Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices

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.

[1]  Lewis A. Coser,et al.  Collective Memory , 2022, Progress in Brain Research.

[2]  A. Gell,et al.  The Glory of van Gogh: An Anthropology of Admiration. , 1998 .

[3]  Tom Engelhardt,et al.  History wars : the Enola Gay and other battles for the American past , 1998 .

[4]  Daniel Levy,et al.  Collective memory and cultural constraint : Holocaust myth and rationality in German politics , 1997 .

[5]  Paloma Aguilar.  Collective memory of the Spanish civil war: The case of the political amnesty in the Spanish transition to democracy , 1997 .

[6]  L. Rapaport,et al.  Jews in Germany after the Holocaust: Memory, Identity, and Jewish-German Relations. , 1997 .

[7]  Donald L. Donham,et al.  Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. , 1997 .

[8]  L. Roniger.  Human Rights Violations and the Reshaping of Collective Identities in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay , 1997 .

[9]  D. Barthel.  Historic preservation : collective memory and historical identity , 1997 .

[10]  Karen A. Cerulo.  Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation , 1997 .

[11]  Shaunna L. Scott,et al.  Sinners, Lovers and Heroes: An Essay on Memorializing in Three American Cultures@@@Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering , 1997 .

[12]  Bernard Rimé,et al.  Collective Memory of Political Events : Social Psychological Perspectives , 1997 .

[13]  Robin Wagner-Pacifici,et al.  The Glory of Van Gogh: An Anthropology of Admiration , 1997 .

[14]  M. Boyer,et al.  The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments. , 1996 .

[15]  Barry Schwartz,et al.  MEMORY AS A CULTURAL SYSTEM. ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN WORLD WAR I , 1996 .

[16]  David S. Wyman,et al.  The World Reacts to the Holocaust , 1996 .

[17]  B. Schwartz.  Introduction: The expanding past , 1996 .

[18]  Eviatar Zerubavel,et al.  Social memories: Steps to a sociology of the past , 1996 .

[19]  Robin Wagner-Pacifici.  Memories in the making: The shapes of things that went , 1996 .

[20]  M. Lamont,et al.  The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity , 1996 .

[21]  Matt K. Matsuda.  The Memory of the Modern , 1996 .

[22]  Raphael Samuel,et al.  Theatres of Memory , 1996 .

[23]  F. Donoghue,et al.  The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers , 1996 .

[24]  M. Wallace.  Mickey Mouse history and other essays on American memory , 1996 .

[25]  D. Matless,et al.  Theatres of Memory. Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture , 1996 .

[26]  M. Oliver.  HISTORICAL PRESERVATION AND IDENTITY: THE ALAMO AND THE PRODUCTION OF A CONSUMER LANDSCAPE , 1996 .

[27]  Diana Crane,et al.  The sociology of culture: emerging theoretical perspectives. , 1996 .

[28]  E. Newman.  Farewell Revolution: Disputed Legacies, France, 1789/1989 , 1996 .

[29]  T. McDonald.  The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences , 1996 .

[30]  N. ben-yehuda,et al.  The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel , 1998 .

[31]  J. Winter,et al.  Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. , 1997 .

[32]  M. Chew,et al.  Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. , 1995 .

[33]  Gary Alan Fine,et al.  The Construction of Nonpersonhood and Demonization: Commemorating the Traitorous Reputation of Benedict Arnold , 1995 .

[34]  Barbie Zelizer,et al.  Competing memories: Reading the past against the grain: The shape of memory studies , 1995 .

[35]  Iwona Irwin-Zarecka.  Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory , 1995 .

[36]  Yasuko Takezawa.  Breaking the Silence: Redress and Japanese American Ethnicity , 1995 .

[37]  B. Zelizer.  Review of Frames Of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory, by Iwona Irwin-Zarecka , 1995 .

[38]  J. Thompson.  The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media , 1995 .

[39]  D. Levine.  Visions of the Sociological Tradition , 1995 .

[40]  Ian Buruma.  The Wages of Guilt : Memories of War in Germany and Japan , 1995 .

[41]  T. Bennett.  The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics , 1995 .

[42]  P. Geary,et al.  Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium , 1996 .

[43]  Andreas Huyssen.  Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia , 1994 .

[44]  Harvard Sitkoff,et al.  History and Memory in African-American Culture , 1994 .

[45]  Jonathan Boyarin,et al.  Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace , 1994 .

[46]  Nina Tumarkin.  The Living And The Dead: The Rise And Fall Of The Cult Of World War II In Russia , 1994 .

[47]  E. Jelin.  The Politics of Memory , 1994 .

[48]  J. Gamson.  Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America , 1994 .

[49]  M. Boyer.  The city of collective memory : its historical imagery and architectural entertainments , 1994 .

[50]  C. Calhoun.  Social theory and the politics of identity , 1994 .

[51]  F. Fukuyama,et al.  The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan , 1994 .

[52]  K. Darian-Smith,et al.  Memory and History in Twentieth Century Australia , 1994 .

[53]  Ann Swidler,et al.  THE NEW SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE , 1994 .

[54]  Stephanie Coontz.  The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. , 1993 .

[55]  Scott A. Sandage.  A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Memory, 1939-1963 , 1993 .

[56]  Thomas T. Spencer,et al.  Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution". , 1993 .

[57]  P. Vidal-Naquet.  Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust , 1993 .

[58]  J. Vansina,et al.  History Making in Africa , 1993 .

[59]  P. Hutton,et al.  History as an art of memory , 1993 .

[60]  T. Segev.  The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust , 1993 .

[61]  B. Zelizer.  Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory , 1993 .

[62]  J. L. Goff.  History and Memory , 1993 .

[63]  M. Schudson.  Watergate In American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, And Reconstruct The Past , 1993 .

[64]  H. Gans.  Sociological amnesia: The noncumulation of normal social science , 1992 .

[65]  Steven R. Englund.  The Ghost of Nation Past , 1992, The Journal of Modern History.

[66]  R. Abrahams.  Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England. DAVID CRESSY , 1992 .

[67]  J. E. Young.  The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today , 1992, Critical Inquiry.

[68]  J. Assmann.  Das kulturelle Gedächtnis : Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen , 1992 .

[69]  Robert P. Snow,et al.  Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. , 1992 .

[70]  H. Rousso.  The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 , 1992 .

[71]  John E. Bodnar.  Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century , 1991 .

[72]  Michael Herzfeld,et al.  A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town , 1991 .

[73]  M. Kammen.  Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture , 1991 .

[74]  S. Gudeman,et al.  The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes , 1991 .

[75]  Barry Schwartz,et al.  The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past , 1991, American Journal of Sociology.

[76]  M. Carruthers.  The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture , 1991 .

[77]  B. Schwartz.  SOCIAL CHANGE AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY: THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF GEORGE WASHINGTON* , 1991 .

[78]  J. Coleman.  Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past , 1991 .

[79]  D. Thelen,et al.  Memory and American History , 1990 .

[80]  Homi K. Bhabha.  Nation And Narration , 1990 .

[81]  George Lipsitz,et al.  Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture , 1990 .

[82]  G. Mosse.  Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars , 1990 .

[83]  G. E. Lang.  Etched in Memory: The Building and Survival of Artistic Reputation , 1990 .

[84]  J. Bruner.  Acts of meaning , 1990 .

[85]  A. Giddens.  The consequences of modernity , 1990 .

[86]  Susan Buck-Morss,et al.  The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project , 1991, Versus.

[87]  D. Cressy.  Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England , 1989 .

[88]  P. Connerton.  How Societies Remember , 1989 .

[89]  N. Denzin.  Meaning and Modernity: Social Theory in the Pragmatic Attitude.By Eugene Rochberg-Halton. University of Chicago Press. 299 pp. Cloth, $40.00; paper, $14.95 , 1989 .

[90]  J. E. Young.  ‘After the Holocaust: National Attitudes to Jews’THE TEXTURE OF MEMORY: HOLOCAUST MEMORIALS AND MEANING , 1989 .

[91]  P. Connerton.  How societies remember: Contents , 1989 .

[92]  Michael Hughes.  The unmasterable past, history, holocaust and German national identity , 1989 .

[93]  Peter Novick,et al.  That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession , 1988 .

[94]  Gladys Engel Lang,et al.  Recognition and Renown: The Survival of Artistic Reputation , 1988, American Journal of Sociology.

[95]  A. M. Alonso.  The Effects of Truth: Re‐Presentations of the Past and the Imagining of Community , 1988 .

[96]  B. Latour.  The pasteurization of France , 1988 .

[97]  Iwona Irwin-Zarecka.  Neutralizing Memory: The Jew in Contemporary Poland , 1988 .

[98]  Anthony D. Smith,et al.  The ethnic origins of nations , 1988 .

[99]  I. Wallerstein.  The construction of peoplehood: Racism, nationalism, ethnicity , 1987 .

[100]  R. Hewison.  The heritage industry: Britain in a climate of decline , 1987 .

[101]  J. Goody.  The logic of writing and the organization of society: Ruptures and continuities , 1988 .

[102]  E. Rochberg-Halton,et al.  Meaning and Modernity: Social Theory in the Pragmatic Attitude , 1988 .

[103]  W. G. East,et al.  The Past Is a Foreign Country , 1986 .

[104]  M. Douglas.  How Institutions Think , 1986 .

[105]  E. Hobsbawm,et al.  The invention of tradition , 1986 .

[106]  Ann Swidler,et al.  Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life , 1986 .

[107]  K. Baker.  Memory and Practice: Politics and the Representation of the Past in Eighteenth-Century France , 1985 .

[108]  P. Wright,et al.  On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain , 1985 .

[109]  J. Pelikan.  Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture , 1985 .

[110]  L. Hunt.  Politics, culture, and class in the French Revolution , 1985 .

[111]  Gaye Tuchman,et al.  Fame and Misfortune: Edging Women Out of the Great Literary Tradition , 1984, American Journal of Sociology.

[112]  Sherry B. Ortner.  Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties , 1984, Comparative Studies in Society and History.

[113]  A. Forster,et al.  The enduring memory : time and history in a French village , 1984 .

[114]  Richard Johnson.  Making Histories: Studies in History Writing and Politics , 1983 .

[115]  David R. Maines,et al.  The Sociological Import of G. H. Mead's Theory of the Past , 1983 .

[116]  B. Anderson,et al.  Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism , 1986 .

[117]  Ulric Neisser,et al.  Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts , 1982 .

[118]  Raymond Williams.  The sociology of culture , 1982 .

[119]  M. Berman.  All that is solid melts into air : the experience of modernity , 1982 .

[120]  Fred D. Davis,et al.  Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. , 1980, Social Forces.

[121]  E. Zerubavel.  Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life , 1981 .

[122]  R. Wohl,et al.  The Generation of 1914 , 1979 .

[123]  Trond E. Jacobsen,et al.  The Collective Memory , 1980 .

[124]  M. Kammen.  A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination , 1979 .

[125]  Claude Lévi-Strauss,et al.  Myth and Meaning , 1978 .

[126]  Theodor Schieder.  The Role of Historical Consciousness in Political Action , 1978 .

[127]  M. Foucault,et al.  Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews , 1978 .

[128]  T. Connelly.  The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society , 1977 .

[129]  P. Fussell,et al.  The Great War and Modern Memory , 2015 .

[130]  Philippe Ariès,et al.  Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present , 1975 .

[131]  E. Hobsbawm.  THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THE PAST: SOME QUESTIONS , 1972 .

[132]  P. Berger,et al.  The Social Construction of Reality , 1966 .

[133]  F. Yates,et al.  The Art of Memory. , 1967 .

[134]  JOHN M. COLES,et al.  The Past in the Present , 1966, Nature.

[135]  T. Kuhn,et al.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. , 1964 .

[136]  W. Warner,et al.  The Living And The Dead: A Study Of The Symbolic Life Of Americans , 1959 .

[137]  G. Mead.  The Philosophy Of The Present , 1959 .

[138]  E. Erikson.  Identity and the life cycle , 1959 .

[139]  H. Butterfield,et al.  The Whig interpretation of history , 1931 .

[140]  M. Weber.  Science as a Vocation , 1919 .

[141]  E. Durkheim.  FROM THE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE , 1996, The New Economic Sociology.

[142]  K. Marx.  The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , 1852 .