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Introduction
In this article, I analyze contemporary mnemonic battles (Zerubavel, 1997, pp. 97-99) concerning three different issues: child sexual abuse, the Vietnam war and American slavery. On the one hand, I provide a framework to compare the cultural and distinctly sociomental dynamics of mnemonic conflict. On the other hand, I use this typology to outline three models for understanding the ways that individuals and communities fuse autobiographical memories to collective definitions of morally salient events and issues (both past and ongoing) in public struggles for cultural and cognitive authority. The mnemonic battles I analyze take three basic forms - disputes over the existence of the past, the nature of the past and the relevance of the past. Each is situated in an increasingly complex late modern environment in which self-reflexivity and a new ethic of autobiographical storytelling came to be at the core of social contention. I outline these various social forms of mnemonic conflict to demonstrate how actors achieve the formal alignment and interdependence of autobiographical and collective memory in the contexts of such disputes.
Toward a cultural sociology of autobiographical memory
In his foundational statement on the sociology of memory, Maurice Halbwachs ([1950] 1980) distinguished between autobiographical (personal), collective (impersonal, shared, existing sui generis ) and historical (official) memory. However, the relation between autobiographical and collective modes of memory remains significantly underexamined. Today, as Jeffrey K. Olick (1999a) shows, most social memory scholars take either a 'collective' or 'collected' approach to memory. Despite their differences, neither camp is sufficiently concerned with autobiographical memory.
Those who focus on the genuinely collective dimensions of memory typically analyze public commemorations (for example, Armstrong and Crage, 2006), institutions (for example, Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi, 2007), symbols (for example, Schwartz, 2000; Zerubavel, 2002), and other impersonal sites of memory. In this view, while individuals certainly partake in acts of collective remembering, these mnemonic forms and practices exist primarily as properties of a community as a whole. Although these scholars often emphasize the ways that social forces pressure individuals to remember in line with dominant norms (facilitating a sense of shared identity and group cohesion), some have also explored how various individuals and groups actively work to create or revamp collective memories and shape our perceptions of past events and...