ABSTRACT
In recent times, the field of memory studies has developed dramatically due to growing awareness that ‘history’ is highly dependent on the social, political and technological environments within which the past is remembered. In their survey of contemporary war memory theory, Ashplant et al. have identified two principal paradigms within which war memory and commemoration are studied. The first is a political paradigm where memory is ‘a practice bound up with rituals of national identification, and a key element in the symbolic repertoire available to the nation-state for binding its citizens into a collective national identity’. The second is a psychological paradigm where ‘war memory and commemoration is held to be significant primarily for psychological reasons, as an expression of mourning, being a human response to the death and suffering that war engenders on a vast scale’ (Ashplant et al. 2000:7).
