We all share with those close to us a pool of collective memories – stories, images, and ideas that we agree upon or at least agree to argue about. Shared memories and records underpin our culture, creating the story of social groups as well as their mythologies and conditions for membership.
Our collective memories – whether shared at the level of a family, a profession, a nation, a faith, or an entire culture – provide the context for the making of our memories. They can affect what we remember, how we choose to remember it, and, to some extent, what we’ve to forget. Adopting a new set of collective memories – by joining a religious cult, for example – changes not only our opinions but can also alter existing memories of events that happened years ago. US psychologist Henry Roediger has shown that it is easy, under laboratory conditions, to make people remember things that never occurred simply by putting them into groups and regularly repeating fictitious stories to them.
Oral traditions
The way in which collective memories are preserved differs from circle to circle. In families or among friends, the means tend to be oral – tales and reminiscences are shared directly and transferred from person to person. There are usually pictures, letters, and mementoes, but these are often meaningless without a living commentary to put them in context. Home movies and videos share the illusion of being a complete record, but these are rarely watched in silence: they primarily provide the focus for family discussions.
Earlier in history, small, non-literate hunting or farming communities preserved their memories in the same way. In this case, there were usually bards, shamans, priests, or chieftains who were designated as the guardians of the oral culture. As groups got larger (or, in the case of families, wealthier), there was a need or desire to make more permanent records – from cave paintings and papyrus manuscripts to the audio and video recordings of modern times. Today, in the age of the internet, 24-hour news, spin doctors, digital special effects, and lawsuits over intellectual property rights, the collective memory of our culture as a whole has become a battleground where the ideas of different interest groups are constantly at war.
Rituals and commemorations
Within modern society, there are also enduring rituals that preserve the collective memories of particular cultural or ethnic groups. These often act as a link between the experiences of an individual family and those of the larger group. For example, Jewish families celebrate Passover with the Seder meal, at which all the participants have a chance to re-enact the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt in the days of Moses.
Some such rituals and the events they commemorate can be divisive; others re-create a sense of unity. The traditional marches of the Protestant Orangemen in Ulster celebrate a historic military victory against the Catholics but come at the expense of local Catholic feelings. Collective memories of Britain in World War II recall hardship and loss but also solidarity and public-spiritedness in the face of a common enemy. The public grief following the assassination of President Kennedy or the sudden death of Princess Diana created a vivid sense of having shared in a moment of history – for a while at least, these events evoked a powerful sense of togetherness. Whether through conflict, grief, tradition, or conversation, it would seem that our compulsion to share collective memories is the mechanism that ensures their survival.
COLLECTING MEMORIES
Preserving family memories can be as simple as encouraging children to talk to their grandparents and elderly relatives. Old photographs and letters are another good starting point. But there are also more imaginative approaches:
Research a family tree – this activity often brings to light family stories from previous decades, as well as uncovering previously unsuspected relatives and ancestors.
Follow the example of the American folk artist Alice Freeman to create a family ‘memory map.’ This is a colourful map of a region that is rich in family associations, reconstructed from memory with a little help from real maps. The map can be studded with relevant quotations, notes, pictures, and souvenirs.
Set up a ‘family website’ for personal recollections, scanned-in photos, video and speech clips, and interactive letters. Each family member could have a page for his or her contributions.
