Collective Memory and Cultural Identity

Problem and Program In the third decade of this century, the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and the art historian Aby Warburg independently developed' two theories of a or social memory. Their otherwise fundamentally different approaches meet in a decisive dismissal of numerous turnof-the-century attempts to conceive collective memory in biological terms as an inheritable or racial memory,2 a tendency which would still obtain, for instance, in C. G. Jung's theory of archetypes.3 Instead, both Warburg and Halbwachs shift the discourse concerning collective knowledge out of a biological framework into a cultural one. The specific character that a person derives from belonging to a distinct society and culture is not seen to maintain itself for generations as a result of phylogenetic evolution, but rather as a result of socialization and customs. The survival of the type in the sense of a cultural