ABSTRACT
To have “memory” of an event, humans have to experience it themselves. Learning of an event secondhand, humans acquire knowledge, but not memory. Yet, when sociologists speak of “collective memory,” they routinely include as agents of memory those who do not have firsthand experience of a past event. This inclusion has been taken for granted ever since Maurice Halbwachs (1992) formulated his Durkheimian theory of the relationship between collective memory and commemoration in terms of group solidarity and identity: collective memory emerges when those without firsthand experience of an event identify with those who have such experience, defining both sets of actors as sharing membership in the same social group. The creation of this affect-laden, first-person orientation to a past event is at the crux of commemoration-simply put, a ritual that transforms “historical knowledge” into “collective memory” consisting of mnemonic schemas and objects that define the meaning of a past event as a locus of collective identity. According to Halbwachs’s formulation, commemoration is a vehicle of collective memory. Below, I first elaborate Halbwachs’s theory, which has dominated the sociology
of commemoration, by drawing on more recent sociological theories of ritual and collective identity. I then critically evaluate the dominant Durkheimian theory of commemoration by examining four empirical phenomena that have not been addressed adequately in the existing literature: (1) commemorations of negative events or difficult pasts, wherein commemoration serves not to produce shared mnemonic schemas, but, rather, to preserve struggles over the meaning of mnemonic objects; (2) the understudied role of political organizations and social movements in the making and remaking of commemorative rituals; (3) the fundamentally temporal nature of commemoration, which calls for a more historical approach to both continuities and discontinuities in the ways actors reiterate commemorative rituals over time; and (4) the incipient rescaling of commemoration from national to transnational arenas and actors, reconfiguring the connection between national identity and collective memory in an increasingly global world.
