“brilliant… an impressive tour de force” Network *Why does collective memory matter? *How is social memory generated, maintained and reproduced? *How do we explain changes in the content and role of collective memory? Through a synthesis of old and new theories of social remembering, this book provides the first comprehensive overview of the sociology of memory. This rapidly expanding field explores how representations of the past are generated, maintained and reproduced through texts, images, sites, rituals and experiences. The main aim of the book is to show to what extent the investigation of memory challenges sociological understandings of the formation of social identities and conflicts. It illustrates the new status of memory in contemporary societies by examining the complex relationships between memory and commemoration, memory and identity, memory and trauma, and memory and justice. The book consists of six chapters, with the first three devoted to conceptualising the process of remembering by analyzing memory's function, status and history, as well as by locating the study of memory in a broader field of social science. The second part of the book directly explores and discusses theories and studies of social remembering. After a short conclusion, which argues that study of collective memory is an important part of any examination of contemporary society, the glossary offers a concise and up to date overview of the development of relevant theoretical concepts. The result is an essential text for undergraduate courses in social theory, the sociology of memory and a wider audience in cultural studies, history and politics.

Memory is a fundamental aspect of being and becoming, intimately entwined with space, time, place, landscape, emotion, imagination and identity. Memory studies is a burgeoning field of enquiry drawing from a range of social science, arts and humanities disciplines including human geography, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, heritage and museum studies, psychology and history. This book is a critically theorised practical exposition of how media and technology are used to make memories for museums, archives, social movements and community projects, looking at specific cases in the UK and Brazil where the authors have put these theories into practice. The authors define the protocol they present as social memory technology. Critically, this book is about learning to deal with our pasts and learning new methods of connecting our pasts across cultures toward a shared understanding and application of memory technologies.

Profoundly challenging the traditional view of memory as the product and property of individual minds, Collective Remembering is concerned with remembering and forgetting as socially constituted activities. The starting point is a conceptualization of remembering and forgetting as forms of social action. Individual memories cannot be understood as `internal mental processes' which occur independently of the interpretive and communicative practices which characterize a particular society or culture. Individuals `read', account for and negotiate their memories within the pragmatics of social life. Contributions also explore the collective processes through which communities' social memories are created, sustained and transformed

In recent years there has been a proliferation of approaches which have redefined our understanding of political power and the state. These contemporary state theories have philosophical and theoretical antecedents that can be traced to post-classical social and political thought: their influences can be traced to feminism, structuralism and poststructuralism, cultural theory, network analysis and globalisation theory. The classical theories of Marx, Weber and Durkheim are altogether less important in contemporary state theory. In Social Theory, the State and Modern Society, Mike Marinetto considers the philosophical and theoretical heritage of modern state theory and then critiques the theories that have evolved from this legacy. Topics covered include: The poststructural state Governance and the decentred state The gendered state The cultural turn in state theory The state in a global context The past, present and future of state theory Social Theory, the State and Modern Society is key reading for students of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy. It is also of interest to researchers and academics with an interest in state theory.

The pioneering sociologist and author of The Seven Day Circle continues his analysis of time with this fascinating look at history as social construct. Who were the first people to inhabit North America? Does the West Bank belong to the Arabs or the Jews? Why are racists so obsessed with origins? Is a seventh cousin still a cousin? Why do some societies name their children after dead ancestors? As Eviatar Zerubavel demonstrates in Time Maps, we cannot answer burning questions such as these without a deeper understanding of how we envision the past. In a pioneering attempt to map the structure of collective memory, Zerubavel considers the cognitive patterns we use to organize the past and the social grammar of conflicting interpretations of history. Drawing on fascinating examples that range from Hiroshima to the Holocaust, and from ancient Egypt to the former Yugoslavia, Zerubavel shows how we construct historical origins; how we tie discontinuous events together into stories; how we link families and entire nations through genealogies; and how we separate distinct historical periods from one another through watersheds, such as the invention of fire or the fall of the Berlin Wall. "Time Maps extends beyond all of the old clichés about linear, circular, and spiral patterns of historical process and provides us with models of the actual legends used to map history…brilliant and elegant."-Hayden White, University of California, Santa Cruz

Venturing out of the laboratory into the wild of natural settings, it becomes untenable to locate memory strictly in the head. Instead, memory appears as a materially extended and socially distributed process, embedded within culture and history. This book explores the complex relations between practices of remembering and the settings in which they are enacted. It advances a novel set of concepts developed from ecological, cognitive, cultural and narrative currents in psychology and further afield to analyze (1) trajectories of autobiographical remembering, (2) the relation between individual and collective memory, (3) memory and cultural transmission, as well as (4) various methodological techniques to investigate memory in the wild.

This work seeks to provide a comprehensive and accessible survey of the international dimension of trauma and memory and its manifestations in various cultural contexts. Drawing together contributions and case studies from scholars around the globe, the book explores the international political dimension of feeling, suffering, forgetting, remembering and memorializing traumatic events and to investigate how they function as social practices for overcoming trauma and creating social change. Divided into two sections, the book maps out the different theoretical debates and then moves on to examine emerging themes such as ontological security, social change, gender, religion, foreign policy & natural disasters. Throughout the chapters, the editors consider the social, political and ethical implications of forgetting and remembering traumatic events in world politics Showcasing how trauma and memory deepen our understanding of IR, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, memory and trauma studies and security studies.

In an age of information and new media the relationships between remembering and forgetting have changed. This volume addresses the tension between loud and often spectacular histories and those forgotten pasts we strain to hear. Employing social and cultural analysis, the essays within examine mnemonic technologies both new and old, and cover subjects as diverse as U.S. internment camps for Japanese Americans in WWII, the Canadian Indian Residential School system, Israeli memorial videos, and the desaparecidos in Argentina. Through these cases, the contributors argue for a re-interpretation of Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle as a conceptual apparatus through which to examine the contemporary landscape of social memory, arguing that the concept of spectacle might be developed in an age seen as dissatisfied with the present, nervous about the future, and obsessed with the past. Perhaps now “spectacle” can be thought of not as a tool of distraction employed solely by hegemonic powers, but instead as a device used to answer Walter Benjamin’s plea to “explode the continuum of history” and bring our attention to now-time.

The differences between individual and collective representations have occupied social scientists since Durkheim, and the social psychological theory of social representations has been one of the most influential theories in twentieth-century social science. The Psychology of the Social brings together leading scholars from social representations, discourse analysis and related approaches to provide an integrated overview of contemporary psychology's understanding of the social. Each chapter comprises a study of a topical issue, such as social memory, the language of racism, intelligence or representations of the self in different cultures; the theory of social representations is both exemplified and linked to central concerns of psychological research, including attribution, memory, and culture; and important links with developmental and educational psychology are made.

Why do we eat sardines, but never goldfish; ducks, but never parrots? Why does adding cheese make a hamburger a "cheeseburger" whereas adding ketchup does not make it a "ketchupburger"? By the same token, how do we determine which things said at a meeting should be included in the minutes and which ought to be considered "off the record" and officially disregarded? In this wide-ranging and provocative book, Eviatar Zerubavel argues that cognitive science cannot answer these questions, since it addresses cognition on only two levels: the individual and the universal. To fill the gap between the Romantic vision of the solitary thinker whose thoughts are the product of unique experience, and the cognitive-psychological view, which revolves around the search for the universal foundations of human cognition, Zerubavel charts an expansive social realm of mind--a domain that focuses on the conventional, normative aspects of the way we think. With witty anecdote and revealing analogy, Zerubavel illuminates the social foundation of mental actions such as perceiving, attending, classifying, remembering, assigning meaning, and reckoning the time. What takes place inside our heads, he reminds us, is deeply affected by our social environments, which are typically groups that are larger than the individual yet considerably smaller than the human race. Thus, we develop a nonuniversal software for thinking as Americans or Chinese, lawyers or teachers, Catholics or Jews, Baby Boomers or Gen-Xers. Zerubavel explores the fascinating ways in which thought communities carve up and classify reality, assign meanings, and perceive things, "defamiliarizing" in the process many taken-for-granted assumptions.