In the past decade, Jeffrey Olick has established himself as one of
the world's pre-eminent sociologists of memory (and, related to
this, both cultural sociology and social theory). His recent book
on memory in postwar Germany, In the House of the Hangman
(University of Chicago Press, 2005) has garnered a great deal of
acclaim. This book collects his best essays on a range of memory
related issues and adds a couple of new ones. It is more
conceptually expansive than his other work and will serve as a
great introduction to this important theorist. In the past quarter
century, the issue of memory has not only become an increasingly
important analytical category for historians, sociologists and
cultural theorists, it has become pervasive in popular culture as
well. Part of this is a function of the enhanced role of both
narrative and representation - the building blocks of memory, so to
speak - across the social sciences and humanities. Just as
importantly, though, there has also been an increasing acceptance
of the notion that the past is no longer the province of
professional historians alone. Additionally, acknowledging the
importance of social memory has not only provided agency to
ordinary people when it comes to understanding the past, it has
made conflicting interpretations of the meaning of the past more
fraught, particularly in light of the terrible events of the
twentieth century.
Olick looks at how catastrophic, terrible pasts - Nazi Germany,
apartheid South Africa - are remembered, but he is particularly
concerned with the role that memory plays in social structures.
Memory can foster any number of things - social solidarity,
nostalgia, civil war - but it always dependson both the nature of
the past and the cultures doing the remembering. Prior to his
studies of individual episodes, he fully develops his theory of
memory and society, working through Bergson, Halbwachs, Elias,
Bakhtin, and Bourdieu.
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