On Collective Memory

Maurice Halbwachs, Lewis A. Coser

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226774497
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

How do we use our mental images of the present to reconstruct our past? Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) addressed this question for the first time in his work on collective memory, which established him as a major figure in the history of sociology. This volume, the first comprehensive English-language translation of Halbwach's writings on the social construction of memory, fills a major gap in the literature on the sociology of knowledge.

Halbwachs' primary thesis is that human memory can only function within a collective context. Collective memory, Halbwachs asserts, is always selective; various groups of people have different collective memories, which in turn give rise to different modes of behavior. Halbwachs shows, for example, how pilgrims to the Holy Land over the centuries evoked very different images of the events of Jesus' life; how wealthy old families in France have a memory of the past that diverges sharply from that of the nouveaux riches; and how working class construction of reality differ from those of their middle-class counterparts.With a detailed introduction by Lewis A. Coser, this translation will be an indispensable source for new research in historical sociology and cultural memory.Lewis A. Coser is Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the State University of New York and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Boston College.

I

THE SOCIAL FRAMEWORKS OF MEMORY

Preface

Recently thumbing through an old volume of the Magasin Pittoresque, I came across an extraordinary story. It was the story of a young girl nine or ten years old who was found in the woods near Châlons in 1731. There was no way of finding out where she had been born or where she came from. She had kept no recollection of her childhood. In piecing together the details she provided concerning the various periods of her life, one came to suppose that she was born in the north of Europe, probably among the Eskimos, and that she had been transported first to the Antilles and then to France. She said that she had twice crossed large distances by sea, and she appeared moved when shown pictures of huts or boats from Eskimo country, seals, or sugar cane and other products of the Americas. She thought that she could recall rather clearly that she had belonged as a slave to a mistress who liked her very much, but that the master, who could not stand her, had her sent away.¹

I reproduce this tale, which I do not know to be authentic, and which I have learned only at second hand, because it allows us to understand in what sense one may say that memory depends on the social environment. A child nine or ten years old possesses many recollections, both recent and fairly old. What will this child be able to retain if he is abruptly separated from his family, transported to a country where his language is not spoken, where neither the appearance of people and places, nor their customs, resemble in any way that which was familiar to him up to this moment? The child has left one society in order to pass into another. It seems that at the same time the child will have lost the ability to remember in the second society all that he did and all that impressed him, which he used to recall without difficulty, in the first. In order to retrieve some of these uncertain and incomplete memories it is necessary that the child, in the new society of which he is part, at least be shown images reconstructing for a moment the group and the milieu from which the child had been torn.

This example refers to an extreme case. But if we examine a little more closely how we recollect things, we will surely realize that the greatest number of memories come back to us when our parents, our friends, or other persons recall them to us. One is rather astonished when reading psychological treatises that deal with memory to find that people are considered there as isolated beings. These make it appear that to understand our mental operations, we need to stick to individuals and first of all, to divide all the bonds which attach individuals to the society of their fellows. Yet it is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories. If we enumerate the number of recollections during one day that we have evoked upon the occasion of our direct and indirect relations with other people, we will see that, most frequently, we appeal to our memory only in order to answer questions which others have asked us, or that we suppose they could have asked us. We note, moreover, that in order to answer them, we place ourselves in their perspective and we consider ourselves as being part of the same group or groups as they. But why should what appears to be true in regard to a number of our recollections not also be the case for all of them? Most of the time, when I remember, it is others who spur me on; their memory comes to the aid of mine and mine relies on theirs. There is nothing mysterious about recall of memories in these cases at least. There is no point in seeking where they are preserved in my brain or in some nook of my mind to which I alone have access: for they are recalled to me externally, and the groups of which I am a part at any time give me the means to reconstruct them, upon condition, to be sure, that I turn toward them and adopt, at least for the moment, their way of thinking. But why should this not be so in all cases?

It is in this sense that there exists a collective memory and social frameworks for memory; it is to the degree that our individual thought places itself in these frameworks and participates in this memory that it is capable of the act of recollection. It will be clear why this study opens with one or even two chapters on dreams² if one realizes that the person who sleeps finds himself during a certain period of time in a state of isolation which resembles, at least partially, the state in which he would live if he were in contact with no society. It is at this moment that he is no longer capable—nor has need—of relying on frames of collective memory. It is then possible to measure the operation of these frameworks by observing what becomes of individual memory when this operation is no longer present.

But if we explain in this manner the memory of an individual by the memory of others, are we not in danger of talking in circles? It would in effect be necessary in this case to explain how others remember, and the same problem would seem to come back again in the same terms.

If the past recurs, it seems of little importance to know whether it does so in my consciousness or in the consciousness of others. Why does it recur? Would it recur if it was not preserved? It is apparently not at all illogical that the classic theory of memory, after a study of the acquisition of memories, studies their preservation before giving an account of their recall. Now, if one does not want to explain the preservation of memories by cerebral processes (an explanation, by the way, which is rather obscure and gives rise to serious objections), it would seem that there is no alternative to admitting that memories as psychic states subsist in the mind in an unconscious state and that they can become conscious again when recollected. In this way, the past falls into ruin and vanishes only in appearance. Each individual mind would in this manner drag behind itself the whole array of its memories. One can now concede, if one so desires, that various capacities for memory aid each other and are of mutual assistance to each other. But what we call the collective framework of memory would then be only the result, or sum, or combination of individual recollections of many members of the same society. This framework might then serve to better classify them after the fact, to situate the recollections of some in relation to those of others. But this would not explain memory itself, since this framework supposes the existence of memory.

The study of dreams has already provided us with serious arguments against the thesis of the subsistence of memories in an unconscious state. But it is necessary to show that, outside of dreams, in reality the past does not recur as such, that everything seems to indicate that the past is not preserved but is reconstructed on the basis of the present.³ It is necessary to show, besides, that the collective frameworks of memory are not constructed after the fact by the combination of individual recollections; nor are they empty forms where recollections coming from elsewhere would insert themselves. Collective frameworks are, to the contrary, precisely the instruments used by the collective memory to reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society. The third and fourth chapters of this book, which deal with the reconstruction of the past and the localization of memories, are devoted to proof of this thesis.

After this study, largely critical in nature, where I nevertheless set out the bases for a sociological theory of memory, I turn to consider collective memory directly and in itself. It is not sufficient, in effect, to show that individuals always use social frameworks when they remember. It is necessary to place oneself in the perspective of the group or groups. The two problems, moreover, are not only related: they are in effect one. One may say that the individual remembers by placing himself in the perspective of the group, but one may also affirm that the memory of the group realizes and manifests itself in individual memories. That is why the last three chapters deal with collective memory as it manifests itself in the traditions of the family, of religious groups, and of social classes. There obviously exist other societies and other forms of social memory. But since I am obliged to limit myself, I focus on those social groups which appear most important to me, and which my previous research has allowed me to study in greater depth. This last reason explains why the chapter on social classes is longer than any of the others. I have used here some ideas expressed elsewhere and have attempted to extend this trend of thought in the present work.

1

Dreams and Memory Images

No real and complete memory every appears in our dreams as it appears in our waking state. Our dreams are composed of fragments of memory too mutilated and mixed up with others to allow us to recognize them. This is hardly an astonishing fact, any more than that in our dreams we do not find true sensations such as those which we experience when we are not asleep. Such sensations demand a certain degree of reflexive attention that is in tune with the order of natural relations that we and others experience. Likewise, if the series of images in our dreams does not contain true memories, this is because, in order to remember, one must be capable of reasoning and comparing and of feeling in contact with a human society that can guarantee the integrity of our memory. All these are conditions that are obviously not fulfilled when we dream. . . .

Let us summarize this analysis and the results to which it has led us. It is built entirely upon a fact which is opposed to a theory. This fact is that we are incapable of reliving our past while we dream,¹ and that if our dreams evoke images that have the appearance of memories, these images are introduced in a fragmented state. Only detached shreds of the scenes we have really experienced appear in dreams. There never appears in dreams an event accompanied by all its particularities, without a mixture of alien elements. There never appears in the eyes of sleeping consciousness a complete scene of events that occurred in the past. I have recorded examples that would seem to prove the contrary. Some were too inexactly and incompletely reported to allow one to make sense of them. In other cases one had grounds to suppose that between the events and the dream the mind had reflected upon its memories and, after having evoked them once or several times, had transformed them into images. Now is it the image or the memory that preceded and occasioned it that reappears in the dream? One alternative appears as likely as the other. Finally, there is the example of memories of early childhood which are forgotten during the waking state but appear in certain dreams: yet these are representations surely too vaguely formed by the child to give rise to true memories. Furthermore, in all these cases and in all imaginable dreams, the actual personality—not the personality as it once was—is actively involved in a dream. If this is the case, it stands to reason that the general aspect of events and persons reproduced is altered thereby. . . .

It is not in memory but in the dream that the mind is most removed from society. If purely individual psychology looks for an area where consciousness is isolated and turned upon itself, it is in nocturnal life, and only there, that it will most be found. Far from being enlarged, free of the limitations of waking life, and far from gaining in extensiveness what it loses in coherence and precision, consciousness appears severely reduced and in a shrunken state in nocturnal life. Almost completely detached from the system of social representations, its images are nothing more than raw materials, capable of entering into all sorts of combinations. They establish only random relations among each other—relations based on the disordered play of corporal modifications. They surely develop in a chronological order. Yet between the dream’s row of successive images and a series of recollections there is as much difference as that between a pile of rough-hewn materials with superimposed parts heaped one upon the other, only accidentally achieving an equilibrium, and the walls of an edifice maintained by a whole armature, supported and reinforced by neighboring edifices. The dream is based only upon itself, whereas our recollections depend on those of all our fellows, and on the great frameworks of the memory of society.

2

Language and Memory

No memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections. This is the certain conclusion shown by the study of dreams and of aphasia—those states where the field of memory is most characteristically narrowed. In these two cases, the frameworks become deformed, changed, and partially destroyed, albeit in two very distinct ways. Indeed, the comparison of dreams and aphasia allows us to highlight two aspects of social frameworks, or two kinds of elements of which they are composed.

There are many different forms of aphasia, many degrees of reduction of memories that are its effects. But it is rare than an aphasiac forgets that he is a member of society. He knows well that the people who surround him and who speak to him are as human as he is himself. He pays intense attention to what they say: he manifests, in regard to them, sentiments of timidity and anxiety. He feels diminished and humiliated, is distressed and sometimes irritated because he cannot manage to keep or to recover his place in the social group. Moreover, he recognizes persons and gives them a definite identity. In general, he can recall the principal events of his own past (which is not the case with amnesiacs). He can to some extent relive this past, even when he does not succeed in conveying to others a sufficiently detailed idea of it. Hence a whole part of his memory—the part which retains events and remembers persons—keeps contact with the collective memory and is under its control. He tries to be understood by others and to understand them—like a man in a foreign country who does not speak the language but knows the history of this country and has not forgotten his own history. But he lacks a large number of current notions. More precisely, a certain number of conventions no longer make sense to him, even though he knows that they exist and tries in vain to conform to them. A word heard or read by him is not accompanied by the feeling that he understands it sense; images of objects pass before his eyes without his being able to attach a name to them—to recognize their nature and role. Under certain circumstances he can no longer identify his thought with that of others or attain that form of social representation which is exemplified by a notion, a scheme, or a symbol of a gesture or of a thing. Contact between his thought and the collective memory becomes interrupted at a certain number of detailed points.

In the case of sleep, by contrast, the images that succeed each other in the dreamer’s mind—each one taken separately—are “recognized”: that is, the mind understands what they represent, understands their sense, and feels empowered to name them. As a consequence, even when they sleep people maintain the use of speech to the extent that speech is an instrument of comprehension. The dreamer distinguishes things from actions and puts himself in the perspective of society to distinguish them. One may imagine that a person who is awake and finds himself among dreamers who express clearly what they see in their dreams would understand these dreamers; there would exist a kind of embryonic social life. It is true that the person who is awake would not succeed in synchronizing the thought of one dreamer with that of another. He could not, as Pascal puts it, make the dream in company.¹ He could not create a dialogue out of two dreamers’ monologues. For this to take place, it would be necessary that the mind of the dreamers not be content with operating upon notions borrowed from the mind’s social milieu; their thoughts would have to flow according to the order which the thoughts of society follow in their course. In effect society thinks according to totalities; it attaches one notion to another and groups these into more complex representations of persons and events which in their turn are comprised in still more complex notions. The dreamer can well imagine people and facts that resemble those when he is awake. But in each particular case, he does not evoke all the characteristic details which constitute for him the personality of people and the reality of facts when he is awake. Those that he constructs to the inclination of his fantasy have no consistency, depth, coherence, or stability. In other words, the condition of the dream seems to be such that the dreamer, while observing the rules which determine the meaning of words as well as the meaning of objects and images considered in isolation, no longer remembers the conventions that establish the relative position in space and in the social milieu of places and events as well as of persons, and does not conform to these conventions. The dreamer cannot escape from himself in that he is not capable of considering, from the collective point of view, these totalities—people and facts, regions and periods, groups of objects and general images—which are in the forefront of the memory of society.

Let me add immediately that this distinction is altogether relative. These two aspects of memory, which present themselves in such dissociated form in aphasia and in dreams, are nevertheless closely linked. In the case of very pronounced aphasia it is difficult to know whether there subsists a memory of events, and up to what point the patient recognizes persons. In less severe cases of aphasia the patients, because they cannot tell of their past owing to their lack of words, and because their relations with others are diminished, are likely to maintain only a vague sense of time, persons, and places. Moreover, if the dreamer more or less recognizes the images which succeed one another in dreams, he has nevertheless only a superficial and confused view. Our dreams are so full of contradictions; we free ourselves in dreams of physical laws and social rules to such an extent that there exists only a rather distant relation between the ideas we construct even of isolated objects, and the notions we have of them in a waking state. Finally, where is the boundary between a simple and a complex notion, between an isolated object and a totality? The same group of facts or of persons might well be considered under one aspect or the other depending on the point of view. It is nevertheless true that if one loses contact with collective memory in these two different ways, there must exist in collective memory two systems of conventions which ordinarily impose themselves on people and even reinforce each other through association, but which can also manifest themselves separately. I have shown that the dreamer is no longer able to reconstruct the memory of complex events which occur over time and have an appreciable spatial extension. This is the case because he has forgotten the conventions that allow a waking person to encompass in his thought such totalities. On the other hand, he is capable of evoking fragmentary images and of recognizing them—of understanding their significance—because he has retained the conventions that allow the waking person to give names to objects and to distinguish one from the other by means of their names. Hence verbal conventions constitute what is at the same time the most elementary and the most stable framework of collective memory. This framework is however rather slack, since it fails to encompass all memories that are even slightly complex and since it retains only isolated details and discontinuous elements of our representations.

3

The Reconstruction of the Past

When one of the books which were the joy of our childhood, which we have not opened since, falls into our hands, it is not without a certain curiosity, an anticipation of a recurrence of memories and a kind of interior rejuvenation that we begin to read it. Just by thinking about it we believe that we can recall the mental state in which we found ourselves at that time. From our impressions of that time, what remains within us before this moment and at the moment of discovery itself? The general notion of the subject, some more or less characteristic symbols, some particularly picturesque, moving, or funny episodes, sometimes the visual memory of an engraving, or even of a page or of some lines might remain. In reality we would feel incapable of mentally reproducing all the events in their detail, the diverse parts of the tale in proportion to the whole, and the whole series of traits, indications, descriptions, propositions, and reflections that progressively inscribe a figure or a landscape in the mind of the reader, which allow him to penetrate to the heart of the matter. This is so because we feel what a gap continues to exist between the vague recollection of today and the impression of our childhood which we know was vivid, precise, and strong. We therefore hope by reading the book again to complete the former vague memory and so to relive the memory of our childhood.

But what happens most frequently is that we actually seem to be reading a new book, or at least an altered version. The book seems to lack pages, developments, or details that were there when we first read it; at the same time, additions seem to have been made because our interest is now attracted to and our reflections focused on a number of aspects of the action and the characters which, we well know, we were incapable of noticing then. These stories moreover seem less extraordinary to us, more formulaic and less lively. These fictions have been stripped of a major part of their prest...