Memory Studies Glossary: 54 Key Terms & Concepts Explained

Memory Studies is an interdisciplinary field that explores how the past is constructed, preserved, and contested in the present. The terminology can often feel as complex as the theories themselves.

This glossary is designed to help those who are just starting their journey into the world of Memory Studies, but also everyone interested in learning more about the ways societies remember. For the time being, this guide breaks down 54 essential terms into simple, accessible definitions.

How to Use the Glossary

• Terms are listed alphabetically from A to Z.
• Some definitions include links to articles, where we have explored specific theories, like Jan Assmann’s Cultural Memory in greater detail. The aim is to eventually write an article for each of these terms, but the process is lengthy.
• This is a work in progress.

To my understanding, this is the only freely accessible glossary of this type online, so please feel free to message me directly for corrections or any other comments that may help improve this project.

Glossary (A-Z)

1. Acceleration of History: The feeling that time is moving faster and "tradition" is disappearing.
2. Annales School: A popular 20th century style of historiography emphasizing long-term social history. It was founded in 1929 when Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre published the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale.
3. Archive: The passive form of memory that preserves the past but keeps it in the past. In contrast to the canon (see entry below), the archive is a memory of the past that has not been forgotten but also has not been activated. Aleida Assmann (2010) likens it to the storeroom of a museum, while the canon is like museum's exhibition.
4. Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD): (Laurajane Smith) The elite-led "official" version of heritage. AHD dictates what is to be considered valuable and worth-preserving, and what not.
5. Canon: The active form of memory that keeps the past present. One example of a canonical memory is a works of art that is often reinterpreted, commented, appreciated, etc. Also see Aleida Assman (2010).
6. Collective Memory: (Halbwachs) Memory shared by a group, distinct from individual memory.
7. Collective Trauma: A psychological shattering shared by an entire group.
8. Commemoration: The formal act of remembering a person or event.
9. Communicative Memory: Short-term, everyday oral history (80–100 years).
10. Counter-memory: Narratives that challenge the "official" version of history.
11. Cultural Memory: Long-term, high-culture preservation (texts, rituals).
12. Damnatio Memoriae: The intentional "condemnation of memory" (erasing someone from history).
13. Dark Tourism (also thanatourism): Traveling to sites associated with death and disaster. The term was coined in 1996 by John Lennon and Malcolm Foley.
    (Read this article about a Soviet Sanatorium in Georgia for more on dark heritage)
14. Difficult Heritage: Sites related to "shameful" history (e.g., concentration camps).
15. Digital Memory: How the internet and algorithms shape what we remember and forget.
16. Dissonant Heritage: Heritage that causes conflict between different social groups.
17. Ethnosymbolism: The study of the symbols and myths that form ethnic identity.
18. Figures of Remembrance: Specific events or people that anchor a culture’s identity.
19. Flashbulb Memory: Vivid, detailed memories of a momentous event (e.g., 9/11). Coined by Roger Brown and James Kulik.
20. Floating Gap: The transition zone between living memory and myth.
21. Functional Memory: Memory that is actively used to build identity.
22. Golden Age: A perceived "perfect" past that nationalists seek to return to.
23. Heritage from Below: Grassroots, non-official history remembered by common people.
24. Heterotopia: (Michel Foucault) Worlds within worlds or rather spaces (like prisons or museums) that are somehow "other".
25. Historical Consciousness: How individuals and communities understand their place in time.
26. Imagined Communities: (Benedict Anderson) The idea that nations are modern and socially constructed. According to Anderson, each nation is an imagined community.
27. Individual Memory: Personal, neurobiological recollections.
28. Intangible Heritage: Oral traditions, performing arts, and rituals.
29. Invention of Tradition: (Eric Hobsbawm) The idea that modern nationalism invents rituals and symbols that look ancient, in order to legitimize the power of the elites and provide a sense of stability at a time of rapid social changes.
30. Kleos: Ancient Greek term that roughly translates into "renown" or "glory." It represents "what is heard" about someone. Heroes, like Achilles, in the homeric epics actively sought a death that would grant them "everlasting kleos."
31. Lieux de mémoire: (Pierre Nora) "Sites of memory" where memory crystallizes (monuments, archives, etc).
32. Longue durée: A historical approach that focuses on historical changes that occur over vast time (millennia). The term that was popularized by the Annales School and famously in Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.
33. Memorial: An object or structure serving as a remembrance of a person/event.
34. Mnemohistory: The study of how the past is remembered, rather than what "actually" happened.
35. Mnemonic: That which facilitates remembering.
36. Mnemosyne: The ancient Greek Goddess of Memory. According to Hesiod's Theogony, she was the daughter of Uranus and Gaia, and the mother of the Nine Muses.
37. Mnemotechnics (or mnemonics): Mental strategies used to organuize and improve memory (like memory palaces, acronyms, rhymes, etc). Widely known as art memoriae or art of memory.
38. Multidirectional Memory: (Michael Rothberg) How different histories (e.g., Holocaust and Colonialism) interact.
39. Mythomoteur: A (national or ethnic) community's constitutive myth that drives unity and provides purpose. The term was coined by Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals and popularized by John A. Armstrong in Nations Before Nationalism (1982).
40. Myth-Symbol Complex: The set of myths and symbols that define a nation’s "core."
41. Nostalgia: A sentimental longing for something lost or a past period.
42. Oblivion (Forgetting): The active or passive loss of information over time.
43. Perrennialism (also Primordialism): The theory of nationalism that claims that nations are ancient and not modern inventions.
44. Post-Memory: (Marianne Hirsch) The relationship of the "second generation" to parental trauma.
45. Presentism: The tendency to interpret the past through modern-day lenses.
46. Prosthetic Memory: (Alison Landsberg) Memories acquired through mass media/films, not lived experience.
47. Repressed Memory: Memories blocked due to high levels of stress or trauma. A term that goes back to Sigmund Freud.
48. Sites of Memory: see lieux de mémoire.
49. Social Memory: How social groups construct and represent their past (for many scholars it's indistinguishable from Collective Memory).
50. Storage Memory: Information that is preserved but has no current "function."
51. Structural Amnesia: When a society "erases" parts of the past that no longer fit its current image.
52. Tangible Heritage: Physical buildings, artifacts, and landscapes.
53. Thanatourism: The term was coined by A. V. Seaton in 1996.
    See the entry Dark Tourism for more.
54. Transnational Memory: Memory that crosses national borders.
    (Read this interview with a historian on transnational memories)

Bibliography

• Armstrong, J. (1982). Nations before nationalism. University of North Carolina Press.
• Assmann, A. (2010). Canon and Archive. In A. Erll & A. Nünning (Ed.), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (pp. 97-108). Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110207262.2.97
• Olick J. and J. Robbins. (1998). ‘Social Memory Studies: From 'Collective Memory' to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices’. Annual Review of Sociology 24: 105–40.
• Halbwachs, M. (1980). Collective Memory. translated by Francis Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter