Chapter 6: A Developmental Approach to Remembering: The Dialectic Between Collective Memory and Identity Construction

According to the theory of social representations (SR), the dynamic process by which individuals remember the past implies the activation and transformation of contents of their social group’s collective memory (Halbwachs, 1925/1992). Moreover, by means of collective memory, individuals can remember past experiences that they did not live and that could have happened a long time before they were born. These kind of social group’s past experiences are stored in family and collective images, feelings, narratives and objects constructed, shared and transmitted in a social environment (Jodelet, 2003; Paez, Bobowik, & Liu, 2017).

SRs of a social group’s past events are not based on individuals’ life experiences. They are transmitted from one generation to the next via the distribution of the production of historians, school teaching, mass media, and symbolic resources constructed by societies that function as memorials encapsulating collective memory contents, such as names of streets, monuments, and museums (Connerton, 1989). As Brown and Reavey argued (this volume), memories can be constructed and preserved in material features of the urban environment with memorial affordances.