Collective Memory
Collective memory is sometimes used in the resurrection of historic house museums – However not all historic house museums use this approach. The notion of Collective Memory originated from philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, in ‘La memoire collective’ (‘On Collective Memory’, 1950). This extended thesis examines the role of people and place, and how collective memory is not only associated with the individual but is a shared experience. It also focused on the way individual memory is influenced by social structures, as a way of continuing socialisation by producing memory as collective experience.
- "Each aspect, each detail, of this place has a meaning intelligent only to members of the group, for each portion of its space corresponds to various and different aspects of the structure and life of their society, at least of what is stable in it."
An example of a site that utilises collective memory is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Japan. It was restored and is based on the dialectics of memory, however it also has the inclusion of joyous festivals to mask the turmoil. The ‘Hiroshima Traces’ (1999) text takes a look the importance of collective memory and how it is embedded in culture and place. Thus, collective memory does not only reside in a house or building, but it also resonates in outdoor space – particularly when a monumental event has occurred, such as war.
- "The taming of memory that can be observed in the city’s redevelopment projects reveals local mediations and manifestations of transnational as well as national structural forces."
Read more about this topic: Historic House Museums
Famous quotes containing the words collective and/or memory:
“Anyone who is kind to man knows the fragmentariness of most men, and wants to arrange a society of power in which men fall naturally into a collective wholeness, since they cannot have an individual wholeness. In this collective wholeness they will be fulfilled. But if they make efforts at individual fulfilment, they must fail for they are by nature fragmentary.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“A man of sense, though born without wit, often lives to have wit. His memory treasures up ideas and reflections; he compares them with new occurrences, and strikes out new lights from the collision. The consequence is sometimes bons mots, and sometimes apothegms.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)