Chapter 4 - The Organization of Collective Memory

Summary

How is collective memory organized? Perhaps more than any other construct in the social sciences, collective memory is blessed with a substantial literature that articulates both its top-down structure, as organized by the state and other institutions, and its bottom-up structure, as represented in the hearts and minds of individuals who belong to groups and are interconnected through social networks. Conversely, the curse of such richness is that the literature on collective remembering is so vast (and in places, antithetical) that no one scholar is capable of fully embracing its many uses and conceptions. Good scholarship in this area, especially in attempts to integrate across different branches of the literature, must be at once selective and comprehensive.