ABSTRACT
The social and cultural study of memory, like human memory itself, is vast
and amorphous. Since the early twentieth century, memory has appeared as a
key concept used by anthropologists, sociologists, literary critics, folklorists,
and religionists, and in all cases one fi nds a heterogeneity of opinion
and use. Particularly since the 1980s, memory has enjoyed a bonanza of
appearances in theoretical and critical scholarship, most notably as part of
the postmodern critique of modern meta-theories, especially of nineteenth-
century trends in professional historiography tied to the nation-state and
in scientifi c reasoning about adjudicating past events. Understandably,
historians have an ambivalent relationship to the notion of memory, many
seeing it more as an enemy at the gates than a guest at the table. Scholars
across disciplines outfi tted their studies of memory with different adjectival
designations that added to the complex character of the general fi eld of
memory research. Thus we have “collective memory” (Halbwachs 1992);
“cultural memory” (Assmann 2006; Sturkin 1997); “social memory” (for
Warburg 1927 see Ramply 2000; Fentress and Wickham 1992; Rampley
2000); “community memory” (Bellah et al 1985); and “popular memory”
(Johnson et al 1982) in addition to “mimetic memory,” “material memory,”
“connective memory,” and “communicative memory” (Assmann 2006),
all terms suggesting that memory is essentially a social phenomenon. The
social situation of memory follows the seminal work of the Durkheimian
sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs, who fi rst proposed that memory is always
a social and collective endeavor. Halbwachs made this proposal in a way
that set his understanding of memory against the two views: one, of
Sigmund Freud and others, that memory is an individual, psychological
affair, and two, against the idea of memory as an “art” to buttress rhetoric
or a “science of mnemonics” to aid education.1 Contained in this social
critique of memory is the inherent assumption that in modernity, memory
comes into sometimes contentious relationship with other social forms,
especially coercive and hegemonic ones, such as the nation-state and its
offi cial memories. This particular deployment of memory describes the
work that surrounds “counter-memory” (Foucault 1977; Davis and Starn
1989) and the opposition between memory and history (Collingwood
1994; de Certeau 1988; Le Goff 1992; Nora 1989).
