ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the sociological theories of Maurice Halbwachs, Alfred Schtz, Pierre Bourdieu, and Niklas Luhmann. Based on these discussions, the concluding overview will attempt to outline the contours of an integrative theoretical perspective that takes the enormous societal relevance of social forgetting into account and grasps the diversity of the forms and phenomena of forgetting. It is recent past that sociology has intervened in these debates and in turn has not remained untouched by the contemporary interest in forgetting as ostensibly the "dark side" of memory. The author starts with the premise that the sociology of forgetting has until now been "forgotten" in a twofold manner: just like the other social and cultural disciplines, sociology has focused its attention, when it has at all engaged with social memory, primarily on social remembering in the form of handing down of stocks of knowledge and cultural traditions and in the form of ritual commemoration of certain aspects of the past.
