Abstract
Ithaca, New York, September 2007
 
 “The past is not dead. In fact, it is not even past.”WILLIAM FAULKNER
 The burgeoning field of study loosely known as “cultural memory studies” fills a strange gap between more traditional historiography and the anthropology of memory. Historiography in the more traditional sense embraces the stance that the past is knowable, verifiable to the extent that we have reliable evidence, and retrievable to some extent. It concerns itself with what happened in the past (and the many complications of knowing that). Cultural memory studies, on the other hand, address what Paul Ricoeur so aptly labeled “the mnemonic phenomenon,” the dialogical process through which collectivities recall the past in light of present concerns that arein part shaped by this very past that is being recalled and refashioned in the present. For the scholar of cultural memory, the object of study is not the past, but the many projects memory undertakes: healing, denial, revision, invention, recreation and re-creation, forgetting. What is the relationship between history and memory? What should it be?
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Highlights
WILLIAM FAULKNERThe burgeoning field of study loosely known as “cultural memory studies” fills a strange gap between more traditional historiography and the anthropology of memory
Cultural Memory, the Past and the Static of the Present “The past is not dead
Historiography in the more traditional sense embraces the stance that the past is knowable, verifiable to the extent that we have reliable evidence, and retrievable to some extent
Summary
The burgeoning field of study loosely known as “cultural memory studies” fills a strange gap between more traditional historiography and the anthropology of memory. Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) may have anticipated this field ahead of his time with his late in life work On Collective Memory, published posthumously in 1950.1 Halbwachs’ work was significant, because of its relatively early date in this vibrant discussion on cultural memory, but because he seems to be one of the first theorists to liberate the study of memory from the realm of the private and the individual. It was assumed in the mid twentieth century that while collectivities may undergo history, memory was a largely personal affair. This paradigm shift, from the agency of the individual to the forces of social reproduction, is a cornerstone of contemporary critical theory, but we note here the work of this early theorist in pointing out the broad path cultural memory studies would come to take more than fifty years after his death
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