Chapter 33 - Issues in the Socio-Cultural Study of Memory

Summary

This chapter examines how one can approach memory as a topic of study in socio-cultural psychology. It involves approaching remembering and forgetting as public, social activities where individual experience is necessarily mediated by collective experience. The chapter looks to a range of approaches to memory in psychology, social anthropology, history, and socio-cultural studies. It aims to use these approaches as diagnostic tools to help shed light on our understanding of memory as a site where both the singularity and collectivity of experience intersect. Frederick Bartlett's description of psychological experimentation then emphasizes that experiments are no less socially located than any other form of social setting. The chapter discusses several bodies of work that may be organized according to four key themes from Bartlett: commemoration; conventionalization; objectification and mediation. It summarizes how these themes converge on the key notion of individual and collective experience situated within organized settings.