History and Memory: Construction, Deconstruction and Reconstruction

Extract

For once our societies are in agreement with the social and human sciences, that is, the sciences that have made these societies their subject of study and claim to provide them with a knowledge of themselves that the societies treat with a distant respect without being very sure they really need it: for our societies, as well as for the social and human sciences, memory is on the agenda, it has become a compulsory reference point. Our societies even agree to hear about a ‘duty to remember’ resembling an ethical and political requirement they could not evade. The preservation and promotion of every trace of the past has become one of the most general and least discussed aspects of every cultural policy. The term ‘heritage’ has entered the official language and is combined with a large number of adjectives: artistic, ethnological, archaeological, ecological, animal and plant. It is as if, in order to find an excuse and make people forget, societies, which on one hand are clearly ambitious for strong economic growth, progress and adaptation to new technologies, had on the other to compensate by making frequent reference to a past they do not wish to lose, destroy or consign to oblivion, even though they continually turn their back on it.