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Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins1
KEYWORDS: sociology of knowledge, identity and memory,
ABSTRACT
Despite substantial work in a variety of disciplines, substantive areas, and geographical contexts, social memory studies is a nonparadigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless enterprise. To remedy this relative disorganization, we (re-)construct out of the diversity of work addressing social memory a useful tradition, range of working definitions, and basis for future work. We trace lineages of the enterprise, review basic definitional disputes, outline a historical approach, and review sociological theories concerning the statics and dynamics of social memory.
Introduction
...the time is past in which time did not matter. Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated...
Paul Valery
Scholars have viewed social memory narrowly as a subfield of the sociology of knowledge (Swidler & Arditi 1994) and broadly as "the connective structure of societies" (Assmann 1992, p. 293). They have seen it as involving particular sets of practices like commemoration and monument building and general forms like tradition, myth, or identity. They have approached it from sociology, history, literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, art history, and political science, among other disciplines. They have studied it in simple and complex societies, from above and below, across the geographical spectrum. Social memory studies is nevertheless, or perhaps as a result, a nonparadigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless enterprise. While this relative disorganization has been productive, it now seems possible to draw together some of these dispersed insights. Our goal in this essay is therefore to (re-)construct out of the diversity of work addressing social memory a useful tradition, range of working definitions, and basis for future work in a field that ironically has little organized memory of its own.
Lineages
Memory, of course, has been a major preoccupation for social thinkers since the Greeks. Yet it was not until the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries that a distinctively social perspective on memory became prominent. The first explicit use of the term collective memory we could find was by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1902, who referred to "the dammed up force of our mysterious ancestors within us" and "piled up layers of accumulated collective memory" (Schieder 1978, p. 2). Contemporary usages are usually traced to Maurice Halbwachs, who published his landmark Social...