A Place for Memory: The Interface between Individual and Collective History

Abstract

Memory is a major theme in contemporary life, a key to personal, social, and cultural identity. Philosophers have long regarded continuity of memory as an essential quality of personhood. But personal and collective identity are intimately linked. Classical works such as Maurice Halbwachs's The Collective Memory, and Sir Frederick Bartlett's Remembering highlight the social nature of what we usually take to be individual memory, an insight reinforced by research on the historical consciousness of non-literate peoples.Sir Frederick Bartlett, Remembering (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1932); Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, Francis and Vida Ditter, trans. (New York: Harper Collins, 1980). For excellent descriptive and theoretical overviews of the problems that Halbwachs opened up, see Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989) and James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992). Here I will explore, in comparative perspective, the social processes through which personal memory becomes collectivized and collective memory is instantiated through autobiographical recollection.