COLLECTIVE MEMORY

Collective memory is a representation of the past that is shared by members of a group, such as a generation or nation-state. The concept is usually traced to writings of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1887-1945), who argued that remembering is shaped by participation in collective life and that different groups generate different accounts of the past (Halbwachs, 1952).

Collective memory and related notions such as public memory (Bodnar, 1992) have been examined in academic disciplines including anthropology (Cole, 2001), history (Novick, 1999), and sociology (Schudson, 1992). Collective memory is also a part of popular culture discussions about the Vietnam War and the Holocaust. One of the hallmarks of collective memory is that it is tied to identity. Deeply held notions about the past are often the source or pride or shame, and they can give rise to legal, and even armed conflict. For example, the Serbs' collective memory of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 has often been cited as a factor that made it possible to mobilize against Bosnian Muslims in the twentieth century.

Strong and Distributed Accounts of Collective Memory

Collective memory is often understood in terms of loose analogies with memory in the individual. Many discussions of America's memory about Vietnam, for example, seem to presuppose that America is some sort of a large organism that has intentions, desires, memories, and beliefs just as individuals do, something reflected in assertions such as, "Our memory of Vietnam makes us unwilling to accept combat deaths."

Assumptions about this issue are often not well grounded and as a result have been the object of criticism. For example, one of the fathers of modern memory studies in psychology, Frederic Bartlett (1886-1969), was critical of the "more or less absolute likeness [that] has been drawn between social groups and the human individual" (Bartlett, p. 293), and he warned that collectives do not have some sort of memory in their own right. Bartlett did believe, however, that memory of individuals is fundamentally influenced by the social context in which they function. Indeed, a central point of his argument is that "social organization gives a persistent framework into which all detailed recall must fit, and it very powerfully influences both the manner and the matter of recall" (p. 296). In short, Bartlett accepted the notion of "memory in the group, and not memory of the group" (p. 294).

Claims about memory "of the group" constitute a "strong version" of collective memory (Wertsch, 2002), and, when made explicit, they have usually been rejected. An alternative that recognizes memory in the group without slipping into questionable assumptions about memory of the group is a "distributed version." From this perspective, memory is viewed as being distributed socially in small group interaction; as well as "instrumentally" (Wertsch, 2002). In the case of social distribution, for example, Mary Sue Weldon (2001) has examined the "collaborative remembering" that occurs when groups of individuals work together to recall information or events from the past.

In the case of instrumental distribution, memory is viewed as involving an active agent and one or more cultural tools such as calendars or other written records. An important transformation of memory in human cognitive evolution occurred with the emergence of "external symbolic storage" (Donald, 1991). This does not mean that such memory somehow resides in texts or records, but it does mean that with the rise of new forms of external symbolic storage such as written texts or the Internet the possibilities for remembering undergo fundamental change.

Such change has both psychological and social dimensions. By becoming skilled at using a certain set of cultural tools, new mental habits and "schemata" (Bartlett, 1995) emerge that shape remembering for members of a collective. New forms of collective life also derive from the appearance of novel cultural tools. For example, Benedict Anderson (1991) has tied the development of modern nations and other "imagined communities" to the rise of print media.

Collective versus Individual Memory

Collective memory is widely understood as inherently involving conflict and negotiation in the social sphere (Bodnar, 1992; Wertsch, 2002). Reflecting its ties to identity, it is often assessed in terms of its ability to provide a "usable past," even when this representation comes at the expense of accuracy. In contrast, while recognizing a connection to identity studies of individual memory tend to focus on a criterion of accuracy. This is not to say that psychologists believe memory is fundamentally accurate. Indeed, many studies point to the myriad ways humans can generate incorrect accounts of what actually occurred. The point remains, however, that psychological studies formulate memory largely in terms of its degree of accuracy.

A question that is sometimes asked about collective memory is whether it is anything more than a set of individual memories and hence whether it could be reduced to a personal level. Any attempt to answer this question must say something about the social processes involved in collective memory without falling into a strong version. This is often done by focusing on how narratives and other textual resources for memory are produced, discussed, and understood by members of a collective.

For example, modern states devote major attention to these issues. They produce official accounts of the past through textbooks and other materials used in schools, national commemorations, the media, and other forms of popular culture. In carrying out this project, states seek not only to promulgate their own account but also to control access to alternative accounts. As depicted by George Orwell in his futuristic novel 1984 (1949), such control can be almost total, but in fact every modern state exerts some control over the account of the past presented to its citizens.

This focus on the textual mediation of collective memory raises the question of whether collective memory is really memory at all. What does it mean to say, for example, that a generation of American teenagers remembers World War II when they were born four decades after the event? This might involve memory for textual resources, or perhaps semantic memory, but is it really the kind of episodic memory often assumed?

Such questions provide a reminder of the problems that arise when loose analogies between individual and collective remembering are employed. In order to address them, one must again turn to the instrumental distribution of collective memory, and in the end it may be more appropriate to discuss this in terms of knowledge about a set of shared textual resources rather than memory per se. What is striking about collective memory, however, is the ways in which it goes beyond what would normally be described as knowledge or semantic memory. This is so first because of the social conflict and control involved in producing the textual resources, and second because much more than neutral knowledge is involved. When discussing highly charged historical events, it is very easy to slip into heated discussions about what "really happened" and deny others' accounts in such a way that narrative texts become emotionally powerful tools of collective identity and memory.

One of the ways that studies of individual and collective memory have overlapped concerns generational differences. Martin A. Conway (1997) and others have examined the "reminiscence bump" that exists for members of a generation for events that occurred when they were between fifteen and twenty-five years of age. Research suggests that such events provide the foundation for a generation's lifelong collective memory. Providing another hint about the close tie between identity and collective memory, Conway argues that the reminiscence bump and its power to shape a generation are inherently tied to processes of identity development in young adulthood.

Collective Remembering versus History

Notions of collective memory and history often overlap. In both cases, the events involved are likely to have occurred before the lifetime of the individuals or group doing the remembering, and in both cases there is a tendency to assert that the account being presented is true. Furthermore, both rely on narrative as a cultural tool. Despite such shared properties, it is possible, indeed essential, to distinguish between them.

Among the properties of collective memory that tend to distinguish it from history are the following:

1. it reflects a single, subjective, committed perspective of a collective, whereas analytic history strives to be objective and distance itself from any particular perspective;
2. collective memory leaves little room for doubt or ambiguity about events and the motivations of actors (Novick, 1999), whereas analytic history strives to take into account multiple, complex factors;
3. collective memory presupposes an unchanging essence of a group across time, whereas analytic history focuses on the transformations that collectives undergo.

These three properties of collective memory characterize, for example, the highly charged dispute between China and Japan over whether events in 1937 constitute the "rape of Nanking" (Chang, 1997) or the "incident in Nanking" (as mentioned in some Japanese textbooks).

A final property that characterizes collective remembering is that it tends to be heavily shaped by "schemata" (Bartlett, 1995), "implicit theories" (Ross, 1989), or other simplifying and organizing frameworks. Such frameworks also shape individual memory and history, but in the case of collective memory they take on a particularly important role due to the processes of conflict and negotiation involved. What is shared in collective memory is often little more than a "schematic narrative template" (Wertsch, 2002) in which detailed information, especially contradictory information, is distorted, simplified, and ignored; this schema stands in contrast to what are at least the aspirations of analytic history. It is for this reason that collective memory often appears to be impervious to new information that might challenge it.

Bibliography

Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.

Bartlett, F. C. (1932; reprint 1995). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Bodnar, J. (1992). Remaking America: Public memory, commemoration, and patriotism in the twentieth century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chang, I. (1997). The rape of Nanking: The forgotten holocaust of World War II. New York: Basic Books.

Cole, J. (2001). Forget colonialism? Sacrifice and the art of memory in Madagascar. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Conway, M. A. (1997). The inventory of experience: Memory and identity. In J. W. Pennebaker, D. Paez, and B. Rimé, eds., Collective memory of political events: Social psychological perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Halbwachs, M. (1952; reprint 1992). On collective memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Novick, P. (1999). The Holocaust in American life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Ross, M. (1989). Relation of implicit theories to the construction of personal histories. Psychological Review 96 (2), 341-357.

Schudson, M. (1992). Watergate in American memory: How we remember, forget, and reconstruct the past. New York: Basic Books.

Weldon, M. S. (2001). Remembering as a social process. In D. L. Medin, ed., The psychology of learning and motivation. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Wertsch, J. V. (2002). Voices of collective remembering. New York: Cambridge University Press.

James V.Wertsch