Remembering the Socialist Past - Bad request! - University of Exeter

among members of a community through public acts of remembrance and through
publicly accessible media which are sometimes commercially driven’. 9 Memories
cannot, of course, be considered as factually accurate or complete accounts of the
past; they are in fact highly selective representations: ‘memories are always
“scarce” in relation to everything that theoretically might have been remembered,
but is now forgotten.’ 10 The selection of what is remembered, rather than forgotten,
is one way in which memories express a ‘relationship to a meaningful past’ in which
the present conditions can influence how a past event or era is remembered. 11 This
relationship between the present and the past, expressed through acts of
remembering at a given time and place, is, therefore, subject to change. 12 The
notion of memory as dependent on the present context has been criticized, in
particular by the sociologist Barry Schwartz, who argues that this ignores the
degree of continuity that has existed in representations of the past over time. 13
Jeffrey Olick cautions against any approach which goes to the extreme of seeing
collective memory as either the product of the present situation, or as an
unquestionable foundation for unchanging collective identities and traditions.
Instead he argues for recognition that remembrance is ‘always a fluid negotiation
between the desires of the present and the legacies of the past’. 14
34
The importance of the context and the conditions of the present for any act
of remembering were first explored by Maurice Halbwachs, whose sociological
theory of memory has provided the foundations for much of the subsequent
9 Rigney, ‘Portable Monuments’, p. 366.
10 Ann Rigney, ‘Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory’, Journal of
European Studies, 35 (2005), 11–28 (p. 17).
11 Eric Caldicott and Anne Fuchs, ‘Introduction’, in Cultural Memory: Essays on European
Literature and History, ed. by Eric Caldicott and Anne Fuchs (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003), pp.
11–32 (p. 12).
12 See Rigney, ‘Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory’, p. 17.
13 See Lewis Coser, ‘Introduction: Maurice Halbwachs 1877–1945’, in Maurice Halbwachs, On
Collective Memory, ed. and trans. by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1992), pp. 1–34 (p. 26).
14 Jeffrey K. Olick, ‘From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and
Products’, in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, pp.
151–61 (p. 159).