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There are few terms or concepts that have, in the last twenty or so
years, rivaled "collective memory" for attention in the humanities
and social sciences. Indeed, use of the term has extended far
beyond scholarship to the realm of politics and journalism, where
it has appeared in speeches at the centers of power and on the
front pages of the world's leading newspapers. The current
efflorescence of interest in memory, however, is no mere passing
fad: it is a hallmark characteristic of our age and a crucial site
for understanding our present social, political, and cultural
conditions. Scholars and others in numerous fields have thus
employed the concept of collective memory, sociological in origin,
to guide their inquiries into diverse, though allegedly connected,
phenomena. Nevertheless, there remains a great deal of confusion
about the meaning, origin, and implication of the term and the
field of inquiry it underwrites. The Collective Memory Reader
presents, organizes, and evaluates past work and contemporary
contributions on the questions raised under the rubric of
collective memory. Combining seminal texts, hard-to-find classics,
previously untranslated references, and contemporary landmarks, it
will serve as an essential resource for teaching and research in
the field. In addition, in both its selections as well as in its
editorial materials, it suggests a novel life-story for the field,
one that appreciates recent innovations but only against the
background of a long history. In addition to its major editorial
introduction, which outlines a useful past for contemporary memory
studies, The Collective Memory Reader includes five
sections-Precursors and Classics; History, Memory, and Identity;
Power, Politics, and Contestation; Media and Modes of Transmission;
Memory, Justice, and the Contemporary Epoch-comprising ninety-one
texts. In addition to the essay introducing the entire volume, a
brief editorial essay introduces each of the sections, while brief
capsules frame each of the 91 texts.
Menacing, nerve-racking, uncomfortably intrusive, the high school
reunion has become a dreaded encounter with the past and present
for many Americans. It is a moment of both heightened
self-awareness and public presentation, insisting that people
account for themselves, not merely to their own satisfaction, but
to the satisfaction of others as well. For the author, this
situation presents an ideal forum in which to explore the ongoing
construction of identity in American society, and, perhaps, to
ascertain just how people have managed to make sense of their
lives, from then to now. As autobiographical occasions, reunions
prompt us to examine our own life narratives, the stories we tell
ourselves about who we are and how we have come to be that person.
But at the same time, they threaten the integrity of those very
stories, subjecting them to the scrutiny of others whose memories
of the past and ourselves may be altogether different from our own.
Reunions, then, engender a fragile community held together by the
resources of a shared past, yet imperiled by the tensions of
competing histories. Inevitabley, they force a kind of biographical
confrontation. This book explores that struggle, the desire to
resolve the tensions between public conceptions and internal
understandings, to maintain a sense of continuity between past and
present lives, and to lay claim to both an integrated self and a
unified life history.
How does a society cope with the challenge of acknowledging and
commemorating difficult aspects of its past? In Yitzhak Rabin's
Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration, Vered
Vinitzky-Seroussi develops a timely sociology of commemoration,
drawing on the public memory of Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin, who was assassinated at the end of a peace rally in Tel Aviv
in 1995. She identifies and analyzes the building blocks from which
commemoration is made: agency, space, time, and narrative. Acting
as a guide, she leads the reader through monuments and gravestones,
memorial services and political demonstrations, rituals both moving
and banal, and individuals determined to remember, as well as those
who wish to forget. Yitzhak Rabin's Assassination and the Dilemmas
of Commemoration examines the meanings, boundaries, opportunities,
and limits of commemoration, a phenomenon not unique to Israel but
shared by many nations across the globe.
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