Blackwell Reference Online

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A group's most profound images and understanding of the past constitute its collective memory. Memory, of course, is possessed and transmitted by individuals, yet it is shaped by their various social relationships. Individuals share their recollections with members of their group and rationally reorganize their stories of the past in accordance with others' interpretations of events ( Coser 1992 : 43). Collective memory is important partly for negative reasons. Removal of a group from a position of authority means eradicating its significance within a nation's past activities, not least memory of that nation's most serious or sacred acts ( Connerton 1989 ). Great political dangers lie in such organized forgetting. If the systematic and calculative decision to rewrite history is still mainly a threat from a dystopian Orwellian future, the active removal from historical view of groups such as Tutsis, Gypsies, or Armenians has been commonplace ( Mann 2005 ). Given their privileged access to contemporary media, dominant classes and favored ethnic groups possess unparalleled capacities to marginalize the Other and to revise positively the character of their own past. A familiar dichotomy attributes collective memory to preliterate and traditional societies, whilst modern societies possess “history.” It is certainly true that certain diasporic groups such as the Jews – “the people of ... log in or subscribe to read full text