New Directions in the Sociology of Collective Memory and Commemoration


New Directions in the Sociology of Collective Memory
and Commemoration

Brian Conway*
National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Abstract

The study of memory straddles a wide range of social science disciplines including sociology, psy-
chology, anthropology, and geography. Within sociology, reviews of the literature have already
been carried out, but these are now somewhat dated. This article takes the measure of recent prior
research on the sociology of collective memory and commemoration by (1) proposing a classifica-
tion of collective memory research; (2) organising the literature under the headings of theoretical
developments, methodological strategies, and methodological challenges; and (3) offering sugges-
tions for maximising the internal cohesion and external utility of the sub-field.

Introduction

Over a decade ago, sociologists Jeffrey Olick and Joyce Robbins wrote a now widely
cited review in the Annual Review of Sociology (Olick and Robbins 1998) of the then (and
still) emerging field of ‘memory studies’. Alerting readers to the different disciplinary
routes into and out of memory and to the three ‘big’ topics of identity, change, and per-
sistence around which it is organised, they characterised the field as ‘centerless’ (Olick
and Robbins 1998, 105). Since then, a number of notable developments have occurred
that have helped to bring greater coherence to a somewhat inchoate field. One good
example of this is the recent establishment of a specialist journal, Memory Studies. Beyond
this, the past decade has also seen a flurry of articles, chapters, and books on memory
projects in a wide variety of national contexts. Indeed, ‘memory studies’ is an umbrella
term hovering up a diverse set of disciplinary vantage points, methodological approaches,
and theoretical perspectives on how we collectively and corporately remember and
commemorate the past.

This article seeks to give the reader a sense of this variation and complexity and, at the
same time, offer some kind of synthesis of it for students of the past beginning to
acquaint themselves with the specifically sociological literature on it. Given the vast body
of research that now exists on memory and the constraints a relatively short review article
such as this imposes, it is necessarily selective and with this in mind I hope it might invite
or urge students to work ‘off the page’ by doing their own explorations in libraries,
archives, and databases.

This review is organised into six sections. Section 1 offers a working definition of
collective memory and commemoration as a basic starting point. The second section
presents a brief history of memory research going back to the early sociological work
of Émile Durkheim and his student Maurice Halbwachs, and then extending into the
last twenty years or so of the contemporary era. Section 3 deals with theoretical devel-
opments in the field. This is followed in Section 4 by an examination of the methodo-
logical strategies sociologists use to empirically study memory as well as a brief

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discussion of methodological challenges in Section 5. Section 6 stands back from the
earlier discussion and attempts to look into the future by speculating about possible
fruitful pathways of enquiry for students of memory.

While memory attracts the interests of scholars from a diverse range of disciplines
each with discipline-specific orientations, what sets the sociological standpoint apart is its
sensitivity to the fundamentally social bases of memory – that is to say, that what, when
and how we remember and commemorate is relational, that is, depends on the variable
influence of others. This is not to deny that individuals ‘do’ memory as well, but it is
to insist that they do so in the context of the prevailing conditions and circumstances
of their social environment both present and inherited. A brief elaboration in the next
section of what we mean by ‘collective memory’ and ‘commemoration’ helps to make
this clearer.

Even a basic acquaintance with memory research quickly reveals the rich pluralism of
mnemonic devices individuals and collectivities use to remember the past. These range
from the better known devices such as memorials, museums, and monuments to less
well-known, though increasingly widely used, means such as street murals, Internet Web
sites, and consumer items like t-shirts, key rings, and CD-ROMS. These mnemonic
devices are asymmetrical in terms of such things as the norms and expectations associated
with interacting with them, malleability, and preservation of the past. Consider, for
example, that how people behave in a museum is more subject to control by those
responsible for putting it together than how people interact with Internet Web sites and
that memorials are more static and less invariant in nature than Internet Web sites. In
terms of the preservation of our connections to the past, museums tend to be better
repositories of the past than more ephemeral, throw-away items like key-rings.

Defining collective memory and commemoration

A basic point of departure in any review article of a field is to develop some basic work-
ing understanding of its key concepts. Sociologist Barry Schwartz puts forward the fol-
lowing definition of collective memory: ‘collective memory refers to the distribution
throughout society of beliefs, feelings, moral judgements and knowledge about the
past’[http://www.sociologyencyclopedia.com/info/sample1.pdf (last accessed 27 January
2010)].

This definition makes three important points. First, collective memory has to do with
a societal-wide phenomenon – it is not a property of individuals but of social groups.
Second, collective memory concerns how people feel about the past rather than strictly
what objectively happened in the past. In this sense, collective memory has to do with
what social groups select out of the happenings of their lives that they consider important
and worthy of preserving. Inevitably, this normative evaluation also involves forgetting –
not everything about the past can be remembered, as there are limits to the capacity of
our minds to process the past (Schwartz 2009; Zerubavel 1997). Memory, to use the lan-
guage of economic theory, involves opportunity costs. By this account, commemorating
the past is not a simple or straightforward matter. Answers to seemingly basic questions
such as who should be remembered? when? and why? are rarely easy to answer, and
social groups frequently fight with one another over the answers to them. A third impor-
tant point that can be made in relation to this definition is that collective memory has to
do with the remembered past and its connections to the lived present and the imagined
future (Lewis and Weigert 1981, p. 435) – it is about the temporality of our individual
and collective lives.

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As a result of a focus on these three things, sociological studies of memory have tended
to suffer from two important conceptual limitations – (1) an oversocialised conception of
memory that tends to sidestep the question of whether collective images of the past map
onto individual reminiscences and vice versa; and (2) a tendency to homogenise collective
memory and thus to underestimate the extent to which collective memory can be a con-
tainer for a diversity of colliding and fragmented meanings of the past.

Collective memory and commemoration are clearly related, but they are not one and
the same thing. Commemoration has to do with the practices and artefacts (Casey 2000;
Olick 2008), social groups mobilise to represent the past to themselves and to others. Put
another way, it relates to what people actually do in a communal way and in public con-
texts – commemoration basically involves public work – in response to the social distri-
bution of opinions about the past and is the outcome of contestation, interests, and
negotiation. Spaces, times, bodies, and images are cultural resources drawn upon in
most commemorative activity. By contrast, collective memory is more a state of mind
than a concrete set of material things and social practices – ‘sites of memory’ (Nora 1989)
– oriented to the past, present, and future.

Pathways of collective memory research

The first sociological thoughts about memory were written by Émile Durkheim – though
admittedly he did not invoke the term itself (Misztal 2003) – and he claimed religious rit-
uals played an important role in reminding people of their pasts and connecting them to
one another through this. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim 1995),
Durkheim was arguably more interested in time than in memory per se (Olick and
Robbins 1998) – positing that our categories of time (and space) come from religion –
and he recognised that the social solidarity generated by it could ‘‘travel’’ beyond ritual
occasions but that it needed to be kept fresh and live through regular commemorative
practices. A second important figure in the history of the sub-field is Maurice Halbwachs,
a student of Durkheim. Halbwachs’s work reflected continuity with the earlier
Durkheimian tradition by emphasising the socially created nature of memory via families,
occupational groups, religious gatherings, and other social hosts. This social understanding
was clearly reflected in the important distinction Halbwachs made between auto-
biographical and historical memory, which I discuss.

Both Durkheim and Halbwachs emphasised the importance of ritual and other mne-
monic devices such as texts of all kinds – museums, murals, monuments, and the like –
that institutionalise the past in our everyday lives. Neither gave much attention, however,
to the dynamic relation between embodied rituals and textual means of remembering the
past (Casey 2000) or to the possibilities of cross-currents and collisions in memory as
reflected in more contemporary work examining ‘‘official’’ versus ‘‘vernacular’’ render-
ings of the past (Gillis 1994). Despite their focus on positive pasts (Fine 2001), at least
mentioning Durkheim and Halbwachs is now almost an obligatory preface comment in
any serious engagement with collective memory.

Nowadays sociologists are actively engaged in memory research. Although much of
this present-day research originates from and about the Anglo-American world, increas-
ingly, less well-studied geographical areas such as Asia are receiving attention as well
(Schwartz and Kim forthcoming; Tsutsui 2009). One way of gauging recent growth in
interest in the field is to look at trends and patterns in the number of journal articles
referring to the concept of collective memory. Since the 1960s, there has been a veritable
explosion of interest in it. In the 1960–1975 period only 4 journal abstracts made

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mention of the term, but in the 2000–2010 period this had grown to 1380 (see Figure 1).
While the number of periodicals also grew over this time period and helps explain the
trend, the almost threefold increase in mentions of the concept from 1990–2000 to
2000–2010 is indicative of its growing popularity.

Theoretical developments

Compared to other sub-fields in sociology, the sociology of collective memory and com-
memoration is not well developed theoretically. Sociologists of memory tend to import
concepts and theories from other sub-fields into theirs and – surprising perhaps – there is
little traffic in the other direction. One rare example of traffic into other sub-disciplines
from collective memory research is the use by sociologists of religion of the concept of
religion as a ‘chain of memory’, a construct associated with the work of Hervieu-Léger
(2000). In addition to the straw men ‘‘constructionist’’ and ‘‘continuity’’ perspectives
(Jedlowski 2001; Olick 2008; Olick and Robbins 1998), the literature is characterised by
the circulation of a plethora of concepts including memory work (Irwin-Zarecka 1994),
memory entrepreneurship (Olick and Robbins 1998), memory projects (Corney 2003),
autobiographical memory (Halbwachs 1992), historical memory (Halbwachs 1992), pros-
thetic memory (Landsberg 2004), postmemory (Hirsch 2008), cosmopolitan memory
(Levy and Sznaider 2006), recovered memory (Sturken 1998), somatic memory (Gibbons
2001), cultural trauma (Alexander 2003), visual memory (Zelizer 2002), and so on. This
bundle of concepts (summarised in Table 1) can be loosely distilled into three broad cate-
gories: (1) concepts relating to agency and actorhood in relation to commemoration and
remembrance; (2) concepts relating to the constitutive forces for memory; and (3) con-
cepts relating to the contexts in which memory is (re)produced. The concepts of ‘mem-
ory work’, ‘memory entrepreneurs,’ and ‘memory projects’ relate to agency and
actorhood, the concepts of autobiographical, historical, post, and cosmopolitan memory
relate to different contexts in which memory is produced while cultural trauma, somatic
memory, recovered memory, and visual memory relate to different constitutive forces for
memory. Space does not permit a full elaboration of each of these focal concepts, so I
have chosen to hone in on six of them.

0
5
0
0

1
0
0
0

1
5
0
0

1960–1975 1975–1990 1990–2000 2000–2010
Source: Sociological abstracts

Figure 1 Number of journal abstracts mentioning collective memory, 1960–2010.

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Coming mainly from the symbolic interactionist tradition, the concept of memory
entrepreneurs refer to human actors with resources and organisation who do things to
remember the past (Fine 2001). The mnemonic artefacts or practices that result from this
human activity – marches, processions, museums, Web sites, poetry, song, etc. – consti-
tute memory projects. By their attention to memory entrepreneurs sociologists give atten-
tion to the role of agency and actorhood in remembering the past and acknowledge that
commemoration does not just happen by chance but requires the active work of people
to propagate and disseminate the past (Fine 2001).

With respect to the variable contexts in which memory is constructed, the useful
distinction between autobiographical and historical memory owes to the influence of
Maurice Halbwachs (Halbwachs 1992). Autobiographical memory has to do with memo-
ries of the past based on direct first-hand experience, while historical memory relates to
memories of the past mediated through the preservation efforts of others. With the pas-
sage of time, one tends to displace the other and open up opportunities for what is
termed ‘prosthetic memory’. Prosthetic memory closely resembles the historical memory
concept by its attention to how people come into contact with memories of the past not
through first-hand experience but via mediated cultural representations such as film and
cinema (Landsberg 2004). This allows new younger ‘post-memory’ generations (Hirsch
2008) removed from past events to nonetheless remember them. These two concepts
seem to challenge Halbwachs earlier emphasis on the importance of social hosts in the
present for keeping memories of the past alive.

All of these theoretical concepts are important, but their utility must ultimately be
judged by their confrontation with empirical data. Some of the research discussed in the
next section does just that.

Methodological strategies

Three broad categories of methodological approaches can be identified in the literature
(see Table 2) – the statistical use of large-scale social surveys, ethnographic investigation
involving the use of in-depth interviews, documentary and textual analysis, and partici-
pant observation (either singly or in combination), and studies using comparative histori-
cal research. Of course, some studies blend these different approaches, but most, more
usually, employ one independently. Cultural analysis of symbolic representations of the
past tends to be the main access point for empirically getting at memory (Schuman and
Corning 2000). Part of this owes something to researcher investment – it is less costly
and time-consuming to look at changes over time in publicly accessible images of some
event or figure than it is to ask people about their views and opinions of them via
nationally representative surveys.

Table 1 Focal concepts in collective memory research.

Actorhood Contexts Formations

Memory work Autobiographical Recovered
Memory project Historical Somatic
Memory entrepreneurship Post Visual

Prosthetic Cultural trauma
Cosmopolitan

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It owes more though to theoretical commitments and particularly the tendency to con-
ceive of memory more in static than dynamic, processual terms (Jansen 2007). Because of
this, long-range historical accounts are less common in the literature despite calls in
recent years from some sociologists of memory (Olick 2008) for the field to go beyond
static conceptions of memory to get at the slow-moving temporal processes in its (re)con-
struction. Compared to the analysis of text, it is more difficult to find empirical studies of
embodied remembrance (Connerton 1989) – how people remember the past via their
physical bodies and in practices such as marches, parades, and processions. Less common
still are examples of studies interrogating the complex relationships between textual and
embodied memory (Casey 2000; Spillman and Conway 2007).

In what follows I give a brief capsule summary account of three representative exam-
ples of each methodological strategy and point the reader towards other interesting illus-
trations of the method’s use. These different methods span levels of analysis from the
individual to society.

Statistical use of large-scale social surveys

One of the best examples of the use of social surveys in collective memory research is
Schuman and Scott’s study of generational differences in collective memories of past his-
torical events (Schuman and Scott 1989). They make the interesting point – drawing on
Karl Mannheim – that when it comes to what memories leave the deepest impression on
us, it is not so much how old one is that matters but rather when one was an adolescent
and young adult. Based on US data and employing Karl Mannheim’s concept of genera-
tion, Schuman and Scott investigate whether different generations remember the past dif-
ferently. Respondents were asked to look back over the previous fifty years and to simply
name big national and world events and developments they remembered and why. They
found evidence for a generational effect, and they isolate adolescence and early adulthood
as the most significant period of one’s life in terms of shaping memory.

A second interesting study involving the use of large-scale social survey data, but in this
instance relating to a historical figure rather than an historical event or changes is Larson
and Lizardo’s analysis of Che Guevara as an international mnemonic and political symbol
(Larson and Lizardo 2007). Based on data from Spanish respondents, they also take
Mannheim’s work as their starting point but go beyond it by suggesting that the exposure

Table 2 Collective memory research: methodological approach, level of analysis, focus, examples, and
frequency.

Approach Level Focus Examples Frequency

Social Survey Micro Patterns and
regularities in people’s
beliefs about remembered
events ⁄ figures

Schuman and Scott 1989;
Schwartz and Schuman 2005;
Schuman et al. 2005.

Moderate

Ethnography Micro Memory ‘on the ground’ Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991;
Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi 2007;
Conway 2010; Saito 2006;.

High

Comparative
Historical

Macro Memory across
time and space

Spillman 1997; Brubaker and
Feischmidt 2002; Jansen 2007;
Armstrong and Crage 2006;
Levy and Sznaider 2006;.

Low

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of generations to a wide range of cultural representations of historical figures exerts an
important influence on memory. Disaggregating the generation category, they also find
some political identity effect – people of a left-wing orientation are more likely, unsur-
prisingly, to remember Che Guevara than others.

Public beliefs about Christopher Columbus around the time of the 500
th

anniversary of
his coming to America are the focus of Schuman et al. (2005) study. More specifically,
they are interested in whether elite opinion about this historical figure maps onto public
beliefs about him, and they found that elite efforts to reconstruct his image showed little
sign of taking hold among ordinary people. To get at these public beliefs, they carried
out a national survey asking over 1500 mostly White American respondents what they
would say Columbus did if asked by a niece or nephew to briefly explain his accomplish-
ments. Respondent answers were distributed on a continuum from negative to positive
beliefs, and they present statistical tables of these distributions.

Beyond these examples, works by Schuman and Corning (2000) and Schwartz and
Schuman (2005) represent good illustrations of the use of the large-scale social survey in
memory research.

Ethnographic investigation: in-depth interviews, documentary and textual research, and participant
observation

In the memory literature, numerous examples exist of ethnographic studies employing the
standard tools of this method – interviews, observation, and textual analysis. Indeed, one
of the paradigmatic pieces of memory research involves the use of ethnographic analysis –
Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz’s study of the Vietnam memorial (Wagner-Pacifici and
Schwartz 1991). This study concerned itself with the basic question of whether commem-
oration without consensus about the past is possible or not and employed controversies
associated with the Vietnam memorial as a case study. Empirically, this study was based
on a resort to textual material from newspapers and congressional records and documents
about the competition, design, and construction for the memorial, written accounts
deposited by people who visited the memorial, observations of the memorial, and objects
people deposited at the memorial. They also employed a comparative logic by examining
similarities and differences between this memory project and other controversial projects.

Saito’s study of Hiroshima in Japanese collective memory provides another example of
research employing the ethnographic method. Here, the main source of data is archival
and textual materials – he examines memoirs of survivors of the bomb, city government
documents contained in archives, and national broadsheet newspapers. Allied to this, he
carefully studied existing secondary sources about the historical evolution of Japanese
society. Based on this, Saito proposes a three-phase periodisation of Japanese engagement
with the memory of the event with an early period focusing on transnational commemo-
ration to later national engagement with it, and still later to the congealing of both
national and transnational elements (Saito 2006).

If most collective memory research pays attention to examples of successful commemo-
ration, Jennifer Jordan’s recent work on memorialisation in the material landscape of
urban Berlin represents a corrective to this approach of looking under the lamp-post to
find memory. Jordan draws on archival material, interviews, and secondary sources to
show that studying and understanding negative cases of unsuccessful remembrance –
discussed in the literature under the rubrics of forgetting, silencing, amnesia, and oblivion
(Connerton 2008; Huyssen 2005; Ricouer 2004; Schwartz 2009; Sturken 1998; Trouillot
1995; Walkowitz and Knauer 2004) – has much to teach us about the dynamics of

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memory than the more frequent default option of studying successful commemoration.
Her focus on where the plaque, statue, memorial, or museum is not tells us that successful
commemoration critically depends on cultural factors such as the presence or absence of
memory entrepreneurs and the resonance of their activities, as well as bureaucratic issues
such as land usage and land ownership (Jordan 2006).

Other interesting empirical studies of memory research using ethnographic approaches
include Vinitzky-Seroussi (2002), Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi (2007), Yoneyama
(1999), Conway (2010), and Spillman and Conway (2007).

Comparative historical research

Studies of how a single event is remembered in different societies at different times or of
how different events are remembered in similar societies are rare in this sub-field. Some
interesting examples of research using a comparative historical logic are Spillman (1997),
Levy and Sznaider (2006), Brubaker and Feischmidt (2002), and Armstrong and Crage
(2006).

Spillman’s study of centennial and bicentennial anniversaries in the two settler societies
of United States and Australia examines variation in commemorative themes adopted at
different times in these two societies. This study found that American political elites
remembered their founding moment as a nation much more than Australian elites did
and she explained this interesting variation in terms of the cultural production of the past
– arguing for the importance of paying attention to the audiences to whom elites were
oriented to as well as variation between the two societies in terms of the salience of inter-
national image and reputation – but also in terms of variation in the semiotic qualities of
historical symbolism.

The study of the similarities and differences in the commemoration of the 1848 revo-
lution in Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania is the focus of Brubaker and Feischmidt’s
comparative work. They examined what memory choreographers said at commemorative
occasions – political discourse – and newspaper and popular press coverage but, signifi-
cantly, and with the help of student assistants, they also participated as observers in recent
commemorations and paid special attention to the emotional atmosphere generated by
them. Examining the different meanings of 1848 across space and time, they found that
1848 was more resonant in Hungary than in either Slovakia or Romania and that it
evoked a different emotional atmosphere and fuelled different political claim-making at
different times. They explain this variation as a consequence of how salient or not the
1848 revolution was to national group identity – in Hungary it was much more salient.
Tracing the trajectory of Hungarian commemorations, they found that commemorations
of 1848 did different things in different contexts – they moved from being sombre to
more celebratory occasions as a result of growing concerns about Hungary’s international
image and standing and demonstrating its credentials as a modern polity worthy of admis-
sion to transnational institutions such as the European Union.

Another recent contribution to comparative historical studies of memory projects is
Armstrong and Crage’s (2006) work on the Stonewall riots in New York City and similar
events in other metropolitan cities and how they were differently remembered in differ-
ent gay communities. Drawing on archival data about gay movements and secondary lit-
erature, they investigate variation between three US cities in terms of how incidents
involving gay opposition to police raids of gay bars got commemorated. Explaining this
variation, they isolate the importance of factors such as ‘mnemonic capacity’ or the ability
of social groups to pull of a commemoration, the resonance of memory projects and

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relationship to wider political movements, the chosen commemorative device, and the
‘commemorability’ of events.

Other notable recent studies using comparative historical research include Jansen
(2007) and Levy and Sznaider (2006).

Methodological challenges

Although it is unusual for sociologists of memory to offer reflective comments on the
actual process of carrying out research on commemoration, a few examples do exist and
almost exclusively within the ethnographic tradition. Viterna’s reflections on fieldwork in
rural El Salvador (Viterna 2009) points out that students of memory run up against two
common validity problems when it comes to asking people questions about their memo-
ries of the past. One common difficulty is that people tend to be prone to sheer forget-
fulness or, put another way, recall problems (Jedlowski 2001) – as time passes our
memories of what happened tend to fade as new experiences compete with old ones for
retention in our minds. Vromen’s study of Roman Catholic Church rescue efforts on
behalf of Jewish children during the Holocaust provides an instructive example of this –
when asked about daily life in Belgian convents nuns tended to forget, for example,
precise details of practices in relation to the daily washing of the children in their care.
Vromen employed letters the nuns wrote to flesh out some of the detail about their lives
missing from their interview accounts and this provides an example of how textual data
can supplement interview data in our memory research (Vromen 2008, 65).

Another difficulty in relation to interviewing people about the past is the tendency of
interviewees to sanitise their retellings in the context of the contemporary ‘remembrance
environment’ (Viterna 2009, 283) – for example, Vromen’s study reports that coura-
geous nuns who ran these institutions tended to de-emphasise the importance of saving
souls – via participation in Catholic rituals such as baptism – as their goal and emphas-
ised instead humanitarian concerns in interviews she carried out with some nuns long
after what happened (Vromen 2008, 51–52). Respondent recollections can also be ham-
pered by audience effects and subsequent post-event stories told by others (Hirst and
Echterhoff 2008).

Of course, researchers can take steps to correct for these deficiencies in their empirical
data gathering – the accounts of respondents can be corroborated or cross-checked against
available textual evidence from newspaper accounts and archival records, for instance.

To my knowledge, no reflective pieces by sociologists using social surveys or compara-
tive historical research exist. The challenges of empirically investigating memory using
these kinds of strategies are the challenges of social survey research – dealing with the
lack of equivalence of survey question meanings across surveys, for example – and com-
parative historical research – selecting pertinent cases and sacrificing breadth of coverage
for depth of understanding, for instance – more generally.

Future directions

Collective memory is central to how individuals and collectivities conceive of their iden-
tities. Sociological engagements with it spotlight how we mobilise resources from the
social world to bring the past into the present and the implications of this for identity,
power, and social change (Jedlowski 2001; Olick and Robbins 1998). Back in the late
1990s, Olick and Robbins (1998) lamented the lack of unity in the discipline’s efforts to
do this. The earlier mentioned developments herald some trend towards greater unity

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though only in a weak sense can the field be said to be unified because innovations –
either at a methodological or at a theoretical level – tend to be ad hoc and slow to diffuse
widely across disciplinary boundaries. Oddly, students of memory tend to be prone to
‘‘selective forgetting’’ in relation to developments in cognate fields.

Future development of the field will likely turn on progress made – or not – on two
fronts: (1) internal cohesion and (2) external utility.

Internally, the sociology of commemoration would benefit from putting the intercon-
nection between theory and data front-and-centre – how sociologists theorise about the
nature of memory has important consequences for how they empirically study it (and
vice versa). Consider two examples. First, sociologists have been interested in the social
forces that shape the production of memory via attention to memory entrepreneurship,
for example, but this angle of vision has meant that their understanding of how mne-
monic artefacts and practices are received or consumed by ordinary people – the recep-
tion issue – is somewhat underdeveloped. Indeed, it is rare to find a study that actually
asks people what they think and feel about commemorative projects. We tend instead to
read off this layer of interpretation and meaning-making from the intentions of those
behind memory projects or from shifting symbolic representations. But given the highly
charged nature of memory debates we know that these intentions do not always neatly
articulate with those of individuals at the other end – in this respect, sociological engage-
ment with the experimental studies of psychologists on memory and their efforts to ‘bring
the individual back in’ through them might well be fruitful (Hirst and Echterhoff 2008;
Schwartz and Schuman 2005).

Second, conceiving of collective memory in ‘‘moving picture’’ (Pierson 2004, 2)
terms calls for sensitivity to long-range historical change and understanding one case in
relation to others. More use of comparative historical logics would allow an examina-
tion of cross-national variation in how the same event or figure is remembered in dif-
ferent national contexts at different times or how similar events are remembered in
similar societies. As we have seen in the classification of memory research presented
earlier, these methodological approaches are less common than other data gathering
strategies. Also underrepresented is the use of mixed-method designs combining qualita-
tive and quantitative data gathering though some notable examples of this do exist
(Schuman et al. 2005).

On an external level, against a ‘picket-fence’ approach emphasising the separation of
memory research from other sub-fields in sociology the field could fruitfully benefit from
paying more attention to how it can contribute to other sub-fields – for example, the
sociology of organisations might benefit from attention to how organisations of many
kinds have their own ‘‘memories,’’ and how this organisational memory potentially shapes
– or not – present-day organisational behaviour. Beyond this example, almost every social
phenomenon from collective action (Armstrong and Crage 2006) to eating behaviour
(Lee 2000; Sutton 2008) can be said to have a ‘‘memory’’ dimension. Although up to
now the sociology of memory has not contributed much by way of concepts and theories
to the broader discipline, the study of collective memory opens up rich possibilities for
exercising the ‘sociological imagination’ (Mills 2000).

Acknowledgement

The author thanks the anonymous reviewers and the section editor, Arlene Stein, for
very helpful and thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this article.

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Short Biography

Brian Conway is lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the National University of
Ireland, Maynooth. His research interests are collective memory, sociology of religion,
and the history of sociology. Previously, he lectured in sociology in the School of
Applied Social Studies at the Robert Gordon University, Scotland. He was awarded a
B.Soc.Sc. degree by University College Dublin, a M.S.W. degree by the University of
Pittsburgh, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in sociology by the University of Notre Dame.
His work has been published in Sociological Inquiry, Journal of Urban Affairs, Memory Studies,
Identity, Cultural Sociology, Symbolic Interaction, Sociological Origins, and Nomadic Peoples, and
a number of edited collections. He is author of Commemoration and Bloody Sunday:
Pathways of Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and associate editor of Sociological Origins.

Note

* Correspondence address: Brian Conway, Department of Sociology, National University of Ireland, Maynooth,
Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Republic of Ireland. E-mail: brian.conway@nuim.ie

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