Memory

Memory, in its broadest sense, refers to a faculty by which we remember; in its sociological conceptualization, it refers to representations of the past, which involve emotions and reconstructions of past experiences in such a way as to make them meaningful for the present.

The fact that “we live with memory on our lips but in societies without living memory” (Nora 1996, 5) is one of the most interesting paradoxes of contemporary societies. The attraction of memory in postnational, posttraditional, and global societies can be illustrated by our readiness to erect memorials to events that have only just happened and to participate in the numerous events of public commemoration as well as by the widespread interest in old places, crafts, and houses. The passion for the preservation of personal memory is visible in the growth of the heritage industry and the proliferation of personal blogs, memorial websites, and family history websites, with tracing family history being the third most popular activity on the World Wide Web, after shopping and pornography, according to R. Hardy.

Since memory practices are increasingly seen as one of the central characteristics of contemporary culture, studies of social memory are becoming an important part of any examination of contemporary society's main problems and tensions. The recent approach to memory in social science tends to assume that memory is essentially social, that is, located in institutions in the forms of rules, laws, standardized practices, and records. The present-day memory discourse, while contributing to the development of a deeper and more insightful understanding of the workings of memory, still relies on Maurice Halbwachs's 1992 description of the complexity of the process of social remembering. Halbwachs's conceptualization of collective memory as shared social frameworks of individual recollections follows Emile Durkheim's belief that every society exhibits and requires a sense of continuity with the past, seen as the essential factor in creating solidarity. According to Halbwachs, collective memory is always “socially framed” since social groups determine what is “memorable” and how it will be remembered. Hence, although memory is a faculty of individual minds, remembering is more than a personal act as even the most personal memories are embedded in social context and shaped by social factors that make social remembering possible, such as language, rituals, and commemoration practices. What is remembered is profoundly shaped by what has been shared with others such that what is remembered is always a “memory of an intersubjective past, of past time lived in relation to other people” (Misztal 2003, 6). Collective memory refers not to living memory but to organized cultural representations and practices. It is “quite different from the sum total of the personal recollections of its various individual members, as it includes only those that are commonly shared by all of them” (Zerubavel 1997, 96).

Remembering, as an active social process of “sense making through time” (Olick and Levy 1997, 922), serves social purposes at the personal and social levels. Social memory is the crucial condition of people relations since both conflict and cooperation hinge on it. Memories give ways of comprehending the world, a set of values and beliefs about the world, substance to a group's identity, and ensure the reproduction and cohesion of a given social and political order. Yet memories are always open to dispute, contestation, often fraught with disagreement and controversy. The preoccupation with memory as a basis for collective identity could lead to dangerous consequences, as frequent conflicts over “the truth” about the past [Page 950]between different groups across the world attest. Memory can be used as a political instrument that legitimizes nationalist myths, ideologies, and propaganda and can be an expression of nostalgia, all of which tend to distort the past by idealizing or even falsifying it. The nostalgia for the past is often re-created for popular consumption and leads to further commercialization of a heritage industry interested in old places, crafts, houses, countrysides, old railways, and “the world of spectacle, of popular fair and mass entertainment” (Huyssen 1995, 19). Given the high turnover rate of consumable items, the relationship between remembering and consumption in modern societies is rather complex. On the one hand, the temporality of consumption tends to induce forgetting. On the other, not all consumer objects obey the pressure of increasing velocity; we keep memorabilia and collect many items reminding us about our past. The amnesiac effect of the temporality of consumption is also undermined by the fact that objects can generate an involuntary association with the past, as Proust famously illustrated by the Remembrance of Things Past narrator's memory of childhood that comes to him with the taste of a madeleine dipped in hot tea. Moreover, memory is sustained by the mode of encoding operative in gift exchange. “Gift exchange potentates memory because, as Mauss first perceived, it rests upon a triple obligations: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive and the obligation to reciprocate” (Connerton 2009, 53).

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