FROM «COLLECTIVE MEMORY» TO «GROUP MEMORY» AND POST- MEMORY: DEVELOPMENT ISSUES AND MODERN CHALLENGES IN MEMORY STUDIES

Abstract

A surge of interest in memory studies in the late 1970s has grown into a serious «memory boom», «memory epoch,» and even «memory industry» in the following two decades. The problems of memory and historical experience posed an interest for the scholars and in the mid-1990s became a predominant trend in the modern theory of history. History and memory have become closer – history does not start where social memory ends and in cultural memory, the science of history and memory are the two modes of a memory (A. Assmann). There are different «modes of remembering» with understanding that the past is not something given and it is reconstructed and represented a new every single time (A. Erll). Replacing a single person with the «collective» in collective memory resulted in individualizing a memory and understanding collective memory as a combination of individual memories. Increased attention is paid to the problems of reception – the images of the past are not perceived by the audience within the meanings that were implied by the creator; they are interpreted differently, thus contributing to memory production. We should consider the links between traditions of memory representation, creators of memory, and its consumers, i.e. see an open dialogue between the object, creator and consumer when creating meanings (W. Kansteiner). In the digital era, memory is getting media treatment; instead of the passive consumer, we are now having a volatile «network audience,» and the limits of memory today are determined by media. There is a growing interest in the research of post-memory – «secondary memories», when the experiences of ancestors affect the personality of descendants, sometimes by ousting personal memories and appropriating those to belonging to someone else. Understanding that the past is not only a legacy for historians but is also a part of everybody’s life in the form of contradictory claims and obligations which determine the present and the future; that the present manipulates the past by attracting only «the part of the past which is supposed to shed light on it or put it in the dark» as well as constructability of communicative memory and «ethnicization of suffering» with neglect for plurality and selective amnesia is a challenge and simultaneously an opportunity for memory studies, and recent past in particular.