Products, processes, and practices: a non-reificatory approach to collective memory.

In order to assess the generality of the collective memory concept and to underwrite discussion of its applicability to studies of early Christianity, this essay traces the development of "collective memory" from its origins in the crucible of the modern nation-state and as a tool for the disciplines that address that social form--mainly sociology and contemporary history. On that basis, the paper outlines a "practice" approach to collective memory, emphasizing the multiplicity and variability of mnemonic practices and products.

*********

The spread of the "collective memory" concept to research on Christian origins is a satisfying sign for those who have worked to develop and institutionalize the concept in its home disciplines, mainly sociology and contemporary history. By the same token, collective memory research is still a young field, and its adoption by scholars who draw regularly on centuries of the most profound learning raises insecurities: is "collective memory" ready for prime time? As an outsider to the field of biblical scholarship, I am naturally most concerned with how the concept's extension can strengthen theory and empirical research in my own areas of interest--not only what I call social memory studies (Olick & Robbins), but its application to the way contemporary states commemorate difficult pasts (e.g., Olick & Levy). But before reaping the benefits of cross-fertilization with a field as far and different from contemporary sociology (with its emphasis on the modern state) as social-scientific study of early Christianity, it is necessary to be as clear as possible about the debts of "collective memory" to its contemporary origin and focus of study. In this essay, therefore, I trace the development of "collective memory" within its historical context with the goal of teasing out the general from the particular. On this basis, I outline a "practice" approach I see as the most promising avenue for research in the field, a field my encounter with biblical scholarship has encouraged me to see in even broader dimensions.

Memory and Identity

Historical narration appears to be an important feature of collective life generally. Communities, particularly those too large for every individual to interact with every other individual, are, as one well-known formulation provocatively puts it, "imagined" (Anderson). But here "imagined" does not take its conventional sense of bogus or wishful (imaginary). Rather, to call a community "imagined" in this way is to refer to how it is cultural rather than natural: the cohesion of a group is a matter of collective imagining, of how the group understands itself, rather than the direct expression of biology, geography, or some other feature of nature. And this is where historical narration plays its crucial role.

The legitimacy of institutions depends on their capacity to sustain what the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1986) has called "naturalizing analogies." Our sense of collective identity often depends in part on our belief that those identities are ineluctable--that they are features of the environment rather than human products, which seem to us so much more mutable and insecure. So we employ rhetorics that reflect our desire for permanence and security. "Equipped with such an analogical base," Douglas writes, "'institutions appear as part of the order of the universe and so are ready to stand as the ground of argument." As another commentator puts it, somewhat more dramatically, "People shoot each other every day over the question of labels. And yet, the very people who do so tend to deny that the issue is complex or puzzling or indeed anything but self-evident" (Wallerstein & Balibar: 71). This sense of self-evidence, however, is made and remade by generations of people through intentional and unintentional actions that contribute to collective imagination. It is not simply given, though previous solutions do constrain subsequent ones.

One particularly potent form of naturalizing analogy is the organic metaphor of the social body, a style of "reasoning" that the Nazis promulgated, though they were by no means the first, nor unfortunately the last. However, more common, and in many ways more versatile, than directly biological analogies, which incidentally are also historical--bodies have lives; they are born and die, from "natural" or "unnatural" causes--are historical rhetorics. Storytelling about collective pasts serves the same naturalizing purpose as organic metaphor because it places present arrangements at the end of a long process of development, making them just as unavoidable as natural facts. Indeed, stories about the collective past are perhaps even more compelling than organic tropes because they place us in the moral debt of previous generations. Not only does an historical narrative tell us that who we are is not a matter of present circumstance or personal choice, it tells us that we owe allegiance to that identity because it is an expensive girl paid for with the blood, sweat, and tears of preceding generations.

Identity is certainly a matter of shared interests at a particular time, but that sharing depends in large part on a sense of common fate over time. Interests always involve an understanding of the past and a projection of the future, and this is exactly what shared communal narratives provide. For this reason, many analysts--and many nationalists, for that matter--have seen collective identity largely in terms of shared history. As one well-known work puts it,</p> <pre> Communities ... have a history--in an important sense are constituted by their past--and for this reason we can speak of a real community as a 'community of memory,' one that does not forget its past. In order not to forget the past, a community is involved in retelling its story, its constitutive narrative [Bellah et al: 153]. </pre> <p>As another prominent theorist (Stuart Hall, quoted in Huyssen: 1) puts it, "Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves in, the narrative of the past." This is just another way of saying that identities are projects and practices that individuals and groups undertake rather than essential and unchanging properties they possess. As the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre (218) writes, "all attempts to elucidate the notion of ... identity independently of and in isolation from the notions of narrative ... are [therefore] bound to fail."

All identities, personal and collective, are thus made in large part by telling and retelling stories, which define boundaries and suggest moral purposes. "The stories that make up a tradition," Bellah and his colleagues (153) have written, "contain conceptions of character, of what a good person is like, and of the virtues that define such a character." Who "we" are depends on who "we" were, not only because we see ourselves as continuous with previous generations, but because the substance of that continuity provides us with moral lessons (though not necessarily those intended by the earlier generations). Storytelling about the past is thus not merely something communities do; it is, in important ways, what they are. Rather than being a mechanism that underwrites cohesion, storytelling about the past "per-forms" the group by "re-member-ing" it. (This is one reason why storytelling is so often highly ritualized.)

Memory and Modernity

How, then, have we conventionally understood memory and its social forms? In the Renaissance, mnemotechnics (the art of memory) involved transforming transient experiences into internal "palaces" of memory, giving every time its place so that the teller of tales could locate the necessary piece with quick reference to a cognitive floor plan (Yates). Later, when the state got into the act, the structure of memory became a public affair, and the powerful externalized the past more and more in visible monuments to their "original" and "authentic" glories. Recent Western cultures apparently respond to temporal flux and the ephemerality of existence by trying to fix them in one way or another, transmuting time into space, turning the flow of history into what Schiller called the "frozen music" of architecture, be it internal or external. Reification, it seems, is the name of the game.

Additionally, since at least the middle ages, dominant groups have responded to the multiplication of perspectives on the past in their complexifying societies by seeking to control and homogenize them, to establish their version as definitive. For example, Pierre Nora writes in his self-consciously magnificent Lieux de memoire that</p>

<pre> From the standpoint of memory, France is not diversity but division. The insistence on diversity, at once problematic and providential,

corresponded to an era of state-centered national synthesis, in

which the endless invocations of unity reflected an imperious need ... to overcome powerful heterogeneous and contradictory forces

through a vast effort of central organization [21]. </pre> <p>Collective memory has thus become more and more a mechanism through which dominant groups seek to control their futures by linking them to pasts within self-consciously eschatological frameworks that legitimate present positions and programs. As time goes on, it seems as if this enterprise has become even more desperate: histories proliferate faster than the groups which "invent" them and, everyone seeks his place--and perhaps the place of others as well--in the historical sun. As we have already seen, frames that relate past, present, and future are especially efficient ways to naturalize and defend a particular world-view: they balk at dissent in their very conception, for they claim to reveal or describe ultimate reality rather than to offer a perspective on it. More simply, most political actors know that to control the past is to control the future. We over-totalize our visions of the past to eliminate dissent, secure identity, and control change.

While memory has always been a central medium of power, this seems to have been especially true in the Modern world, where we have invented elaborate apparatuses for producing and controlling the past and where we often play out present struggles in its fields. To be Modern is, in part, to have both the problem of the past and the means to address it. Macro-historical approaches explain this rise of memory in technological-determinist terms. For example, Goody and others speak of the rise of literacy leading to linear narrative and an associated distance from the past (and thus problem with it), while Anderson traces out its relation to nationalism, another essentially Modern form of consciousness. Many writers comment on the general acceleration of time in industrial society that leads to alienation not just from the collective past but from one's own as well. Le Goff, building on Leroi-Gourhan and others, argues for the importance of newly-expanded state apparatuses such as the archive, the library, and the census, among others, in defining the mnemonic character of Modern societies. Such technological explanations, however, while providing unique insights, are clearly only part of the picture, and they often over-draw the distinction between the "circular" temporality of "oral" cultures and the "linear" chronotype of "written" ones.

Modernity thus becomes a critical factor. As Matei Calinescu (2) puts it, "the idea of Modernity could be conceived only within a framework of a specific time awareness, namely, that of historical time, linear and irreversible, flowing irresistibly onwards." Not surprisingly, therefore, intellectuals in the late nineteenth century--a time in which the flow of history seemed to be careening out of control--paid serious attention to memory, be it individual or social, just as the political world around them was seeking to harness and exploit it. Writers like Proust, Bergson, and Freud contributed to the veritable obsession with memory they saw around them by excavating, theorizing, diagnosing, indeed propagating, their age's pervasive nostalgia (a medical condition), responding to it with a simultaneous fascination, engagement, and terror. Intellectual historians (Matsuda; Kern; Hutton; Terdiman) characterize this period emblematically in terms of its memory crisis and see writers of the time as appropriately preoccupied with historicity. Nonetheless, it often seems as if these writers, while appreciating the anguish associated with social and individual memory loss, viewed it as a temporary condition, one which new forms of thinking would overcome rather than exacerbate; they sought and proposed coping mechanisms to manage the mighty flow of accelerated experience. It is interesting in this regard that the so-called classical theorists of sociology (Shils; Terdiman), also writing around this time, paid only scant attention to the problem of memory. Within their basic modernization paradigm, memory belonged to simple societies while history belonged to complex ones. Though they remained largely silent on the issue (exceptions include Durkheim on primitive commemoration rituals at the end of Elementary Forms and Weber's brief reference to Tolstoy's remarks on how modernity transforms death in Science as a Vocation), we can extrapolate to say that they would have understood the memory crisis as a pain of transition, a kind of anomie that would disappear if the transition were successful.

In the last fifteen or twenty years, as memories and memory politics seem to be proliferating to ever-greater degrees and various groups challenge not just the substance of unitary pasts but their very idea, memory has once again become a major topic on our agenda, though we now approach it not only in ordinary language contexts or through literate reflections but from the established disciplines of social science and the academic humanities, which posture important analytical distance from the more embedded efforts of nineteenth-century intellectuals and the more partisan views of political contenders. While Proust, Bergson, Freud, and their contemporaries fretted and feted mnemonic reverie and ideologists argued not just over particular histories, but over whether the past in general was the bedrock of civilization (conservatism) or a hindrance to progress (progressivism), recent historiographical and sociological work on social memory has gone a long way to clearing away ideological blinders, to establishing the importance of pastness per se as a basic feature of social life (MacIntyre; Carr), and to understanding the historicity of memory itself (Yates; Nora; Matsuda; Le Goff).

Excellent work in both sociology and historiography has increased our understanding of how collective memory is produced, how it is determined, and what role(s) it plays in all sorts of social processes, from adding extra ammunition in political struggles to underwriting the identity of entire societies (for literature reviews, see Olick & Robbins; Kammen; Schwartz 1996; and Irwin-Zarecka). Sociologists and historians have not only analyzed whether and when memories are historically accurate (Knapp; Hobsbawm & Ranger), but have sought to untangle the complex operation of memory as both an independent and a dependent variable (Schwartz 1991). The goal has been both to describe what roles images of the past play within particular cases and to generalize and typologize the various possibilities, and the conditions under which they obtain, across cases. Social scientific analysts of memory, like social scientists generally, are thus caught between the conceptual vocabularies of nomothetic social science and idiographic description. Either they try to specify general conditions under which the past is cause or effect, durable or malleable, resource or constraint, or they tell only the story of how a particular group makes itself by narrating its past, where the vicissitudes of such narrations are peculiar to the group's unique folkways. The well-known problem with idiography is that it is limited by its rejection of generalization, its insistence that every case is unique and incommensurable, and that the analyst is not employing any pre-empirical concepts. To be sure, every case is, in some sense, unique--this is an historiographical truism. But even the least theorized narratives contain general theoretical constructs (albeit unacknowledged or denied). All accounts employ concepts and generalizations that draw on other contexts and preconceptions, thus giving lie to their claims of being atheoretical or particularistic. Moreover, as analysts we want more than purely local knowledge and, with proper caution, can successfully risk it (indeed, we cannot help risking it). In short, aspects of the memory problematic are clearly general and epochal, no matter how embedded they are in the peculiarities and vicissitudes of particular cases.

The problem with the typological approach to social memory is more profound. As historians of memory we recognize well the ways in which modern memory operates through the two related mechanisms of reification and over-totalization discussed above. Makers of memory, as we have seen, often seek to establish that a particular past is tangible and fixed, a "real" object rather than a creation of living beings struggling to make meaning, (re-)interpret identity, and exercise power; and, they often posture as if the past is incontestably unitary, as unitary as the social group they claim to represent and whose divisions they cannot admit without losing a sense of identity and the right to act in its name.

While seeing this clearly, however, theorists of social memory have to be especially careful about the ways they themselves employ these same fallacious operations. Like much analytical social science, we risk reducing and hypostatizing to the point of doing symbolic violence. When collective memory is treated strictly as either an independent or a dependent variable (or even alternately as both), as either a resource or a constraint, durable or malleable, rather than a constitutive feature of sense making through time (thus all and none of these), its status as a process rather than a thing is effaced. Pierre Nora, for example, has defended his epic meta-commemorative project by arguing that identity work is a hermeneutical process of continual reconstruction rather than the search for an essence; as Lawrence Kritzman writes in his Foreword to the English edition, "If a 'realm of memory' is to exist, it must have a capacity for metamorphosis." Thus, an analysis that aims at identifying causal factors enables the prediction or control of social outcomes by manipulating memory as an independent variable or by mitigating the effects of other independent variables on it. My argument here, however, is that this conventional analytical language, while having its uses for the purposes of modeling, must not be mistaken for an ontology of memory.

Much of the good empirical work on memory in different contexts has remained isolated for lack of shared theoretical vocabulary. General concepts, however, risk reifying memory for the purposes of "explaining" its roles in broader, ultimately more important contexts. There has, for this and other reasons, been relatively little in the way of general theories of memory or attention to memory by general theorists. To be sure, Giddens is an intriguing exception and some postmodern theorists have recently problematized memory in intriguing ways, but they do so as part of a rejection of conventional social scientific concerns, not as a way to refine or fulfill them. So even the best case studies spend a great deal of time and energy re-inventing concepts and methods from and for their cases. Social memory studies is in this respect a pre-paradigmatic enterprise--with the exception of a few common references. More shared vocabulary might go a long way to clearing the ground for comparative work and general theory. But by its very nature, attention to social memory poses unique problems for such comparative and general work. Our reformulation, therefore, must be more fundamental.

Approaching Memory Sociologically

Historical time, which we experience through memory is, as Marc Bloch put it, "the very plasma in which events are immersed and the field within which they become intelligible." Identity--self-sameness through time--is always a relation between past and present established through the media of memory. Memory thus cannot be divided off from life to be conceptualized as a variable without loosing something of its meaning and operation. As Wagner-Pacifici (302) puts it, our subject is the "exploration of forms of memorization or, communication through time," which "poses the question of meaning as a paramount task." Memory is not a thing, but a process. Indeed, because all social life is process and flux, memory is particularly central.

Social studies of memory--as much if not more than other social scientific enterprises--thus seem to me to require a processual or relational vocabulary to appreciate the ineffable mediality of memory in complex social processes; for memory is not the cause of life, nor its effect, nor even an isolable feature of it, but its very form--relationality in time. As James Joyce's Stephen Daedalus puts it, with characteristically obscure syntax, "I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under ever-changing forms." With memory, meaning is both the medium and the outcome simultaneously, it cannot be separated out as an independent or a dependent variable, because doing so would be to deny both its temporal relationality and that of other "variables." Clearly, no social mechanics will suffice.

But that does not mean we cannot develop transposable strategies, strategies that will allow us to compare and contrast different cases so that we might avoid the limits of parochialism and illuminate the particularities of given cases in new ways. Without a sufficiently processual conceptual repertoire, we risk crossing over into the lay methodology of the memory makers, helping to establish the terms of their battles and perhaps even providing analytical technologies useful within them, rather than understanding the genesis of their discourse's operations and its transitive status as meaning. A most vivid example of this analytical conflation is displayed in nineteenth-century German historicists' virulent nationalism, where the line between historiography and advocacy disappeared entirely (see Iggers). The same was the case for the American historical profession in the late nineteenth century, when sectionalism was the rule in readings of reconstruction, as well as during World War One when patriotism compromised the very notion of objectivity (see Novick). With a more processual analytical vocabulary, however, we should be able to approach both memory's particulars and its generalities in such a way that we neither hypostatize its operations nor fail to see beyond particular cultural horizons. How?

Intellectual Frameworks

Like sociology in general, a sociology of retrospection is concerned with how what we say and do--as individuals and together--is shaped by a not often obvious--and always changing--combination of traditions, fantasies, interests, and opportunities. One problem, however, has been finding useful concepts that do not deny important distinctions among kinds of retrospection, whether these distinctions are epistemological, institutional, or substantive. Intellectual frameworks and their attendant concepts have proliferated in recent years. In France, for instance, the so-called "history of mentalities" has pursued a "collective psychology" approach to cultural history. Its aim--which it formulates in distinction to the high-mindedness of intellectual history and the economic and demographic loci of social history--is to grasp "the imaginary and collective perceptions of human activities as they vary from one historical period to another" (Chartier: 27). Commemoration and historical imagery, in this approach, are parts of "the whole complex of ideas, aspirations, and feelings which links together the members of a social group" (Lucien Goldman, quoted in Chartier: 32) and are thus important topics for investigation.

In Germany, many historians and social scientists have revived an older, philosophical concept of "historical consciousness" (Geschichtsbewusstsein) to guide analysis (e.g Rusen). In some versions--particularly those steeped in Hegelian abstractions about historical spirits and cultural essences unfolding in history--"historical consciousness" is nearly synonymous with collective identity per se (e.g., Lukacs). In other versions, "historical consciousness" refers more narrowly to the production of, and debate over, images of the past in political processes. Here "historical consciousness" is often linked to the label "the politics of history" (Geschichtspolitik), which indicates both the role of history in politics and the role of politics in history (e.g., Wolfrum).

Yet another camp employs the awkward yet useful term "mnemohistory," which "Unlike history proper ... is concerned not with the past as such, but only with the past as it is remembered" (Assman). Mnemohistory calls for a theory of cultural transmission, one that helps us understand history not as "one damned thing after another," as Arthur Lovejoy put it, nor as a series of objective stages, but as an active process of meaning-making through time, "the ongoing work of reconstructive imagination." Indeed, according to the term's inventor (Assman), it "is only through mnemohistorical reflection that history ... becomes aware of its own function as a form of remembering."

There are also other terms, such as "political myth" (Tudor), "tradition" (Shils), "public history" (Benson, Brier, & Rosenzweig), "oral history" (Passerini, Thompson), and "heritage" (Lowenthal), among others. Each of these terms has its own inflection of the issue, and several label distinct scholarly literatures. While many authors using these terms have adopted "collective memory" as a more general term or label for an area of concern, others have objected that collective memory's conceptual contribution is not positive. Gedi and Elam (30), for instance, call its use "an act of intrusion ... forcing itself like a molten rock into an earlier formation ... unavoidably obliterating fine distinctions." As we will see, I agree with the charge that collective memory over-totalizes a variety of retrospective products, practices, and processes. Nevertheless, as a sensitizing rather than operational concept, I believe it raises useful questions when taken as a starting point for inquiry rather than as an endpoint.

Despite this array of different concepts and traditions--all useful in their ways--the overwhelming majority of discussions in recent years has proceeded under the rubric of "collective memory." Like "mentality," "historical consciousness," "mnemohistory" and other terms, "collective memory"--or, alternatively, collective or social remembering--directs our attention to issues at the heart of contemporary political and social life, including the foundations of group allegiance and the ways we make sense of collective experience in time. But it does so, I think, in particularly salutary ways, perhaps paradoxically because of its very breadth and imprecision. Because of its general sensitizing powers, I use "collective memory" as the guiding concept for my own work (e.g. Olick 1999, 2005). However, we still need to spend some time exploring what kinds of sensitivities "collective memory" creates, and why.

Collective Memory

Memory, our common sense tells us, is a fundamentally individual phenomenon. What could be more individual than remembering, which we seem to do in the solitary world of our own heads as much as in conversation with others? Even when we "reminisce," we often experience this as a process of offering up to the external world the images of the past locked away in the recesses of our own minds. We can remember by ourselves in the dark at night, as we drive alone along the highway, or as we half-listen to a conversation about something else. By the same token, lesions of the brain--caused perhaps by Alzheimer's disease or physical injury--are surely internal rather than social defects preventing us as individuals from remembering. Memory--and by extension forgetting--thus seems not just fundamentally individual, but quint-essentially so, as primal and lonely as pain. What can we possibly mean, then, when we refer to social or collective memory?

Memory has been a major preoccupation for social thinkers since the Greeks (see especially Coleman). Yet it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that a distinctively social perspective on memory became prominent. The first explicit use of the term I have ever seen was by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1902, who referred to "the damned up force of our mysterious ancestors within us" and "piled up layers of accumulated collective memory" (cited in Schieder), though this was a poetic allusion rather than the seed of a sociological theory of memory. Strasbourg historian Marc Bloch used the term "collective memory" in 1925 as well as in a later book on feudal society. Yet, contemporary use of the term collective memory is usually traced largely to his Strasbourg colleague, the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who published his landmark Social Frameworks of Memory (Les Cadres Sociaux de la memoire) in 1925. Halbwachs' interest in memory combined insights from two important figures in late nineteenth century France, philosopher Henri Bergson and sociologist Emile Durkheim, both of whom were concerned--though in very different ways--with so-called "advances" of European "civilization."

In the late nineteenth century, powerful forces were pushing to overcome subjectivity, judgment, and variability in the name of science, organization, and control. Political and commercial e1ites, for instance, viewed the diversity of local times as a growing problem. Like different gauge railroad tracks, the diversity of times was an impediment to increasingly complex and widespread commerce and political power (Kern). As a result, e1ites worked hard to standardize time in terms of homogeneous criteria. One good example was the establishment of time zones and Greenwich Mean Time. Scientific advances--which discovered regularities behind apparent variations--lent support to these unifying and standardizing projects. The philosophical tradition, moreover, had long favored objectivist accounts, in which empirical variety is a mere illusion behind which lie perfect conceptual unities.

Influenced in part by Romantic perceptions that this new conceptual universe was somehow sterile, the philosopher Henri Bergson rejected objectivist accounts, arguing that subjectivity is the only source of true philosophical knowledge. Thinkers like Proust and Freud became preoccupied with memory because it seemed to them that precisely in an age in which history, biography, and other forms of record keeping were ordering history in an increasingly objective and complete manner, meaningful connections to our pasts, personal or shared, seemed to be waning (Bergson, Terdiman, and Kern). Similarly, Bergson was concerned with increasing rationalization and the unifying force of science. Stressing subjectivity, Bergson undertook a radical philosophical analysis of the experience of time, highlighting memory as its central feature. Against accounts of memory as passive storage, he characterized remembering as active engagement. Against accounts of memory as the objective reproduction of the past, he characterized remembering as fluid and changing. Bergson thus posed the problem of memory in particularly potent ways for Halbwachs and other later theorists. His work on memory drew Halbwachs' attention to the difference between objective and subjective apprehensions of the past. Whereas new forms of record keeping measured time and recorded history in increasingly uniform and standardized ways, individual memory was still highly variable, sometimes recording short periods in intense detail and long periods in only the vaguest outline. Following Bergson, the variable experience of memory was for Halbwachs the real point of interest.

Like Bergson, Durkheim too considered objectivist accounts of time and space unjustified. Unlike Bergson, however, Durkheim located the variability of perceptual categories not in the vagaries of subjective experience, but in differences among forms of social organization. Where Bergson rejected objectivist and materialist accounts of time in favor of the variability of individual experience, Durkheim rejected such accounts by attending to the ways different societies produce different concepts of time. Forms of time, like other basic categories, derive neither from transcendental truths nor from material realities, but are social facts, varying not according to subjective experience but according to the changing forms of social structure. Standardization and objectivism, according to Durkheim, were central ways modernizing societies were responding to increasing levels of differentiation and individuation. By connecting cognitive order (time perception) with social order (division of labor), Durkheim thus provided for Halbwachs a sociological framework for studying the variability of memory raised by Bergson.

Halbwachs' Legacies

In his seminal work on collective memory, Halbwachs drew from Bergson's problematization of time and memory, but he addressed the issue through Durkheim's sociological lens. Memory, for Halbwachs, is first of all framed in the present as much as in the past, variable rather than constant. Studying memory, as a result, is not a matter of reflecting philosophically on inherent properties of the subjective mind but of identifying its shifting social frames. Moreover, for Halbwachs memory is a matter of how minds work together in society, how their operations are not simply mediated but are structured by social arrangements: "It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories." The forms memory takes vary according to social organization, and the groups to which any individual belongs are primary even in the most apparently individual remembering. But memory, following Bergson, is also a central part of social and psychic life, not just an interesting aspect of social structure.

There are, nevertheless, a number of distinct aspects of collective remembering in Halbwachs, and different kinds of collective memory research since then have emphasized various of these (for a more elaborated version of this argument, see Olick 1999 and Olick & Robbins). First, Halbwachs argued that it is impossible for individuals to remember in any coherent and persistent fashion outside of their group contexts; these are the necessary social frameworks of memory (for connections to Goffmanian frame analysis, see Irwin-Zarecka). His favorite examples include the impossibility of being certain of any particular childhood memory. As adults, we cannot say whether the memory of a childhood experience is more the result of stored features of the original moment or some kind of compilation out of stored fragments, other people's retellings, and intervening experiences. The social frameworks in which we are called on to recall are inevitably tied up with what and how we recall. Groups provide us the stimulus or opportunity to recall; they shape the ways in which we do so, and often provide the materials. Following this argument, the very distinction between the individual and social components of remembering ceases to make absolute sense. "There is no point," Halbwachs argued, "in seeking where ... [memories] are preserved in my brain or in some nook of my mind to which I alone have access: for they are recalled by me externally, and the groups of which I am a part at any given time give me the means to reconstruct them.... " All individual remembering, that is, takes place with social materials, within social contexts, and in response to social cues. Even when we do it alone, we do so as social beings with reference to our social identities.

If all individual memory is socially framed by groups, however, groups themselves also share publicly articulated images of collective pasts. For this reason, Halbwachs distinguished between "autobiographical memory" and "historical memory." The former concerns the events of one's own life that one remembers because they were experienced directly. The latter refers to residues of events by virtue of which groups claim a continuous identity through time. "Historical memory" of the Civil War, for instance, is part of what it means to be an American, and is part of the collective narrative of the United States. But nobody still has "autobiographical memory" of the event. This is the more authentically Durkheimian moment in Halbwachs' theory; Durkheim developed a sociological approach to what he called "collective representations" symbols or meanings that are properties of the group whether or not any particular individual or even particular number of individuals shares them. In this sense, very few people may be able to identify key figures or events of the Civil War, but those figures or events may nonetheless be important elements of American collective memory. Whereas survey researchers may conclude that a particular image or event not remembered by very many people is no longer a part of the collective memory, for a true Durkheimian culture is not reducible to what is in people's heads.

Representations themselves, from this analytical perspective, are not to be evaluated in terms of their origins, resonance, or distribution in any particular population. Collective memory, in this sense, has a life of its own, though this need not be as metaphysical as it sounds. Work emphasizing the genuinely collective nature of social memory has demonstrated that there are longterm structures to what societies remember or commemorate that are stubbornly impervious to the efforts of individuals to escape them; powerful institutions, moreover, clearly support some histories more than others, provide narrative patterns and exemplars of how individuals can and should remember, and stimulate public memory in ways and for reasons that have little to do with the individual or aggregate neurological records. Without such a collectivist perspective, after all, it is difficult to provide good explanations of mythology, tradition, and heritage, among other long-term symbolic patterns.

Durkheimian approaches are often accused--and often rightly so--of being radically anti-individualist, conceptualizing society in disembodied terms, as an entity existing in and of itself, over and above the individuals who comprise it. Another important feature of Durkheimian sociology can be an unjustified assumption that these societies--constituted by collective representations which individuals may or may not share--are unitary. A Durkheimian approach to collective memory, thus, can lead us to attribute one collective memory or set of memories to entire, well-bounded societies. (All such critiques, however, are based on something of a straw man version of Durkheim's positions.) While not usually--though sometimes--articulated in terms of Durkheimian theory, many contemporary political discussions about cultural heritage share such assumptions. Commemoration of certain historical events is essential, so the argument goes, to our sense of national unity; without substantial consensus on the past, social solidarity is in danger. There is either a "deep structure" or stored up legacy of shared culture which binds us together; without its pervasive influence, there is no "us" to bind.

Halbwachs was in many ways more careful than his great mentor, placing most of his emphasis on the multiple social frameworks of individual memories (Coser). He characterized collective memory as plural, showing that shared memories can be effective markers of social differentiation. Nevertheless, Halbwachs did lay the groundwork for a genuinely collective, in addition to socially-framed individualist, approach to memory. In some contrast to his discussion in which what individuals remember is determined by their group memberships but still takes place in their own minds, Halbwachs also focused on publicly available commemorative symbols, rituals, and technologies. As I just noted, some later theorists treat these symbols and representations as a vast cultural storehouse; this is a wise move, since the items in a cultural storehouse are real. Others, however, take an additional step and hypothesize a deep cultural structure, a set of rules, patterns, and resources, that generates any particular representation. In even more extreme versions, the structure of collective meanings is treated as not as conscience collective, but as a "collective unconsicous," which does indeed have mystical overtones. One need not become a metaphysician, however, to believe there is a dimension of collective remembering that is organized without direct reference to individuals.

From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and Products

Perhaps the solution is to recognize that all of these factors are in play at all times: collective representations (publicly available symbols, meanings, narratives and rituals), deep cultural structures (generative systems of rules or patterns for producing representations), social frameworks (groups and patterns of interaction), and culturally and socially framed individual memories. The kinds of questions one asks when looking at collective representations as collective representations, after all, are distinct from those one asks when looking at the individual reception of such representations or at their production. Cognitive storage processes, moreover, are pretty obviously different from official storytelling. And different theories have shown how cultural patterns (e.g., time consciousness) produce social structures (e.g., strong national identities), though other theories show just as well exactly the opposite, that social structures produce cultural patterns (e.g. memory is structured generationally).

But are individual memory, social and cultural frameworks, and collective representations really separate things? The term "collective memory"--with its sometimes more, sometimes less clear contrast to individual memory--seems to imply just that! But only if we forget that collective memory is merely a broad, sensitizing umbrella, and not a precise operational definition. For upon closer examination, collective memory really refers to a wide variety of mnemonic products and practices, often quite different from one another. The former (products) include stories, rituals, books, statues, presentations, speeches, images, pictures, records, historical studies, surveys, etc.; the latter (practices) include reminiscence, recall, representation, commemoration, celebration, regret, renunciation, disavowal, denial, rationalization, excuse, acknowledgment, and many others. Mnemonic practices--though occurring in an infinity of contexts and through a shifting multiplicity of media--are always simultaneously individual and social. And no matter how concrete mnemonic products may be, they gain their reality only by being used, interpreted, and reproduced or changed. To focus on collective memory as a variety of products and practices is thus to reframe the antagonism between individualist and collectivist approaches to memory more productively as a matter of moments in a dynamic process. This, to me, is the real message of Halbwachs' diverse insights.

Three Principles for the Analysis of Collective Memory

The foregoing excursus on Halbwachs and the origins of the collective memory concept may appear rather abstract, but it leaves us with quite concrete principles about what to look for in the diverse landscapes of memory, and about how to treat the materials we find there. First, despite the penchant of many politicians, commentators, and scholars for invoking the collective memory of an entire society, collective memory is far from monolithic. Collective remembering is a highly complex process, involving numerous different people, practices, materials, and themes. One must be careful, therefore, not to presume at the outset that every society has one collective memory or that it is obvious and unproblematic how (and which) public memories will be produced. It is important to remember the different demands on participants in different discursive fields, such as politics or journalism, religion or the arts, and to appreciate subtleties of context and inflection. Doing so, of course, makes it difficult to judge a whole epoch or a whole society. For me, this is no loss.

Second, the concept of collective memory often encourages us to see memory either as the authentic residue of the past or as an entirely malleable construction in the present. Schwartz (2000) and Schudson have articulated and responded to this analytical matrix. "Traditionalist" models, for instance, assimilate collective memory to heritage, patrimony, national character, and the like, and view collective memory as a bedrock for the continuity of identities. They often ask how collective memory shapes or constrains contemporary action. On the other hand, "Presentist" models assimilate collective memory to manipulation and deception, a mere tool in the arsenal of power. They ask how contemporary interests shape what images of the past are deployed in contemporary contexts and see memory as highly variable. Neither of these views, however, is a particularly insightful way to understand the complexities of remembering, which is always a fluid negotiation between the desires of the present and the legacies of the past. What parts past and present, history and memory, respectively play in this negotiation--and how they are related--is as much an empirical question as it is a theoretical one. As Barry Schwartz says (personal communication):</p> <pre>

Sharp opposition between history and collective memory has been

our Achilles Heel, causing us to assert unwillingly, and often despite ourselves, that what is not historical must be "invented"

or "constructed"--which transforms collective memory study into a kind of cynical muckraking. </pre> <p>And third--though this may just be another way of stating the first two principles--we must remember that memory is a process and not a thing, a faculty rather than a place. Collective memory is something--or rather many things--we do, not something--or many things--we have. We therefore need analytical tools sensitive to its varieties, contradictions, and dynamism. How are representations of and activities concerning the past organized socially and culturally? When and why do they change? How can we begin to untangle the diverse processes, products, and practices through which societies confront and represent aspects of their pasts?

To think in terms of mnemonic practices and products is a first step. But future work still needs to inquire further into the question of the mechanisms of mediation between past and present, of collective memory's continuities and transformations, and of the proper ways to grasp these analytically. In this endeavor, it is certain that the wider we cast our nets--whether to the fleeting products of modern political machines with their endless prolif eration of images and vast technologies of communication--or to the early period of Christian tradition--with its finite body of enduring texts and pre-modern combination of oral and written forms--the more profound will be our general theory. The application of the collective memory framework in biblical studies will thus clearly be a two way street.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of of Nationalism. Revised Edition. New York, NY: Verso.

Assman, Jan. 1998. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, & Steven M. Tipton. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Commitment and Individualism in American Life. New York, NY: Harper and Row.

Benson, Susan Porter, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig, eds. 1996. Presenting the Past: Essays in History and the Public. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Bergson, Henri. 1990. Matter and Memory. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books.

Bloch, Marc. 1925. Memoire collective, tradition, et coutume: a propos d'un livre. Revue Synthese 40.

Calinescu, Matei. 1987. Five Faces of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Carr, David. 1991. Time, Narrative, and History. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Chartier, Roger. 1988. Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Coleman, Janet. 2005. Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Coser, Lewis. 1992. Introduction: Maurice Halbwachs, 1875-1945. In Halbwachs, On Collective Memory. Chicago, IL: Univeristy of Chicago Press.

Douglas, Mary. 1986. How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Gedi, Noa and Yigal Elam. 1996. Collective Memory--What Is It? History and Memory 8/1, (Spring/Summer): 30-50.

Giddens, Anthony. 1991. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Goody, Jack. 1986. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Hobsbawm, Eric, & Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Hutton, Patrick 1993. History as an Art of Memory. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

Huyssen, Andreas. 1995. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York, NY: Routledge.

Iggers, George. 1983. The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present. Revised Edition. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona. 1994. Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory. Somerset, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Kammen, Micahel. 1995. Review of Frames of Remembrance. History and Theory 34 (3): 245-61.

Kern, Stephen. 1983. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Knapp, Steven. 1989. Collective Memory and the Actual Past. Representations 26 (Spring): 123-49.

Le Goff, Jacques. 1992. History and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Leroi-Gourhan, Andre. 1993. Gesture and Speech. Translated by Arthur Berger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lowenthal, David. 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Lukacs, John. 1994. Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past. Somerset, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Second Edition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Matsuda, Matt K. 1996. The Memory of the Modern. New York. NY: Oxford University Press.

Nora, Pierre. 1989. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de memoire. Representations 26 (Spring): 1-21.

Novick, Peter. 1988. That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Olick, Jeffrey K. 2005. In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943--1949. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

1999. Collective Memory: The Two Cultures. Sociological Theory 17/3 (November): 333-48.

Olick, Jeffrey K., &Joyce Robbins. 1998. Social Memory Studies: From "Collective Memory" to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices. Annual. Review of Sociology 24: 105-40.

Olick, Jeffrey K., & Daniel Levy. 1997. Collective Memory and Cultural Constraint: Holocaust Myth and Rationality in West German Politics. American Sociological Review 62 (December): 921-36.

Passerini, Luisa, ed. 2005. Memory and Totalitarianism. Somerset, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Rusen, Jorn, ed. 2001. Geschichtsbewusstsein: Psychologische Grundlagen, Entwicklungskonzepte, Empirische Befund. Vienna, Austria: Bohlau Verlag.

Schieder, Theodor. 1978. The Role of Historical Consciousness in Political Action. History and Theory 17:1-18.

Schudson, Michael. 1992. Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Schwartz, Barry. 2000. Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1996. Introduction: The Expanding Past. Qualitative Sociology 19/3: 275-82.

1991. Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization of George Washington. American Sociological Review 56 (April), 221-36.

Shils, Edward. 1981. Tradition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Terdiman, Richard. 1993. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Thompson, Paul Richard. 2000. The Voice of the Past: Oral History. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Tudor, Henry. 1971. Political Myth. London, UK: Pall Mall.

Wagner-Pacifici, Robin. 1996. Memories in the Making: The Shape of Things that Went. Qualitative Sociology 19/3: 301-22.

Wallerstein, Immanuel and Etienne Balibar. 1992. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London, UK: Verso.

Wolfrum, Edgar. 1999. Geschichtspolitik in der Bundesrepublik. Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschafiliche Buchgesellschaft.

Yates, Frances A. 1966. The Art of Memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Zelizer, Barbie. 1995. Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (June): 214-39.

Jeffrey K. Olick, Ph.D. (Yale University), is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949 (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and The Sins of the Fathers: Governing Memory in the Federal Republic of Germany (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press), and the editor of States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts and Transformations in National Retrospection (Duke University Press, 2003). The above paper is based on a keynote address at the Social Scientific Criticism of the New Testament section of the Society of Biblical Literature, San Antonio, Texas, 2004.