ABSTRACT
If the terrain of collective memory is vast and varied, it is also structured. Not demanding active attention a memory household offers an anchor, the comfort of continuity and identity. The work involved in the construction and maintenance of memory household is often quite invisible. On a societal scale, memory work continuously going on is visible. Urban neighbourhoods in many North American cities provide a terrain rich in such “dormant” collective memory; ordinarily not evoking warm remembrance for their inhabitants, they can do just that for people who left the places behind decades ago. From the point of view of individuals, a great deal of the collective memory markers retain such dormant presence. Visual, emotional as well as intellectual referents of memory-of-the-origins must exist in some form; what that form is varies greatly. But for a community of memory as a whole, engaging in moral accounting cannot be expected to follow from high standards alone.
