What Is Collective Memory? Definition & History

We remember and forget things. This remembering and forgetting informs the way we interact with the world. Through the process of retaining memories that we find important and discarding those we deem redundant, we assemble our identity. This is a personal form of memory, but there is also a collective one. Societies also remember, and, of course, forget things. Like the individual, the society constructs its identity based on memories of things past. If you are a historian or an anthropologist, you must have stumbled upon this concept. So, let's dive in.

Maurice Halbwachs Coined the Term Collective Memory

The term "collective memory" (original, memoire collective) was coined by the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. Halbwachs first discussed the term in his work Les Cadres sociaux de la memoire (1925) and in more depth in his Memoire Collective (1950). Halbwachs, under the influence of his teacher Emile Durkheim, studied the way identities (individual, collective, or social) shape and are shaped by memories of the past. The idea is that an individual or a group can shape the past through the memories they select to preserve, but also that the identity of the individual or the group can change if a memory is altered.

Collective and Individual Memory

So what is the relationship between individual and collective memory? Collective memory is made of individual memories. They communicate.

"The collective memory, for its part, encompasses the individual
memories while remaining distinct from them. It evolves according
to its own laws, and any individual remembrances that may penetrate
are transformed within a totality having no personal consciousness." Halbwachs 1980, 51

As individuals, we all belong to multiple different groups sharing various common memories; the family, the neighborhood, the school, the university, work, a political party, a country, and an ethnic group. Our participation in these groups shapes our identity, but we also influence these groups. Like a mosaic, change enough pieces and you have a different image.

If you think about it, the politics of memory are everywhere. We spend a good bunch of our early years at school, which, among others, is tasked with passing down a society's key memories, or rather, the must-know things you need to know in order to become a member of society.

Collective Unconscious vs. Collective Memory

A common misconception is that Carl Jung's collective unconscious is the same as collective memory, but that's not the case. Jung's theory posits that there is a common unconscious shared by all humans that we can all access and binds us all together in a mystical way. However, Halbwachs' collective memory is not something that we are born with, it is something we learn, something we shape, something that can be lost. If a society chooses to forget something, it can be forgotten.

History vs. Collective Memory

Halbwachs distinguishes between history and collective memory. History is, for him, what follows the end of memory. For example, Holocaust survivors formed communities of remembrance, but as years passed and their communities began to fade away, historians jumped in to keep the memory alive. Thus, collective memory is a first, direct interaction with the past, while history is a second one; an interaction that follows memory. For Halbwachs, memory was alive, changing, debatable, while history was distant and rigid.

Today, however, the trend among academics is to perceive history as a form of collective memory that can also shape and interact with the past.

Bibliography

• Olick Jeffrey and Joyce Robbins. 1998. ‘Social Memory Studies: From 'Collective Memory' to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices’. Annual Review of Sociology 24: 105–40.
• Halbwachs, Maurice. 1980. Collective Memory. translated by Francis Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter
• Jung, Carl. 1916. The Structure of the Unconscious.