de Saint-Laurent Constance, Obradović Sandra
Department of Information Engineering, University of Bologna & Swiss National Science Foundation, Viale Risorgimento 2, 40136, Bologna, Italy.
Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK.
Integr Psychol Behav Sci. 2019 Mar;53(1):1-13. doi: 10.1007/s12124-018-9463-5.
Collective memory has become an increasingly important topic in social and human sciences over the past thirty years. Beyond the interest for how we understand history, collective memory research has explored how the past has been used to defend certain understandings of the world (for instance nationalist ideologies), political actions (as in the case of intractable conflicts), or collective identities (particularly when they are seen as reflecting the historical 'essence' of a national group). That is, how the history is used as a resource for the present. However, theoretical conceptualisations have more directly focused on how collective memory is produced, and less so on how it is mobilised for the present. In this paper, we propose to review the main conceptualisation of collective memory in psychology - as social thinking, as social identity, and as sense-making - and how they more or less implicitly understand the relations between past and present. In a final section, we argue that representations of history have mainly been seen, in collective memory research, as a source of meaning for the present or as a way to position oneself in the current social field. In conclusion, we propose a third way of understanding the relations between past and present, considering collective memory to be both transformative of the present and prospective for the future.
在过去三十年里，集体记忆已成为社会科学和人文科学中一个日益重要的话题。除了对我们如何理解历史的兴趣之外，集体记忆研究还探讨了过去是如何被用来捍卫对世界的某些理解（例如民族主义意识形态）、政治行动（如在棘手冲突的情况下）或集体身份（特别是当它们被视为反映一个民族群体的历史“本质”时）。也就是说，历史是如何被用作当下的一种资源的。然而，理论概念化更直接地关注集体记忆是如何产生的，而较少关注它是如何被用于当下的。在本文中，我们建议回顾心理学中集体记忆的主要概念化——作为社会思维、作为社会身份以及作为意义建构——以及它们或多或少隐含地如何理解过去与现在之间的关系。在最后一部分，我们认为，在集体记忆研究中，历史表征主要被视为当下意义的来源或在当前社会领域中定位自己的一种方式。总之，我们提出了第三种理解过去与现在之间关系的方式，认为集体记忆既对当下具有变革性，又对未来具有前瞻性。
