ABSTRACT
Collective memory has become an ubiquitous term dominating the public and scholarly imagination since the late 1980s. True to its multidisciplinary character there has been little agreement on a concise definition (Olick and Robbins 1998). Nevertheless, much of the literature draws on the works of Maurice Halbwachs, for whom memories are not simply mediated but structured by social arrangements and constituted in social frameworks. ‘It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories’ (Halbwachs 1992: 38). Studying and theorizing memory is thus not a matter of exploring the subjective mind or its neurological functions but of identifying shifting social frames within which memories are embedded. The forms memories take thus vary according to social organization, and the groups to which individuals belongs.
