Collective memory (Topical Term)

Work cat.: 2006010437: The politics of memory in postwar Europe, 2006: CIP galley (collective memory is created through communications with other members of society; creates bonds of solidarity with other people; tends to focus on catastrophes and their related traumas (e.g., slavery, Fascism, World War II, Holocaust, genocide, and human rights abuses); collectively shared representations of the past can be changed over time; focus on social, political and cultural factors; based on the society and its inventory of signs and symbols; subsumes individual experiences under cultural schemes that make them comprehensible and therefore meaningful; evolve through conflict and consensus; other terms: collective remembrance, social memory, cultural memory, national memory, public memory, vernacular memory, countermemory)

2006010427: Stern, S.J. Battling for hearts and minds, 2006: CIP galley (emblematic memory: a socially influential framework of meaning drawn from experience; draws out the great truths of a traumatic social experience; memory struggles about traumatic times that affected or mobilized large numbers of people create a symbolic process that blurs the line between the social and the personal; personal experience has acquired value as cultural symbol or emblem; if people demonstrate the connection between their own lives and a memory framework by "performing" memory in the public domain (through street rallies, protests, pilgrimages, media interviews, or legal petitions, etc.) a cultural echo effect becomes visible and adds credibility)

Centre national de la recherche scientifique WWW Home page, March 28, 2006: (the concept of collective memory stresses less the institutional and political uses of the past -- the memory "policies" and strategies -- than the socially shared representations of the past; can be defined as an interaction between the memory policies -- also referred to as "historical memory" -- and the recollections -- "common memory," of what has been experienced in common)

Wikipedia, March 28, 2006 (collective memory: term coined by Maurice Halbwachs; collective memory is shared, passed on and also constructed by the group, or modern society; the collective memory of a nation is represented in part by the memorials it chooses to erect)

LC database, March 28, 2006 (cultural memory; emblematic memory; historical memory; institutional memory; national memory; public memory; social memory)

Here are entered works on the representations of history that are shared within a society and used to form a group or national identity, as well as the means used to create them.