Drawing on studies of modern memory cultures, it presents a dynamic and generative model that construes memory in terms of cultural practices of remembrance. It argues for a more clearly demarcated distinction between myths and memories which acknowledges cultural memory as a site of new experiential perspectives that often work against the authority of myths, seen as the unquestioned truths about the collective past.
This article, originally presented at an LSE conference in honour of Anthony Smith (March 2017), revisits Smith's landmark collection Myths and Memories of the Nation (1999) from the perspective of recent developments in cultural memory studies. The concise presentation of the main concepts of cultural memory studies is intended not only to offer readers a unique overview of current research in the field it is also meant to serve as a forum for bringing together approaches from areas as varied as neurosciences and literary history, thus adding further contour and depth to this emergent field of study. The aim of this handbook is to offer the first truly integrated survey of this interdisciplinary and international field of cultural memory studies. Sometimes these concepts converge at other times they seem to exclude one another and all too often, researchers in one discipline seem to take no notice of the work done in neighboring disciplines.
Today, the complex issue of cultural memory is re-markably interdisciplinary: Concepts of cultural memory circulate in history, the social and political sciences, philosophy and theology, psychology, the neurosciences, and psychoanalysis, as well as in literary and media studies. As a consequence, the study of the relations between culture and memory has diversified into a broad range of approaches. In the course of the last two decades this area of research has witnessed a veritable boom in various countries and disciplines. Cultural memory studies came into being at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the works of Maurice Halbwachs on mémoire collective.
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