Halbwachs’ studies in collective memory: A founding text for contemporary ‘memory studies’?

Abstract

In the past few years, an increasing number of scholars have begun working to develop an integrated field introduced as a new discipline. From now on, these ‘memory studies’ have their own scientific journals, academic departments and international conferences. Now the scholars involved in this institutionalization situate themselves in an intellectual genealogy headed by the French sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs. Going back to Halbwachs’s original writing, this article argues that this genealogy rests upon a misreading. For the author of Collective memory, ‘memory’ was not a specific topic of research, but rather should be studied within and with the help of the ordinary tools and methods of general sociology. This article pleads the cause of this alternate route and, in doing so, hopes to introduce the reader to Halbwachs’s original theory and to its promising developments for contemporary studies in collective memory.

Youth Education with Proverbs: A Case Study of Polish Proverbs about Work

“…Passed from generation to generation, proverbs may also be a source of antagonisms and prejudice: social, ethnic, sexist, or against certain professional groups. The occurrence of such negative phenomena confirms the claims by Halbwachs (Gensburger, 2016) that members of a given community may hold beliefs that are not based in their own direct experience-and proverbs belong to carriers of such collective memory.…”

A semiotic theory of memory: between movement and form*

“…Framed-ness is about studying memory within social formations, for example "a religious group, a social class, and ethnicity" (Erll 2011: 6), and the result is the image of a "containered" memory (Erll 2011: 11). Erll traces this model back to Maurice Halbwachs's idea of "memory frameworks," whose most successfulthough also contested (Gensburger 2016)interpretation is to be located in Pierre Nora's concept of lieu de mémoire. By contrast, the expression "travelling memory" is meant to stress the fact that "memory lives in and through its movements" and does not stand still (Erll 2011: 11); it therefore needs a model capable of describing such movements.…”

Do particular para o geral: memória, história oral e estudos organizacionais

“…Não menos importante, essas preferências epistemológicas revelam a tentativa de demarcação de campos de estudo em construção: Olick (1999), como Halbwachs (1992) fez em seu tempo, quis trazer a sociologia como orquestradora do campo, distinguindo-a da história e, principalmente, da psicologia (Gensburger, 2016;Tamm, 2013); Rowlinson et al (2010), distinguindo sua abordagem dos EMO e da psicologia.…”