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Keywords: collective memory, history, historiography, philosophy of history
Abstract: Collective memory, despite its status as patrimonial notion within sociological tradition, recently escaped this rigid disciplinary straitjacket, becoming a cardinal concept in the contemporary discourse of social sciences and humanities. Understanding the nature of collective memory cannot be reached before clarifying the relation between memory and history. This paper analyzes the different configurations under which the relationship between history and collective memory evolved throughout time. The central argument advances the idea that collective memory crystallizes at the area of confluence between history and mythistory, taking historical facts from the former, and organizing them according to the mythical logic of the latter.
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Collective memory: a notion on top of the theoretical agenda of social sciences
Seen as a continuous parade of ideas unfolding through time, the history of social and human sciences appears as a sequence of intellectual fashions, each of them dominated by a central axial concept around which an entire mass of secondary ideas orbit. Until recently, the concept of "culture" has magnetized theoretical imagination, evidence thereof being the impressive collection of "cultural studies" which have emerged throughout the entire territorial panorama of social sciences. Along with what can be called the "mnemonic turn" produced in recent decades, the notion of "memory" has seized the centre stage of the intellectual debates of the moment. Collective memory, a term whose conceptual paternity belongs to the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs,1 has gained a strong foothold in the marketplace of ideas exchanged in the social sciences. Launched in the academic discourse in the first half of the 20th century, the notion quickly faded into oblivion, only to be resuscitated in the 1980s by a renewed wake of social and intellectual interest in the past. So "collective memory's" academic success comes with a temporal retard of half a century. But all this delay is fully compensated by the force with which the contemporary preoccupation with memory has erupted in current discussions: the idea that both contemporary society and social studies are experiencing a "memory boom"1 is gaining increasingly more ground. There seems to be an unprecedented preoccupation with memory, revealed in the concern of the social actors (both individuals and collective) with protecting and even recovering...