transmission of a living past persisted long after the
advent of print, and indeed continues to the present day (Ong 1983). In all
cultures, not only in those without writing, memorizing is a part of everyday
life (Goody 1977: 35). Moreover, basing the distinction between preliterate
and literate cultures on a difference in levels of rationality embedded in those
cultures needs to be rejected, as the extent to which a society is capable of
transmitting its social memory in a logical and articulate form is not dependent
upon the possession of writing but is rather connected with that society’s
representation of language and its perception of knowledge (Fentress and
Wickham 1992: 45). Many studies illustrating a continuity between the
mnemonic habits of preliterate and literary cultures argue that the privileged
cultural role of memory depends ‘on the role which rhetoric has in a culture
rather than on whether its texts are presented in oral or written forms’ – so
in societies where literature is valued for its social function, rhetoric
and interpretation works to provide the sources of a group’s memory
(Carruthers 1990: 10, 12). In similar vein, Assmann (1997), stresses the
importance of oral transmission in cultures which, despite the possession of
MEMORY EXPERIENCE 23
written means for preserving the past, keep their main texts alive through
commentary.
Nevertheless, although preliterate cultures do not necessarily differ in
terms of tasks and the value they assign to memory, the content of memory
and the principal domain in which memory crystallizes have been affected
by various processes such as the transformation of the technical means of
preserving the past, changes in the experience of time, the increased interest
in the past and the occurrence of dramatic events. For example, writing,
because it generates cultural innovation by promoting economization and
scepticism, encourages ‘the production of unfamiliar statements and the
thinking of novel thoughts’ (Connerton 1989: 76). Furthermore, while
speech can preserve memories over long intervals of time, it is too ﬂeeting
to permit any listener to pause for recollection; thus a sense of the past ‘that
is primarily based on hearing tales from others is different from one that is
primarily based on reading oneself’ (Eisenstein 1966: 49). As the ‘pastness’
of the past depends upon a historical sensibility, this can hardly begin to
operate without permanent written records. Hence, literate societies, where
records reveal the past is unlike the present, differ from oral cultures in their
attitudes to the past. The repetitive regularity of most orally transmitted
history means that most knowledge of the past is in fact shared, while in
literate societies ‘printed historical texts are widely disseminated but most
knowledge of the past is fragmented into segments exclusive to small
clusters of specialists and the consensually shared past shrinks to a thin
media-dominated veneer’ (Lowenthal 1998: 238). In literary cultures, past
events, removed from living memories and ﬁxed to printed pages, lose their
vividness and immediacy. Moreover, as nobody could be expected to
remember the content of continuously expanded libraries, the past is not
entirely known. However, printed texts facilitate critical approaches and
open inquiry into the past (Ong 1983). The new awareness of historicity
came into being ‘when it became possible to set one ﬁxed account of the
world beside another so that the contradictions within and between them
could literally be seen’ (Connerton 1989: 76). In contrast, oral societies
live very much in the present and only with memories which have present
relevance and which articulate inconsistent cultural inheritance.
The ‘electroniﬁcation’ of memory provides a new dimension to the role
memory plays in our image-fed society (Urry 1996: 63). Digital technology,
interactive media and information systems have greatly changed the
facets of memory practices in our time, and as a result today’s memory is
‘composed of bits and pieces’ (Hervieu-Leger 2000: 129). The immediacy of
communication, information overload, the speed of changing images, the
growing hybridity of media, all further expand and problematize the status
of memory. We have unlimited access to facts, sources and information,
which we can store, freeze and replay. At the same time, visual images can
interfere with and confuse our memories. For example, computer-generated
24 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING
graphics can fake the truth about the past, as they do in ﬁlms like Forrest
Gump and Zoolander). This decline of the credibility of photographic
images and other visual evidence, together with the overabundance of ﬂickering
and changing narratives and images, is a threat to the status of memory
as it raises the question of whose vision of the past and whose memories
should be trusted. In the same vein, just as in print culture, readers’ assessment
of trust in the book underwrote the stability of knowledge and society
(Johns 1998), trust in media (in other words, institutional trust) is crucial in
making narratives of memory and identity into dominant cultural representations
of reality.
The importance of institutional trust means that technological change is
not the sole factor responsible for the status of memory. Both the shift in
means of communication and the changes in modes of social organization,
including changes in the practice of power, inﬂuence the nature of mnemonic
practices. In other words, the structuring of memory in society is shaped by
technological changes in the means of communication and the transformation
of the dominant institutions of society. Memory, as the main source of
collective identity, has always been employed by various social forces to
boost their control and standing. When the main social authority was
religious institutions, for example (as in ancient Israel), religious memory
was called upon to sustain followers’ allegiance; thus the biblical continuous
appeal to ‘Zakhor’ (‘remember’) that ensured that remembering was ‘felt as
a religious imperative to an entire people’ (Yerushalmi 1982: 9). Similarly,
the emergence of the nation state was accompanied by inventions of new
memories to enhance national identities. Today, memory is more distant
from traditional sources of power, while at the same time it becomes increasingly
shaped by mass media.
To sum up, this chapter, after describing different forms of memory,
deﬁned collective memory as the representation of the past, both the past
shared by a group and the past that is collectively commemorated, that
enacts and gives substance to the group’s identity, its present conditions and
its vision of the future. The following presentation of the role of main mnemonic
communities and institutions of memory aimed to expand our understanding
of the social formation of memory. Discussing further the status of
memory, we noted how changes in modes of communication and social
organization inﬂuence the structure and status of memory. Since memory
has travelled from oral expression through print literacy to today’s electronic
means of communication, we can conclude by saying that memory
has its own history. This history, linked to a large degree to the history of
changing modes of communication and techniques of power, will be discussed
in the next chapter.
MEMORY EXPERIENCE 25
Further reading
Baddley, A. (1989) The psychology of remembering and forgetting, in T. Butler (ed.)
Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, pp. 33–60. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Goody, J. (1998) Memory in oral tradition, in P. Fara and K. Patterson (eds)
Memory, pp. 73–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Renan, E. ([1882] 1990) What is a nation?, in H.K. Bhabha (ed.) Nation and
Narration. London: Routledge.
Schudson, M. (1995) Distortion in collective memory, in D.L. Schacter (ed.) Memory
Distortion, pp. 346–63. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sennett, R. (1998) Disturbing memories, in P. Fara and K. Patterson (eds) Memory,
pp. 10–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
26 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING