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COLLECTIVE MEMORY

COLLECTIVE MEMORY

DEFINITION

Collective memory describes the socially mediated ways groups retain, revise and transmit understandings of a shared past. It is not a single memory stored inside a collective mind; it is produced through bodies, places, images, rituals, narratives, institutions, omissions and acts of remembrance. What is remembered and what remains unspoken are shaped by power.

GENERATOR / ORIGIN

DERIVED FROM: the interdisciplinary field of memory studies, including Maurice Halbwachs's account of social frameworks of memory, and psychoanalytic reflections by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. In this Brain the concept is extended analytically through Apichatpong Weerasethakul, haunting and landscape.

GENEALOGY

Individual recollection → socially framed memory → cultural/collective memory → contested historical memory → landscape and territory as memory fields. Psychoanalysis contributes the problem of what cannot be integrated or spoken; cinema and performance make memory material through bodies, places, images and duration.

WHY IT MATTERS HERE

Collective Memory connects the psychology branch to historical, cinematic, ecological and performance research. It prevents “memory” from being treated as purely private and allows comparison among haunting, political history, landscape, archive and embodied transmission.

KEY GENERATORS / EXAMPLES

RELATIONSHIPS