ABSTRACT
The recent literature on collective or social memory contains two principal themes. The first emphasizes the significance of “group remembering”, of those social practices by which the members of a community preserve a conception of their past. Such practices, it is argued, must be brought from the periphery to the centre of social theory, for within them a community’s very identity is sustained and the continuity of social life made possible. The second theme is the social constitution of individual memory. Here we find a radical challenge to the orthodox view that memory is located solely within the head, a challenge which suggests that the nature of individual memory cannot be analysed without essential reference to notions such as “society”, “community” and “history”.
