Collective Memory: How it is Formed and its Intersection with Cultural Trauma

Collective Memory and Cultural Influences
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Collective Memory and Cultural Influences
People’s lives are greatly influenced by their memories, whether collective or individual. Memories of past experiences inform how decisions about the present and future are made. According to Momennejad et al. (2019), memories, and more specifically, collective memories, create bonds among individuals in social/cultural groups, whether family, cultural or national groups. In addition, collective memory shapes the collective identity of a social/cultural group as well as its collective behavior. Different individuals have different memories of their past. However, their interactions with others influence how they remember their past as a collective within any given social/cultural group. In his work on collective memory, Halbwachs (n.d.) indicates that memories are collective because people recall their memories through others even when others did not witness the event. This is partly because people’s confidence in their memories varies depending on whether others can support these memories. When it comes to collective memory, many questions arise. For example, is collective memory the same as shared memory? Does it mean that everyone in a social/cultural group who shares that collective memory remembers their past the same way? These questions can only be answered if there is a clear understanding of collective memory. As such, the purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of collective memory, how it is formed, and its intersection with cultural trauma and identity as well as how it informs the future.
What is Collective Memory?
There lacks a specific definition of collective memory among scholars, and as such, there is no general consensus on the correct definition of the term. However, there are two common definitions of the term that have been incorporated by scholars based on their view of collective memories. Some scholars argue that collective memories are individual memories that are then shared among a social group to give them a collective identity (Hirst et al., 2018). As such, collective memories are considered to be shared memories that exist in the minds of individuals. This definition is more acceptable among psychological scholars because it allows them to approach collective memory from an individualistic perspective and analyze the role of human memory in shaping collective memories. In addition, this definition allows scholars to view collective memory as a past as experienced by individuals who lived through that past (De Saint-Laurent, 2017). When people share these individual memories, they then form a collective identity as a group.
However, others argue that the definition of collective memories as shared individual memories among a social group is not entirely true. For instance, Hirst and Manier (2008) indicate that collective memories are not shared individual memories but rather “social representations contained not in the head but the world.” This means that collective memory has more to do with how the social group represents itself and its past to the world and its efforts to...