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

Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory was conceived primarily in relation to
memory shaped by everyday and intergenerational interaction and did not give
detailed consideration to how memory might be transmitted through cultural texts,
artefacts and practices. 19 As will be shown further below, however, his concept of
social frameworks of memory is relevant to consideration of how cultural objects
and practices can reflect existing models of remembrance as well as, in some
cases, shaping new ways of remembering the past.
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The study of collective and cultural memory as it is mediated through, for
example, texts, images or ritual has been advanced particularly by the work of
Pierre Nora and of Jan and Aleida Assmann. Nora, in fact, perceived material and
symbolic forms of remembrance to be in opposition to ‘true’ memory. These
symbolic forms are the lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) which Nora considered
to be replacing milieux de mémoire (‘settings in which memory is a real part of
everyday experiences’). 20 Nora argues that we ‘create archives, mark anniversaries,
organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, and authenticate documents’ due to the
disappearance of ‘spontaneous memory’. 21 He defines a lieu de mémoire as ‘any
significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of
human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial
heritage of any community’. 22 Some aspects of Nora’s theories have been criticized,
including his understanding of milieux de mémoire which betrays a sense of
nostalgia for the perceived loss of a more ‘natural’ and unmediated expression of
memory in society. 23 Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire or ‘sites of memory’ has,
however, been very influential and has been drawn upon in more recent theories of
cultural memory which study collective remembrance through locations and
19
The role of tradition and cultural artefacts was, however, considered in his later work, La
Topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte (1941). See Astrid Erll, Memory in
Culture, trans. by Sara B. Young (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 18.
20
Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman,
trans. by Arthur Goldhammer, 3 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), I, p. 1.
21
Nora, I, p. 7.
22
Nora, I, p. xvii.
23
See Stephen Legg, ‘Contesting and Surviving Memory: Space, Nation, and Nostalgia in Les
Lieux de Mémoire’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23 (2005), 481–504.