Collective Memory

Collectivity is the quality or state of being collective, whereby, ‘Collective Memory’ (CM) is a term coined by Maurice Halbwachs, a French philosopher and sociologist, refers to memories shared by a group, as a community or culture, that emerges through communication and institutions.

CM in contrast to ‘collective thinking,’ is a complex social process in which a society or social group constructs and reproduce a relation to the past, mainly referring to those cultural practices and social knowledge about the past that influence emergence, transformation, and extinction of a social identity. Better put, a community's shared renderings of the past that help shape its collective raison d être (reason for being).

It is a shared pool of memories, knowledge and information of a social group that is significantly associated with the group's stories, artefacts, diet, symbols, traditions, images, and music that form the ties that bind. CM has been conceptualized in several ways and proposed to have certain attributes.

The difference between history and CM is best understood when comparing the aims and characteristics of each:

The goal of history is to broadly provide a comprehensive, accurate, and unbiased portrayal of past events, this often includes the representation and comparison of multiple perspectives and the integration of these perspectives and details to provide a complete and accurate account.

In contrast, CM focuses on a single perspective, for instance, the perspective of one social group; nation, or community. Consequently, CM represents past events as associated with the values, narratives and biases specific to that group.

Studies have found that people from different nations can have major differences in their recollections of the past.

James E. Young, a professor Emeritus of English, Judaic & Near Eastern Studies, introduced the notion of 'Collected Memory' (opposed to CM), marking memory's inherently fragmented, and collected by individual characters. While Jan Assmann, a German Egyptologist, developed the notion of 'Communicative Memory', a variety of collective memory based on everyday communication. This form of memory is similar to the exchanges in an oral culture or the memories collected (and made collective) through oral history.

CM is a burgeoning topic of research, one that might be used to understand the perspective of people in other groups, whether of a nation; political party; religion, or other social group, because it locates shared memories in individual minds and sees collective outcomes as aggregated individual processes.

It is the theory that people, whether by race, family, or culture, gather memories that influence how they see their lives. In short, it is how people remember and think about their past.

There seems to be a consensus that CM constitutes memory in the group and not of a group, despite the latter assumptions still resurfacing. Every CM unfolds within a spatial framework that is a reality that endures.

CM encompasses both the shared frameworks that shape and filter ostensibly “individual or personal memories" and representations of the past sui generis, including official texts, commemorative ceremonies, and physical symbols such as monuments and memorials.

Sociological work on CM traces its origins to Émile Durkheim, a French sociologist, and his student, Halbwachs. In the United States, the contemporary sociology of memory coalesced in the 1980s and 1990s, after Barry Schwartz, an American psychologist, brought renewed attention to Durkheim’s focus on commemoration, as well as Halbwachs’s interest in how the past is reconstructed in the present, in the service of actual needs, interests, and desires.

Though this line of research initially emphasized heroic pasts, particularly national commemorations that bolstered state legitimacy with reference to triumphant episodes, scholars quickly began to address the ways that collectivism grapple with “difficult pasts,” or episodes that evoke shame, regret, and/or dissensus, and that threaten to “spoil” national identity.

What is the relationship between memory and forgetting, and related concepts such as silence and denial? Can the increasingly pervasive language of “trauma” help us understand the current preoccupation with difficult pasts in both scholarly literature and public culture?

More recently, scholars have critiqued the field’s overwhelming focus on national memory from two angles:

1. First, studies of micro-level memories have revived Halbwachs’ initial interest in the social frameworks that structure (seemingly) individual memories.
2. Second, globalization facilitates connectedness and identification beyond and/or outside of national frames of reference, and thus scholars have pointed to the emergence of “cosmopolitan memory" that creates community and solidarity beyond and outside formal political borders.

Two different concepts of CM compete, one refers to the aggregation of socially framed individual memories, and the other refers to the collective phenomena 'Sui Generis' ("in a class by itself"), though the difference is rarely articulated in the literature.

Studies of CM address how people create and maintain a shared representation of their group’s past and group identity. In particular, we consider how knowledge representations and schematic narrative templates (recurring stories of the past) contribute to collective remembering.

Diverging memories between groups can cause conflict, so examining how different group’s varying memories of “the same event” can cause misunderstandings is critical. We consider whether (and how) groups can mediate their differences to attempt to reach consensus about the past, using narratives of the ’Table of Nations’ (or “Origines Gentium”) as a case study of ethnocentricity, the belief that a dominant ethnic group is superior to other ethnic groups, and that its perspectives should be adopted at the individual and societal levels…

Food for thought!