Collective Memory and Cultural Identity

Abstract

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