Toward a Dynamical—in the Field—Approach to Collective Memory

The study of collective memories—as shared individual memories that bear on people’s identities—has experienced a resurgence during the past decade. This interest has proliferated because scholars from diverse disciplines have increasingly recognized that communities base their collective identities and collective actions, to an important extent, on these shared memories. Memory, identity, and action are closely intertwined. Given that this interdependence occurs at both an individual and a group level, social scientists have advocated for a programmatic effort to understand why a memory—be it individual or collective—takes the form that it does. This chapter describes the fundamental characteristics of collective memory, illustrating its relation to nationalism and pointing to generative research trajectories that are aimed at understanding the formation of collective memories in real-world contexts.