Collective Memory

Although once considered a subspeciality within the domain of the sociology of knowledge, the examination of collective behavior or “social memory studies” has developed over the past two decades into a vibrant theoretical domain, linking sociological theory, historical sociology, social psychology, and the sociology of culture. The collective memory approach argues that history enters into social life through the means by which individuals, organizations, and states interpret, recall, and commemorate the past.

The legitimating theoretical text in this field is Maurice Halbwachs's 1925 work, The Social Frameworks of Memory, finally translated into English in 1992. Halbwachs, an influential French follower of Émile Durkheim and Henri Bergson, and colleague of Annales historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, argued that memory was organized in light of “collective frameworks.” Through collective frameworks, individuals recall events in light of the standards of those groups in which they are embedded.

As scholars came increasingly to recognize that society was socially constructed, this model of memory provided a means by which the interpretations of the “facts” of the past could be theorized—not as representing “truth,” but reflecting the nexus of interests and resources. The social context of remembering determines how individuals and groups conceptualize the past, part of what has come to be labeled cognitive sociology.

While impetus for the analysis of collective memory can be attributed to Halbwachs, American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley (1918) similarly explored the social determinants of judgments of fame in Social Process. Among early American studies, W. Lloyd Warner's (1959) masterful analysis of commemorative rituals in Newburyport, Massachusetts, The Living and the Dead, with his focus on the way memories serve the ends of community building, was particularly influential. Although, as Olick and Robbins (1998:107) point out, there is some discussion of social memory in Durkheim, Marx, and Simmel, these passages are few and not linked to the social process of memory.

In the past quarter century, the development of theories of collective memory have quickened, both in the United States and Europe. Special notice needs to be given to the magisterial seven-volume work edited by Pierre Nora, Les lieux de memoire, abridged in a three-volume English edition (1996–1998), Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Following from Halbwachs, Nora and his colleagues examine the places, events, and symbols of French society. This monumental work is a brave attempt to capture what it means to think of oneself as French. Nationality becomes a form of personal essence.

Such a model is linked to discussions of tradition in the context of citizenship. Benedict Anderson (1991) speaks of nations as constituting “imagined communities.” By this, he refers to a notion, similar to Nora's, that national identity is grounded in imagination and memory. Often in practice, this linkage of self with nation is grounded in the mundane conditions of civic engagement, a process that Billig (1995) refers to as “banal nationalism,” noting that such images of nationhood are repeated and routinely flagged in the media and come to represent the nation to citizens. However, such images are not inherent in the state; both the state and the images that come to constitute it must be constructed and sedimented in light of what appears to be an unchanging historical reality, a process Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) referred to as the “Invention of Tradition.” This creation of common bonds through symbols that can be deployed in the public sphere contributes to the project of nationalism, or in other terminology creates a “civic religion.” As historians have addressed this creation of a national identity or civic religion, the number of case studies of instances of [Page 117]this process have multiplied, notably with regard to American, French, and Israeli society.

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