Sociology of memory

Hi everybody!

Today I’m going to talk about sociology of memory, a very important theme of the sociology and History

The sociology of memory started with the Maurice Halbwachs’s writings, especially with the “Collective memory”. This work is based in the social theory of Émile Durkheim and it is a very important job. In the Collective memory we can see memory as not an individual construction, but it feeds from different social processes. It means, that the capacity to remember and rebuild the past is possible because we live collectively, so the memory problem is impossible to understand without the social framework that supports it. This reconstruction is what we often call “memory”. The collective memory is crossing for a lot of transformations and moves, even if it exists in there invariable aspects.  

The premise beside this idea is memory express in the individual and the social interaction. But there is not only one memory: there are as many different memories as humans groups there are, because they emerge from them. However, this idea is not enough to explain the disputes of different groups to establish hegemony about the reconstruction of the past, and that is a political dimension of memory. And this is when Michael Pollak comes in.

Thanks for reading!