Is There Such a Thing as ‘Collective Memory’?

Abstract

Memory scholars investigate how memories are generated on the level of individuals, groups, societies and nations, how they are constructed, transmitted or transformed by different media and how, within all of these domains, they are reconstructed retrospectively according to present norms, aims and visions. When analysing the social and cultural practices and texts by which a collectively shared sense of the past is generated, negotiated and communicated, the concept of ‘memory’ that we are working with needs to be defined and conceptual tools developed.