Shaping memories 2020 : Shaping memories in contemporary narratives

One of the themes characterizing the current reflection in the social sciences (with a proliferation of Memory Studies especially since the 1980s in the Anglo-Saxon and European area) concerns the role of memory, not only in relation to its theoretical definition, but also with respect to its possible use as an interpretative tool in the empirical analysis of social processes.

Studies on the social origin of memory have developed within different fields, from the sociology of Halbwachs, Assmann, Cohen, Lavabre, Zerubavel, Jedlowski, Namer, Jelin [...] to other philosophical and historical perspectives of authors such as Nora, Ricoeur, Ost, Le Goff, Jenkins and Arendt, Benjamin, Kracauer ... All these strands have contributed to a systematization of the theme by placing it in a multidisciplinary terrain. From Halbwachs onwards, social scientists have highlighted how it is never only the individual in his or her singularity to remember, but it is always a group or society of which he is a member.