Individual and Social Memories

Individual and Social Memories Are we capable of borrowing and assimilating the memories of others, not only those of our nearest relatives and emotional connections but also of totally unrelated figures in the contemporary media? Might treating memories through documentation, correction and arrangement render them stale and dead? or might a historian counter this by siding or identifying with memories, learning from and even debating with them? This article discusses remembrance and memory with reference to their applications in academic discourse, particularly over the past few decades. Here, memory is mainly comprehended as a social and cultural phenomenon, firstly by scrutinizing individual memory and its psychological effects. Other topics include fictive and prosthetic memory, the shaping of individual memory by a variety of forces, and the transfer and internalisation of memory by later generations or across close communities. Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, Krzysztof Pomian, Alison Landsberg and Maurice Bloch are some of the theorists behind such analysis. The concept of collective memory is most often traced to the writings of Halbwachs which were published in the 1950s. He focused on the identity, knowledge and views shared by groups other than nations, since he considered the latter to be the object of history. History, he felt, takes over where tradition ends and social memory is abandoned. Nora, who took up Halbwachs’s torch around 1970, agreed: history is portrayed as a secular, analytical and critical discourse, whereas memory operates in a sacred domain. The article goes on to present the differing views on the relationship of individual memory, collective memory and history which are seen in the theories of Jan and Aleida Assmann and Jay Winter. While they both stress reciprocity, Assmann’s model of cultural memory involves events, texts and tangible structures that may become dormant but can be revived when a memory is activated. Finally, memory studies by Icelandic historians are addressed; these have for instance dealt with places of memory, national heroes, the 17th-century pirate raid and, especially in literature, the Second World War.