Memory in Mind and Culture

2018

This paper discusses the issue of the relationship of history and memory. Memory becomes a topic in historical discourses as it deals with identity, especially when we speak of collective memory. The paper presents the history of the relationship of history and memory and suggests a thesis according to which the close interaction between these two concepts can solve the crisis of identity that has been most urgent in our days.

Memory Studies, 2008

This article presents an account of collective memory which explains its relationship to individual memory on the one hand and to history on the other. It argues that the role of memory, both individual and collective, is not merely cognitive; it is also normative. That is, memory does not simply transmit information from the past to the present; it also transmits responsibilities. Insofar as collective memory has a cognitive aspect, it makes claims about the past. These may be confirmed or disconfirmed by historical research. This does not mean that collective memory is just bad history. It is more like history written in the first person, and its role is to inform the present generation of its responsibilities to the past.

Collective Memory and Collective Identity: Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History in Their Context, 2021

Memory and History: An Introduction "Collective memory" is one of the issues that has attracted the attention and discussion of scholars internationally across academic disciplines over the past five decades.1 The origin of its theoretical frameworks derives from pioneering works of great thinkers in the 19th century. Despite the fact that Émile Durkheim never utilized the expression "collective memory," he is regarded as the one who gave the foundation to the idea, specifying the social importance of remembrance in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim characterizes society as an objective reality that maintains "collective consciousness." For him, "collective consciousness" has an impact on individual consciousness.2 "Collective consciousness" is the supreme form of the psychological life, because it is "the consciousness of the consciousnesses."3 Durkheim asserts that being located outside of or above individual and local contingencies, the "collective consciousness" sees things through their perpetual and essential nature, which it shapes into transmittable ideas. On the other hand, Henri Bergson accentuates the subjective facets of time, perception, reality and memory when he writes: Memory actualized in an image differs, then, profoundly from pure memory. The image is a present state, and its sole share in the past is the memory from which it arose. Memory, on the contrary, powerless as long as it remains without utility, is pure from all admixture of sensation, is without attachment to the present, and is, consequently, unextended.4 One generation later, Maurice Halbwachs, who was a student of both Durkheim and Bergson, presented the term "collective memory" in a sociological context, employing it not only to allude to collective portrayals but also to indicate the 1 The literature that discusses "collective memory" is extensive. A few selected monographs should suffice to get a glimpse of the general situation in current scholarship:

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2006

Narrative Inquiry

Memory studies has, in only a few decades, produced insights in two inter-related processes. First, memory scholars theorized how representations of the past become socially shared. Secondly, they theorized how these cultural and collective memories circulate and are being re-actualized in different contexts. But critiques of the field have targeted the metaphorical and reified nature of cultural memory concepts. This article argues that some concepts developed in social scientific narrative studies could provide cultural memory scholars with a precise and less metaphorical vocabulary to understand how people make sense of non-autobiographical pasts in different interactional contexts. In particular, the article focusses on how positioning theory and unexplained events in narrative pre-construction assist analysis of the flexibility of the remembering self in everyday interaction. The examples in this article concern narrations of the Second World War and Holocaust gathered during f...

2020

Is memory an example of successful adaptation among homo sapiens? – this hypothesis permeates the 40 chapters of the Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies. This volume edited by Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen approaches the field of memory studies from multiple perspectives, from sociology and philosophy to psychology and biology even. The book is divided into six parts, complemented with index, illustrations, all carefully edited. Part One presents a number of theories and perspectives. Here, main concepts of memory studies are discussed with the hindsight of several decades that have passed since they first stormed social sciences. Collective, communicative and cultural memory as well as their relation to history all receive attention there. Patrick H. Hutton's thorough analysis of Pierre Nora's 'sites of memory thirty years after' deserves special praise for its careful reconstruction of the process in which this concept arose, as well as for a succi...

New German Critique, 1995

Teksty Drugie, 2016

Cognizing the other, us vs others or our own vs someone else's within a divided group, along with processes of diffusional intercultural permeation, hybridizing and fusing the heterogeneous (thus conditioning not only the imitative and dependent, but also the original and specific)-undoubtedly, these were the most fundamental problems for the humanities and culture of the previous century. It is not without reason that they have given rise to a wide range of studies, commentaries, philosophical and theoretical conceptualizations. It has long been obvious that debate over these matters has not been restricted to academia, but first and foremost in the cultural arena with all its conflicting historical, political and social issues. One could say that they constitute one of the few domains in which the humanities, broadly understood, can carry out research which is not only cognitively and substantially valuable, but also potentially good and socially useful, depending on the effects of implementing programmes which are (socially) corrective, formational and educational in nature.

Memory Studies 2008

This article presents an account of collective memory which explains its relationship to individual memory on the one hand and to history on the other. It argues that the role of memory, both individual and collective, is not merely cognitive; it is also normative. That is, memory does not simply transmit information from the past to the present; it also transmits responsibilities. Insofar as collective memory has a cognitive aspect, it makes claims about the past. These may be confirmed or disconfirmed by historical research. This does not mean that collective memory is just bad history. It is more like history written in the first person, and its role is to inform the present generation of its responsibilities to the past.

Re-visiones, 2018

In this era of global neoliberal necro-capitalism, we are increasingly faced with a political and social amnesia that yields results without the past producing more and more processes of dehistorization and depoliticization. In these processes is fundamental the logic of repetition (neoliberal), which produces at least two different procedures of (de) historicization. On the one hand, we have the logic of the Western neoliberal world, which functions as a mere transhistorical machine; On the other hand, in the eastern and southern regions of Europe we detect forced techniques to accept historicization as totalization. In both cases, the result is a suspension of the history whose primary intention is to discard any alternative it contains. Gržinic's idea is to offer some examples and, even more, try to define these processes on a much broader scale, in order to see their political, social and cultural consequences.