ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a truncated genealogy of memory as an epistemological orientation. It examines the work of important twentieth-century thinkers of memory and outlines partially overlapping but not wholly complementary 'intellectual traditions' that rediscovered memory in the latter part of the twentieth century. Survivors, denied justice, accountability, and, generally, monetary or land reparations and redistributive justice by the transitional paradigm, are left with the memorial, the site of remembrance, as a place to tell their story or inscribe their truth. Both David Lowenthal and Pierre Nora posit separate and distinct realms for history and memory, though both for radically different reasons. For Lowenthal, history is the collective agent, produced through dialogue and thus superior to memory, which need not be collectively produced at all, and thus is fungible, alterable, and deeply anachronistic. Social memory is a trans-disciplinary concept used to explore the relationships and linkages between group identity in the present and a group's production of an inter-subjectively intelligible past.
