ABSTRACT
Any examination of identity must contend with the differences between individual identity and the identity of a collective claiming distinction as a unique group. One way to examine the distinction is through the lens of memory. The early twentieth-century French sociologist and philosopher Maurice Halbwachs maintained that memory, as it presents itself to us, has some of the same qualities as narrative, especially those attributes which fall into the more affective categories. In his key work, On Collective Memory (1992), he posited that individuals grow into increasingly wider circles of recollection, beginning with the family and its intimate stories and lore, and expanding to include our local neighborhood, our school and childhood friends, our faith community, our working lives (training, workplaces, union membership, and the like), and, finally, the political framework of whatever larger polity such as the city or the nation-state from which we take our civic identity (Halbwachs 1992). Two propositions are central to Halbwach’s arguments. The first is that, although these memories are ultimately subjective and personal, they are at the same time only imaginable and communicable because we accumulate them in interactions with other people, beginning with our parents and immediate family members and expanding outward. The second, and more complex one, is that the act of remembering is not a retrieval of a deeply subjective and isolated set of perceptions waiting for us to reach back and find it, but rather an interactive maneuver in which we reconstruct the past but with the capabilities and needs of the present. “Collective frameworks of memory are … the instruments used by the collective memory to reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thought of the society” (ibid.: 40).
