ABSTRACT
Memory is a topic which closely links the interests of psychologists, anthropologists and historians. Psychologists have traditionally studied how individuals remember but have paid little attention to what they remember. Anthropologists have studied what individuals remember and how this is affected by what it is acceptable to recall. They have focused on the relation of individual and social memory. Historians too have studied what people remember of past events since many of their sources take this form, but more recently they have begun to see their work as one kind of remembering, in the end, not fundamentally different to other kinds of recall. This view is elaborated in an extreme form in the work of the American cultural historian Hayden White (1973).
