Challenging the traditional view of memory as the product and property of individual minds, "Collective Remembering" investigates remembering and forgetting as socially constituted activities. The starting point for all the authors is a conceptualization of remembering and forgetting as forms of social action. Individual memories cannot be understood as "internal mental processes" occurring independently of the interpretative and communicative practices that characterize a particular society or culture. Individuals "read", account for and negotiate their memories within the pragmatics of social life. The book also explores the collective processes through which communities' social memories are created, sustained and transformed - in families, other groups and cultures, and organizations. They examine the ways in which what is to be remembered - or forgotten - can become rhetorically and ideologically contested domains for the "possession" of the past, present and future.
The social character of memory is a focus of growing interest across a range of disciplines, including psychology, history and historical geography, linguistics and communication studies, sociology and social theory.