Collective memoryâs fallibility is well documented; its powers less so. How ironic it is that so much ink has been spilled on memoryâs incidental functionsâthe forgetting or ignoring of wrongdoing, legitimating and challenging power, exaggerating and underestimating virtuous acts, giving voice to the marginalizedâwhile its major function, to bring us into more direct contact with the past, has led to nothing significant in the way of theoretical explication. Collective memoryâs contribution to homo sapienâs survival is not its malleability; rather, memory enhances survival because it permits us to retain and recover so much of the past. Collective memory does not and cannot work perfectly, but if it did not work well enough for practical purposesâpurposes which make the human species uniqueâthen human society would be impossible.
This essay bypasses issues concerning the sources and consequences of collective memory: how it reflects the distribution of power, on the one hand, or, on the other, the patterns and moral demands of culture. Memory study needs a better conceptualization of its object. Although conceptual clarification accomplishes nothing in itself, it does invite inspection of memoryâs distinctive features, including the workings of memory in its collective aspect and the development and regulation of new lines of inquiry. Collective memory must be explored in its normal as well as pathological working, in how it gets things essentially right and preserves them over vast stretches of time.
The study of the pastâhow it is known, interpreted, and preservedâis currently in an ambiguous state. According to the prominent psychologist Daniel L. Schacter (1995), memory, by and large, reflects reality, âbut distortions can arise due to its constructive nature.â Schacterâs emphasis on distortion, so representative of the present state of collective memory scholarship, is symptomatic of disciplinary cultures plagued by excessive, sometimes pathological and often paralyzing cynicism. Research cultures are so determined to disclose memoryâs deficiencies that scholars like Schacter often choose topics in which deficiencies are most evident. Books and journals typically show memory at its worst because few editors and readers are interested in cases of accurate remembering. The consequence is a âbody of evidenceâ which exaggerates distortion and forgetting.
The situation should be rightly understood. Manâs capacity to twist history to his liking is universal and infinite. Denial of the great genocide of Armenians; conservative Japanese efforts to transform World War II into a defensive war; French nationalists transforming their forebearsâ collaboration with the Nazis into fierce resistance; the oblivion among Western Jews of Sholem-Shumuel Schwarzbard, David Frankfurter, and Herschel Greenspan, the first to stand up against their peopleâs tormentersâno one can claim that such efforts to remake the past by remembering or forgetting are rare.
Knowledge of memoryâs pathologies is indispensable to its understanding. However, the more investigators deliberately seek to identify these pathologies, the more they underestimate memoryâs power and, worse, raise the possibility that they might actually have an interest in doing so. In either case, knowledge of collective memoryâs normal working is underdeveloped.
The field of collective memory scholarship is itself a collective enterprise which transcends the achievements and shortcomings of its members. The excesses of this enterprise must be recognized. Few scholars, it is true, have spectacularly overstated the mutability of memory. But, when many scholars select topics where past realities are doubted and differently interpreted while few select topics where such realities are demonstrable and have a limited range of interpretations, collective memory as a field of study assumes a deconstructive perspective.
History, collective memory, and commemoration
Collective memory is often reputed to be an ambiguous and complex concept (e.g., Olick and Robbins 1998; Roediger and Wertsch 2008). In fact, few concepts are clearer or simpler, but only when recognized as an emergent entity linked to history and commemoration.
History
History is an ancient discipline and admits of many definitions; collective memory is a new discipline, and its scholars are most familiar with the definition proposed by Maurice Halbwachs ([1950] 1980). History, as Halbwachs defines it, seeks an objective standpoint to assess the causes and consequences of events. It is âsituated external to and above groupsâ and describes the past independently of contemporary opinions and conditions. Once established, Halbwachs believes, historical knowledge remains stableâits stream of facts and demarcations âfixed once and for allâ (pp. 80â1).
Collective memory
As history alone stands âabove groups,â memory, individual or collective, is situation-dependent. But collective memory must be assessed at two levels. The term âbiographicalâ memory refers to what individuals know, believe, and feel about themselves at earlier times in their lives. They do so by means of the brainâs storage and recall systems, which mediate information from parents, family members, friends and acquaintances, diaries, photo albums, recordings, birthdays, anniversaries, as well as other social frames, including dates of significant political, economic, cultural, and social events by which individuals locate their own past within the wider world (Halbwachs 1925, [1950] 1980: 22â47).
Individual memories are the fundamental units of collective memory, but collective memory itselfâthe topic of this essayârefers to the distribution throughout society of what individuals know, believe, and feel about the past, how they judge the past morally, how closely they identify with it, and how much they are inspired by it as a model for their conduct and identity.
Individuals remember no historical events or historical individuals before their birth or beyond their own experience, but it would be a mistake to conclude that the âmemoryâ of such occurrences is merely a metaphor that simplifies a complex phenomenon by representing it in familiar terms, for to conceive collective memory in this way fails to show what it is or what it does.
As a distributive entity whose key property is variation, collective memory denies the possibility of fully shared conceptions of the past. The adjective âcollectiveâ is not synonymous with consensual. That every distribution also has a central tendency makes total dissensus equally impossible.
Above all, similar distributions of thoughts and feelings about the past appear in communities widely dispersed and unknown to one another, which means they reflect a transcendent condition common to all. Similar differences across time reflect this same condition. For example, Abraham Lincolnâs renown in the memory of American white people has exceeded that of African Americans throughout the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. But whitesâ and blacksâ renown for Lincoln, although differing in magnitude, has fallen at similar rates. This confluence can only result from the same cultural current influencing individuals located in different times and different racial communities (Schwartz 2008: 149, 166â7; Schwartz 2000b). Collective memory must therefore be treated as an emergent entity, a social fact connecting separate and often distant communities.
Whether one considers differences at a given point in time or similar differences across time, collective memory is more than a framework for the interpretation of what individuals remember. The distribution of individual memories is itself a social context exercising direct effects on what individuals remember separately. In other words, collective memoryâs influence is discerned by isolating the dominant memories of a group from the memories of its individual members (see Blau 1960 on âstructural effectsâ).
A useful analogy to collective memory is public opinion. Opinions, like memories, can only be held by individuals and can only be assessed by questioning individuals, but when these opinions are aggregated they assume new significance. Collective opinion affects the way the average person thinks about matters of the day. It renders individuals more or less confident in their personal opinions. Public opinion and collective memory alike affect elections, the morality of given lines of conduct, even the price of goods and services.
Although collective memory and public opinion are similarly constituted and exert effects in similar ways, collective memory represents itself not only by what individuals, in the aggregate, believe about past incidents and persons but also by multiple forms of commemorative symbolism.
Commemoration
Commemoration, in contrast to history and collective memory, distinguishes events and persons believed to be deserving of celebration from those deserving of being merely remembered. The primary vehicles of commemoration include objects which lift from the historical record those events and persons representing a societyâs conception of its ideals and depravities. Commemorative writing includes eulogies, poems, plays, and commentaries motivated by reverence or enmity. Emphasizing the moral rather than factual aspects of the past, commemorative texts lean toward hagiography or condemnation and are thus distinguishable from analytic history and chronicling. Commemorative music consists of anthems, hymns, and songs of repentance, aligning melodic and harmonic structures and lyrics to historical entities in such a way as to dramatize their significance. Iconsâsigns resembling what they representâcommemorate the past by bringing it to visual presence through paintings, statues, prints, photographs, motion picture film, television, and online video. Monuments, including obelisks, antique temples, and other memorial structures, are designed to elevate the public imagination by dramatic reference to grand events and their men. Shrinesâbirthplaces, residences, state buildings, military headquarters, battle sites, and sites of individual deathâbring the individual into direct contact with the sacred. Shrines (from the Latin word scrinium, meaning case or chest) are sacred because they are, by definition, containers of relics, objects that, in contrast to mundane things, are associated with extraordinary events or used by extraordinary people. Commemoration is also realized in naming patterns which make the past ubiquitous by incorporating it into the identity of businesses, streets, cities, towns, counties, states, rivers, and mountains. Observances, including periodic performance of anniversary, centennial, and holiday rites, perform the same functionsâto maintain the memory of extraordinary events and persons and to preserve their essence within the collective consciousness. The âessenceâ of a collectively remembered entity refers to its âguiding patternâ (Shils 1981: 32â3) or, more concretely, the âbasic patternâ (Kroeber [1923] 1963: 1â27) from which variations, including memoryâs fads and fashions, emerge and fade.
The relations among history, commemoration, and collective memory can now be stated. Historyâs goal is to rationalize the past; commemoration and its sites, to sanctify it. History makes the past an object of analysis; commemoration, an object of commitment. History is a system of âreferential symbolsâ representing known facts and their sequence; commemoration is a system of âcondensation symbolsâ (Sapir 1930: 492â93) that simplifies events of the past and clarifies the moral sentiments they inspire. History, like science, investigates the world by producing models of its permanence and change; commemoration, like ideology, seeks to promote commitment to the world by producing symbols of its shortcomings as well as achievements and values (Geertz 1973: 193â233). History and commemoration are at once the sources, vehicles, and products of collective memory.
Nowhere is the interdependence among history, commemoration, and memory more evident than in the field of biblical studies. James Dunn (2003), prominent among historical Jesus scholars, declares that âthe quest for the historical Jesusâ can only be a quest for the âJesus rememberedâ by contemporaries and successors, men and women who told or wrote about him and so marked the memory of his life (p. 335). Dunnâs statement stands out in the context of successful efforts, beginning in the first decade of the twenty-first century, to integrate collective memory, commemoration, and biblical history studies (Kirk and Thatcher 2005), but these efforts are generalizable to all fields concerned with the past.
What makes events memorable?
Commemoration expresses the memorability of historical events. Social scientists with constructionist bents of mind believe, as did Georg Simmel ([1905] 1977) more than a century ago, that âif something is important, then importance must be âascribedâ or âattachedâ to it; in other words, it is important [and memorable] because the historian is interested in itâ (p. 163).
In contrast, the realist historian ascribes significance to an event because of its intrinsic qualities and consequences. Destructive and order-changing events, including the bombing of Hiroshima or the attacks of September 11, compel the realist historian to ascribe importance to them. So do creative events, such as the advent of Christianity and the colonization of the New World. As the consequences of these events cannot be defined out of existence, they become memorable.
How collective memory gets started
Although many collective memories go back to time immemorial, others have more recent and ascertainable starting points. Both categories of events may be equally memorable. Almost nothing was known about U.S. president Abraham Lincolnâs young adulthood when he was assassinated in 1865. But William Herndon, Lincolnâs former law partner, located and interviewed 250 informants, including many former New Salem, Illinois, residents who had known Lincoln while he lived there in the 1830s. Because thirty-five to forty years had passed since these people had last seen Lincoln (an interval equivalent to that separating Markâs Gospel from the Crucifixion), Herndon conscientiously weeded out distortions, rumors, and mistakes in order to estimate the truth value of their testimony (Wilson and Davis 1998). He then used this adjusted store of information to publish the most comprehensive biography up to that time of Lincolnâs early life (Herndon and Weik 1889).
In a second example, Katsuichi Honda ([1971] 1999) during the late 1960s interviewed survivors of the December 1937 to February 1938 Nanking Massacre. These illiterate victims could not have written their own stories, but their oral retellings more than thirty years later enlarged the records of the war crime tribunals.
Memories of Abraham Lincoln and the Nanking Massacre were transmitted orally across generations and have been retained long after the people who originally reported them have scattered or died. As these memories were passed on, they were modified, but their essence remained unchanged. How they remained unchanged is the problem.
Redundancy
The Lincoln and Nanking narratives show that memory of a single event may have more than one âoriginalâ version. Edmund Leach (1976) explains how this is so in his account of myth transmission:
Let us imagine the situation of an individual A who is trying to get a message to a friend B who is almost out of earshot, and let us suppose that communication is further hampered by various kinds of interferenceânoise from wind, passing cars, and so on. What will A do? If he is sensible he will not be satisfied with shouting his message just once; he will shout it several times, and give a different wording to the message each time, supplementing his words with visual signals. At the receiving end B may likely get the meaning of each of the individual messages slightly wrong, but when he puts them together the redundancies and the mutual consistencies and inconsistencies will make it quite clear what is âreallyâ being said (pp. 63â4).
In brief, the âmeaningâ of the message is not in any single one of its versions or carriers but in all versions and all carriers taken together. To return to the examples noted earlier: Abraham Lincolnâs friends did not fall silent when he died, and survivors of Japanâs invasion of Nanking did not forget their suffering after their city was liberated. However, the eyewitnesses need not have told the same story in order for a good estimate of the real Lincoln and the real Nanking atrocity to appear on the âreceiving end.â As Leach has demonstrated, the more varied the narrative, the more accurately it is conveyed and remembered. Such stories contain bits of information that are vague at the individual level but coherent in their assemblage.
