If the past weighs on the present, then the present also weighs on the past: Collective remembering as an open system for human science

Abstract

The study of collective memory (CM) forms a platform for dialogue between top‐down (CM as publicly available symbols) and bottom‐up approaches (CM as aggregated across individuals), and between the idiographic (case specific) and nomothetic (universal) approaches across the social sciences and humanities. The availability of symbolic resources from history to serve as foundations for systems of belief is critical for defining human science as an open system involving synchronic and diachronic analyses that theorize about the making and breaking of political culture: including concepts, processes, and organizations coming into being, or disappearing, and as they do so, changing what phenomena can be observed and why. This Special Issue contains ten articles, one cluster of which centering around Europe, and the collective remembering of World War II. This contributed to the making of the European Union, but national structures also limit popular identification with this supranational structure. Despite the best efforts of states, the bottom‐up surveys reported here demonstrate the heterogeneity of CM, as mediated by mass communications, and age cohorts. In contexts ranging from memory of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, to protest movements in Hong Kong, Japanese occupation of Korea, and social representations of the histories of Singapore, Morocco, and Egypt, the papers collected here show consistently that CM is heterogeneous, and different CMs are associated with different political attitudes and behavior. History as a symbolic resource is best conceptualized as something that can be mobilized by an identity entrepreneur, not as something fixed.