ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the interrelation between individual processes of remembrance and collective memories. It emphatically advocates an empirical approach that is an empirically precise reconstruction regarding which cultural practices are effective in which historical and social contexts, which are marginalized, and how do these practices and related we-images as collective memories develop and change. In order to discern the reciprocal relationships between individual processes of remembering and the influential collective memories of we-groups in their respective figurations with other we-groups, as the possibly related unequal balances of power, the combination in this context the social constructionist approach of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann with the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias. Apart from the traces of the experienced or inherited past, evident in the representations that are powerfully defined by the now of the narrator and its influential discourses, one across people time and again who are not ready to represent the requisite collective memory and the we-image without reservations.
