ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a comparative project whose aim is to deepen understanding of the link between social and personal memory as active processes. It deals with the gaps and links between very different histories: the links between social memory, life history and nation-formation. Gaps of scale between the state system, the nation and family histories and possibly an incommensurability of concepts of personal identification and nation-formation are its problems, since the encompassing scale is sometimes sought as an authorisation of inter-personal memory. Victims of the Cultural Revolution movements in China were often labelled 'ghosts' and 'demons'. 'Haunting' and 'demonisation' travel across all reference points, European and non-European. The social act of historiography, or of memoir and biography, or simply of marking a grave, inscribes and by the same act leaves out personal memory.
