Memory Studies Glossary: 51 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 51 essential terms into accessible definitions.

How to Use the Glossary

Terms are listed alphabetically. 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.

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. Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD): (Laurajane Smith) The elite-led "official" version of heritage.
4. Collective Memory: (Halbwachs) Memory shared by a group, distinct from individual memory.
5. Collective Trauma: A psychological shattering shared by an entire group.
6. Commemoration: The formal act of remembering a person or event.
7. Communicative Memory: Short-term, everyday oral history (80–100 years).
8. Counter-memory: Narratives that challenge the "official" version of history.
9. Cultural Memory: Long-term, high-culture preservation (texts, rituals).
10. Damnatio Memoriae: The intentional "condemnation of memory" (erasing someone from history).
11. Dark Tourism: Traveling to sites associated with death or tragedy.
12. Difficult Heritage: Sites related to "shameful" history (e.g., concentration camps).
13. Digital Memory: How the internet and algorithms shape what we remember and forget.
14. Dissonant Heritage: Heritage that causes conflict between different social groups.
15. Ethnosymbolism: The study of the symbols and myths that form ethnic identity.
16. Figures of Remembrance: Specific events or people that anchor a culture’s identity.
17. Flashbulb Memory: Vivid, detailed memories of a momentous event (e.g., 9/11). Coined by Roger Brown and James Kulik.
18. Functional Memory: Memory that is actively used to build identity.
19. Golden Age: A perceived "perfect" past that nationalists seek to return to.
20. Heritage from Below: Grassroots, non-official history remembered by common people.
21. Heterotopia: (Michel Foucault) Worlds within worlds or rather spaces (like prisons or museums) that are somehow "other".
22. Historical Consciousness: How individuals and communities understand their place in time.
23. Imagined Communities: (Benedict Anderson) The idea that nations are modern and socially constructed. According to Anderson, each nation is an imagined community.
24. Individual Memory: Personal, neurobiological recollections.
25. Intangible Heritage: Oral traditions, performing arts, and rituals.
26. Invention of Tradition: (Hobsbawm) Modern rituals that claim to be ancient.
27. Kleos: Ancient Greek term that roughly translates into "renown" or "glory." It represents "what is heard" about someone. Heroes in the homeric epics actively sought a death that would grant them "everlasting kleos."
28. Lieux de mémoire: (Pierre Nora) "Sites of memory" where memory crystallizes (monuments, archives, etc).
29. 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.
30. Memorial: An object or structure serving as a remembrance of a person/event.
31. Mnemohistory: The study of how the past is remembered, rather than what "actually" happened.
32. Mnemonic: That which facilitates remembering.
33. Multidirectional Memory: (Michael Rothberg) How different histories (e.g., Holocaust and Colonialism) interact.
34. Mythomoteur: The national myth that drives national unity and purpose.
35. Myth-Symbol Complex: The set of myths and symbols that define a nation’s "core."
36. Nostalgia: A sentimental longing for something lost or a past period.
37. Oblivion (Forgetting): The active or passive loss of information over time.
38. Perrennialism (also Primordialism): The theory of nationalism that claims that nations are ancient and not modern inventions.
39. Post-Memory: (Marianne Hirsch) The relationship of the "second generation" to parental trauma.
40. Presentism: The tendency to interpret the past through modern-day lenses.
41. Prosthetic Memory: (Alison Landsberg) Memories acquired through mass media/films, not lived experience.
42. Repressed Memory: Memories blocked due to high levels of stress or trauma. A term that goes back to Sigmund Freud.
43. Sites of Memory: see lieux de mémoire.
44. Social Memory: How social groups construct and represent their past (for many scholars it's indistinguishable from Collective Memory).
45. Storage Memory: Information that is preserved but has no current "function."
46. Structural Amnesia: When a society "erases" parts of the past that no longer fit its current image.
47. Tangible Heritage: Physical buildings, artifacts, and landscapes.
48. The Archive: Passively stored information not currently in use.
49. The Canon: Active, curated memories a society deems "essential."
50. The Floating Gap: The transition zone between living memory and myth.
51. Transnational Memory: Memory that crosses national borders. (read this interview with a historian on transnational memories)