Hirbet Hizah: Between Remembrance and Forgetting

Abstract

The questions what, how, and when we remember remain a source of fascination for scholars. They remain among the most elusive and complex to define. Collective memory is situated at the divide between the conscious and the subliminal, between acknowledgment and denial, between history and psychology. Currently in vogue is the conception of the "usable past": collective memory as a construct, a product of national-cultural manipulation that seeks to entrench in memory those portions of the past useful for invigorating the imagery of the society's self-identity and fostering its vital current interests and agendas. That conception repudiates the notion that there are spontaneous, unintentional processes at work as collective memory crystallizes. If we attach conscious intent in shaping memory and its construction, then who are its agents? What are their tools? Moreover, in democratic states--and, arguably, in other states too-- there is never one single source of inspiration and guidance. How does the open arena of conflicting interests affect memory's configuration? When is a particular event stamped, indelibly or temporarily, in memory? What processes catalyze its fixing, what forces act to submerge its recollection? If the "usable past" ministers to interests in the present, then what is the fate of those segments of the past that do not serve the [End Page 1] society's current agendas? Are they doomed to oblivion? Or is there a constant dynamic reciprocity between the past and the present, manifested in memory's transformations, not necessarily due to some template imposed from above--but rather to changing circumstances as they affect public consciousness?