Collective Memory, its Structure and its Cultural Antecedents

The article examines the phenomenon of collective memory, the processes of its formation, and the role of different actors in these processes. It is noted that collective memory is an ambivalent phenomenon that combines, on the one hand, individual memories, and, on the other hand, the effects of political and cultural influence carried out by key social actors. A significant contribution to the consolidation of collective memory is made by the products of the language game — language tropes that give rise to metaphors, hyperboles, metonymic formations, and stable memes. Tropes summarize assessments of the past, consolidating them and simultaneously introducing a moral dimension into them. Collective memory is closely related to historical memory, which is purposefully formed through the efforts of institutional actors within the framework of memorization policy, in museum expositions, monuments, history textbooks, and popular media. Memory policy cannot ignore individual experience aggregated by collective memory. In some cases, collective memory creates its own defense mechanisms that help overcome the consequences of social cataclysms. This goal is served by the protective mechanisms of repression, which take traumatic events beyond the memory, or by the mechanisms of projection, which take the events under discussion beyond the responsible behavior of current generations. Collective memory narratives are formatted by psychocomplexes — stable frames that fill past events with meanings and value content. One of the key actor’s influencing collective memory is historical science, communities of professional historians offering their own, usually nuanced, assessments of past events. Identities, including civil and ethnic identities, are formed on the basis of collective memory.