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.

Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture

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

WELCOME TO THE MEMORY INDUSTRY. In the grand scheme ofthings, the memory industry ranges from the museum trade to the legal battles over repressed memory and on to the market for academic books and articles that invoke memory as key word. Our scholarly fascination with things memorable is quite new. As Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins have noted, "collective memory" emerged as an object of scholarly inquiry only in the early twentieth century, contemporaneous with the so-called crisis of historicism. Hugo von Hofmannsthal used the phrase "collective memory" in 1902, and in 1925 Maurice Halbwachs's The Social Frameworks of Memory argued, against Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, that memory is a specifically social phenomenon. But outside of experimental psychology and clinical psychoanalysis, few academics paid much attention to memory until the great swell of popular interest in autobiographical literature, family genealogy, and museums that marked the seventies. 1 The scholarly boom began in the 1980s with two literary events: Yosef Yerushalmi's Zakhor: jewish History and jewish Memory (1982) and Pierre Nora's "Between Memory and History," the introduction to an anthology, Lieux de me'moire (1984). Each of these texts identified memory as a primitive or sacred form opposed to modern historical consciousness. For Yerushalmi, the Jews were the archetypal people of memory who had adopted history only recently and then only in part, for "modern Jewish historiography can never replace an eroded group memory." For Nora, memory was an archaic mode of being that had been devastated by rationalization: "We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left." Despite or perhaps because of their elegiac tone and accounts of memory as antihistorical discourse, these works found an amazing popularity and were quickly joined by others. In 1989 the translation of Nora's influential essay in a special issue of this journal and the founding of History and Memory, based in Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, showed the crystallization of a self-conscious memory discourse. A decade later the scholarly literature brims with such titles as "Sites of Memory" or "Cultural Memory" or "The Politics of Memory. "2 The emergence of memory as a key word marks a dramatic change in linguistic practice. We might be tempted to imagine the increasing use of memor as the natural result of an increased scholarly interest in the ways that popular and folk cultures

On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse

Competing memories: Reading the past against the grain: The shape of memory studies

After showing that authenticity is socially constructed rather than an attribute of that which is called authentic, we examine the authenticity work involved in claiming authenticity and discuss the processes of authentication. We then explore the situations in which the quest for authenticity makes for change and conclude by showing that the salience of authenticity can change.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/joms_533.pdf?abstractid=758084&mirid=1

In Search of Authenticity

Nationalism has long excited debate in political, social and cultural theory and remains a key field of enquiry among historians, anthropologists, sociologists as well as political scientists. It is also one of the critical media issues of our time. There are, however, surprisingly few volumes that bring together the best of this intellectual diversity into one collection.

Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture

Citations

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

On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse

Competing memories: Reading the past against the grain: The shape of memory studies

In Search of Authenticity

The SAGE Handbook of Nations and Nationalism

Related Papers (5)

Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

The Invention of Tradition

The Past is a Foreign Country

Commemorations : the politics of national identity