ABSTRACT
THE RECENT wave of interest in oral history and return to the active subject as a topic in historical practice raises a certain number of questions about the status and function of scholarly history in our societies. Scholarly history has in fact long taken on the task of establishing a kind of official memory. On the other hand, the collection of life stories or examination of what is commonly referred to as the oral tradition, have led historians to engage in an effort of distancing themselves from their subject matter, resulting in the emergence of a new object of study: precisely concerned with the (collective or individual) memory as a distinct, specific reality that appears to play an essential role in the definition of the identity of social groups, but which is in no way to be confused with historical discourses. In fact, this awareness is no more than a rediscovery, in that sociologists such as Maurice Halbwachs and Roger Bastide have already indicated in their pioneering works the way to an analysis of the collective memory. Why then does this discrepancy exist? What contributions, meanings and consequences emerge from scholarly history turning to living memory? And what, precisely, are the relationships between history and memory?
