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What is collective about collective memory? Two different concepts of collective memory compete-one refers to the aggregation of socially framed individual memories and one refers to collective phenomena sui generis-though the difference is rarely articulated in the literature. This article theorizes the differences and relations between individualist and collectivist understandings of collective memory. The former are open to psychological considerations, including neurological and cognitive factors, but neglect technologies of memory other than the brain and the ways in which cognitive and even neurological patterns are constituted in part by genuinely social processes. The latter emphasize the social and cultural patternings of public and personal memory, but neglect the ways in which those processes are constituted in part by psychological dynamics. This article advocates, through the example of traumatic events, a strategy of multidimensional rapprochement between individualist and collectivist approaches.
Collective memory, one might plausibly argue, often plays an important role in politics and society. Such claims are by now commonplace in scholarly as well as political discourses: images of the Vietnam war limit support for American military activities; memories of the Nazi period constrain German foreign and domestic policy; recollections of dictatorship shape the activities of transitional and posttransition regimes from Eastern Europe to Latin America; and Watergate has become the perennial reference point for all subsequent scandals in Washington, to name just a few possible such hypotheses. Indeed, the term collective memory has become a powerful symbol of the many political and social transitions currently underway, though there is also something broadly epochal about our seemingly pervasive interest in memory. New regimes seek ways to "settle" the residues of their predecessors, while established systems face a rise in historical consciousness and increasingly pursue a "politics of regret."1
Whatever its sources, the flurry of recent interest in and use of the term collective memory raises an important challenge to scholars interested in the diverse phenomena it apparently indicates. Before, or at very least as part of, offering the kinds of hypotheses mentioned above, we need to be clear about what exactly the term means. I do not mean that we need to "operationalize" collective memory postivistically in order to generate empirically verifiable covering laws. Rather, I mean that we need to inquire into the...