and social structure are responsible for framing people’s experience. At the
same time he claims that constructionist views fail to notice the multidimensional
and layered nature of situations: ‘It is not just that different
people might have different definitions of the same situations, but that each
participant can be in several complex layers of situational definition at the
same time’ (Collins 1988: 58). Goffman’s avoidance of complete relativism
(as seen in his recognition of the primary importance of the physical and
social worlds, and his interest in analysing the organization of experience)
parallels the dynamics of memory approach’s insistence on the reality of the
past while, at the same time, adding to it the assertion that people do indeed
interpret the past (Schudson 1997: 15). Since people continuously project
their expectations and perceptions, or frames of reference, into the past, and
since they continuously build frames upon frames, the past is reconstructed
in a more complicated way than the simple assertion that the present
influences the past would suggest.
According to Goffman (1959: 247), the reality and sincerity of frames is
protected by the use of various procedures that anchor frame activity and
induce in us a belief that what appears to be real is real; yet it is the material
world that is the ultimate grounding, while all transformations of it are
secondary. His approach allows us to view forgetting as the result of the
disappearance or change of frameworks due to shifts in social conventions.
The fact that there can be many frames and that they are constructed upon
each other, with primary frameworks at the beginning of the process, results
in the multiple nature of reality. While engaging in the process of framing,
people prove themselves to be capable of dealing with many frames without
any problems. They are also capable of adjusting frames to ‘fit’ the actual
occurrence itself in such a way that the definition of the event, as provided
by the framework of shared memory, becomes confirmed. Such a construction
of the social world ensures our conventional conduct, which in turn is
understandable only in terms of the frame. When the fit is imperfect ‘the past
is at once an idealization and critique of the present world’ (Schwartz 2000:
253). In other words, in order for collective memory to inspire and mobilize,
the fit must be imperfect, leaving enough discrepancy to allow for the evaluation
of the present. The workings of primary frameworks become most
visible when discussing generational memories and groups traditions.
Generational memory: imprint of a ‘spirit of the times’
The idea of generation is very old. It was used, for example, in ancient
Greece and features in the Old Testament, where it is conceived in a genealogical
sense as the measure of distance between parents and children.
Despite its long history, the notion of generation has had a brief and not very
successful career as a scientific concept. However, attempts to elaborate the
THE REMEMBERING PROCESS 83
idea are interesting because they tend to transcend the arbitrary limits of
conventional academic disciplines. For example, Marias’ (1970) formulation
of the concept of generation, while relying on historical method and
tracing the theory back to Ibn Khaldun’s fourteenth-century writings,
incorporates philosophical, literary and sociological insights. Seeing generation
as ‘the concrete unit of authentic historical chronology’, Marias
emphasizes that it requires more than merely biological or biographical
information, since we ‘must also know the structure of the world at that
time’ (p. 101). Following Ortega’s idea of generation as ‘the visual organ
with which historical reality can be seen in its real and vibrant authenticity’,
Marias defines generation as ‘systems of prevailing conventions’ and therefore
as ‘a fundamental ingredient of each of us’ (1970: 102, 101, 83). He
points out that affinity between members of a given generation ‘does not
arise so much from themselves as from being obliged to live in a world of a
certain and unique form’ (p. 104). Since to live is something ‘that happens in
the form of coexistence’ (p. 79) and since generation is our historical world,
it is from this generational basis that we face reality in order to mould our
lives.
Such assumptions about the importance of generation and a ‘spirit of the
times’, which leaves its imprint on the collective memory of a given generation,
have energized various perspectives, from ideas of generation as a way
to explain the feeling of ‘destiny’ among a specific group of people, to perspectives
arguing that generation ‘alone could help to compose a dynamic
portrait of a society’(Renouard in Nora 1996b: 505). The majority of these
theories seem to stress the uniqueness of each generation and their mutual
distance, yet in reality generations have much in common and tend to
resemble each other (de Tocqueville 1968). In the same vein, Halbwachs
([1926] 1950) argues that there is a ‘living link’ between generations which
ensures that the past is handed on via parents and grandparents and goes
beyond the limits of individual experience. While the generational gap is
perceived as providing a basis for changing the present, generational continuity
is regarded as a source of stability and legitimacy. In other words, as
generation follows generation, each receives an inheritance from its
predecessor, and this intergenerational transmission, or tradition, is a foundation
of societal continuity.
It was Mannheim who injected a more sociological perspective into the
notion of generation. His classic essay on ‘The Problem of Generation’,
originally published in 1928, is still the main point of reference for all the
more recent contributions. By insisting that in order to share generational
location in a sociologically meaningful sense an individual must be born
within the same historical and cultural context and be exposed to experiences
that occur during their formative adult years, Mannhein endorsed the
conceptualization of generations as something more than merely collections
of age cohorts. His description of links between the generations as a social
84 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING
category and memory suggests that theories of social memory should be
a central part of the sociology of knowledge (Plicher 1994). Mannheim’s
theory of generation, designed as part of his theoretical strategy to understand
‘the existential basis of knowledge’ and develop an alternative
approach from Marxism to social change, sees generation as ‘one of the
fundamental factors in the unfolding dynamic of history’ (1972: 288–90).
The specificity and uniqueness of each generation’s experience results in
the different character of their respective collective memories. Moreover,
Mannheim uses this notion in ‘a surprisingly contemporary way to
encompass all types of knowledge a person might acquire, that is conceptual
knowledge of words, world knowledge, skills as well as memories’ (Conway
1997: 21).
Stressing the difference between appropriated and personally acquired
memories, Mannheim argues that the memories we acquire for ourselves in
the process of personal development are real memories which we really
possess and which are the basis of our generational identity, since this
type of knowledge is generally better preserved in our memory and has real
binding power (1972: 296). He further specifies that it is the period of late
adolescence and early adulthood which is the formative one for the constitution
of a distinctive memory and personal outlook. The concept of ‘the
inventory experience’, which is an experience absorbed from the environment
in early youth, allows Mannheim to argue that young people’s fresh
encounters with the wider world in this critical stage of their lives become
‘the historically oldest stratum of consciousness, which tends to stabilise
itself as the natural view of the world’ (p. 296). In this perspective, experience
from adolescence and early adulthood is carried forward with selfawareness
and contributes to differences in generational views of the world.
However, for a generation to be a key aspect of the existential determination
of knowledge, its members need to share more than just demographic
characteristics. Mannheim believed that belonging to the same generation
becomes sociologically significant only when it involves participation in
the same historical and social circumstances which ‘endow the individuals
sharing in them with . . . common mentality and sensitivity’ (p. 291). A
unique generational memory, a result of its members’ common exposure to
social and intellectual processes, is dependent on the tempo of social change.
The quicker the pace of social and cultural change, the greater are the
chances that a generation gap will emerge, resulting in older generations
controlling the reigning conceptions of history, while the young quickly
acquire ‘new strategies of action’ for coping with life in unsettled times
(Swidler 1986).
The growing tempo of change, together with the spread of democracy,
can be seen as responsible for today’s new interest in the idea of generation.
With the decline of the importance and visibility of old divisions, knowledges
and bonds, generational identifications become more important and
THE REMEMBERING PROCESS 85
hence it can be said that the ‘generation is the daughter of democracy and
the acceleration of history’ (Nora 1996b: 508). Furthermore, in this era of
electronic communication, globalization of popular culture and the importance
of mass media, it is predicted that ‘generations will exist more easily
across social space because they will be able to share more easily a collective
culture’ (Eyerman and Turner 1998: 97). Emerging generational links and
solidarities simultaneously simplify and complicate the network of social
allegiances, as recent developments impose new limits and enhance new
types of connection. These new trends have shifted attention from previous
studies of generations as a variable which can help to predict future
behaviour, to current investigations of generation as a collectivity constituted
by the historical dimensions of the social processes predominant in
that generation’s youth. This recent interest in generational memory has
helped to clarify some uncertainties connected with attempts to identify a
concrete ‘generation’.
New investigations of the collective memories of generations has solved
the problem of how to define a generational cohort, as this type of research
assumes that memories will be structured along the age dimension in ways
that allow us to identify various generations. Unlike the traditional
approach, new research ‘starts with memories and works backwards rather
than forward from generations’ (Schuman and Corning 2000: 915). The
importance of links between generation and memory, so prominent in the
new studies, can be seen as a result of researchers’ realization that, in order
to assume that members of a cohort in terms of age adopt a certain line
of action, there is a need to identify what earlier experiences are carried
forward in memory by that cohort.
Several studies examine the existence of generational differences in
memory by comparing the meaning of adolescent memories with those that
occur in other periods of life (e.g. Schuman and Scott 1989; Schuman
and Corning 2000). In order to verify hypotheses extrapolated from
Mannheim’s theory, this type of research investigates intergenerational
effects, seen as the result of the intersection of personal and national history,
examines the role of various stages in individual lives for memory encoding,
and analyses whether adolescence and early childhood are the primary
sources of political and social memories. In one such study, following
Mannheim’s suggestions that adolescence and early adulthood are stages of
life uniquely open to gaining knowledge about the wider world and that
those from an older generation are likely to interpret events in terms of their
previously well developed view of the world, Schuman and Scott (1989)
asked a cross section of Americans to identify any two ‘especially important
national or world events or changes’. Their research results show that
memories are structured by generational divisions and that attributions of
importance to national and world events of the past half century tend to be a
function of an individual having experienced an event during adolescence or
86 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING
early adulthood. By examining the existence of generational differences in
memory, Schuman and Scott’s study proves that knowledge personally
gained is more important, as people do not tend to regard those events and
changes that occur after their early adulthood as important. For example,
older generations were significantly more likely to mention World War II as
one of the major events in the last 50 years than younger people, who did
not personally experience it.
In addition, the meaning of events differs for various cohorts, which confirms
Manheim’s position. However, some types of event, due to their
‘objective’ importance, are seen as significant by all generations, including
those who were not adolescents at the time. That said even in cases where
the surface memory of an event does not vary according to age, the ‘meaning
of the event . . . will be different for different cohorts’ (Schuman and Scott
1989: 361). For example, the Vietnam War generation, who experienced the
distrust and divisions of the 1960s, viewed World War II, which they did not
personally experience, as the ‘good war’, while older Americans’ perception
of World War II is constructed around its impact on the world.
Those who chose an event that happened during their adolescence showed
a strong tendency to explain their choice in terms of straightforward personal
experience during that time (Schuman and Scott 1989: 370–3). For
example, even though most Americans over 50 shared a memory of John F.
Kennedy’s assassination, this was identified as an important event predominately
by people who were in their teens to early mid-twenties in 1963,
when the assassination took place, while older people mentioned the assassination
less frequently and in less personal terms. The younger people
clearly remembered Kennedy’s assassination ‘in terms of either a specific
“flashbulb” image of hearing of the event itself or a more general report of
its being memorable’ (Schuman and Scott 1989: 373). For instance, a
woman aged 33 at the time of the study said ‘I remember it vividly. I was in
my sixth grade class when the principle came in to announce it’ (p. 373).
Also of interest at this point are the studies undertaken by cognitive
psychologists, whose work on autobiographical memories revealed the
existence of what they termed the ‘reminiscence bump’ or ‘peak’. These
investigations illustrate the importance of adolescence and early adulthood
as the critical stages for memory encoding (Rubin et al. 1998). A recent
study by Schuman et al. (1997) focuses on actual knowledge of the past,
rather than on the spontaneous recollection of past events. By checking their
respondents’ knowledge related to 11 political, social and cultural events
spread over the past 60 years (many of which occurred midway in the life
cycle of present older adults) Schuman et al. confirmed Mannheim’s general
prediction that it is during adolescence that ‘life’s problems begin to be
located in a “present” and are experienced as such’ (1997: 47).
If we combine the discovery that youth experiences focus memories on the
direct personal meaning of events with our previous observation that people
THE REMEMBERING PROCESS 87
tend to share their emotionally loaded experiences with others, we can say
that it is the sharing of memories among young people which ensures the
persistence of memories from the period of adolescence and early adulthood.
At the same time, young people’s sociability and their sharing of
experiences produces an affective basis to their generational identity. Generational
memory allows people to have a certain social identification, both on
an individual and a societal level. As people remember sharing memories
and remembering together, a generational identity is constructed. In other
words, a generational identity is produced through collective practices,
established in response to traumatic or formative events which demand the
sharing of memories: ‘Generational memory grows out of social interactions
that are in the first place historical and collective and later internalised in a
deeply visceral and unconscious way so as to dictate vital choices and control
reflexes of loyalty’ (Nora 1996b: 526).
The most important moments for a generation tend to be unusual historical
events since the more an event generates emotions, the more it elicits
social sharing and is hence better remembered. A generation is a product of
memory because of the formative role of memories of historical events from
adolescence and early adulthood in the creation of a generational culture.
Memory of the past is always intersubjective, a recollection of a past time
lived in relation to other people. However, generational memory is historical
not only because it consists of remembrances of historical moments: ‘It is
historical above all because it is first imposed from without, then violently
internalised’ (Nora 1996b: 523). People remember special emotional experiences
from when they were young adults because, in order to make sense
and reflect on these experiences, they talk about them with others. In turn,
this mnemonic socialization, through which we learn what we should
remember and what we can forget, provides bases for generational culture
and identity. Generations, while being products of memory, are at the same
time the main relationship in the production of history. This argument
comes from Davis’ (1989) reflection on Lision-Tolosana’s ethnographic
account of generational relations in a small town in Spain in the period
1900–61. By demonstrating how each new generation takes its inheritance
from its predecessor, reacts against it, and – in response to the particular
historical situation – creates a new environment that again is the object of
reaction, Lision-Tolosana establishes that each generation had substantial
autonomy to remake history.
Generational identifications are constructed out of generational cultures
that provide a set of embodied practices, tastes, attitudes, preferences and
dispositions, which are sustained by collective memories and enforced by
control, through rituals of exclusion, of access to collective resources (Eyerman
and Turner 1998). Such a perspective, emphasizing the importance of
collective cultural experiences, allows for the adoption of Pierre Bourdieu’s
notion of habitus to express the uniqueness of a given generational memory.
88 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING
Using this concept, Eyerman and Turner modify Mannheim’s original conceptualization
and define a generation as ‘a cohort of persons passing
through time who come to share a common habitus’. Sharing a collective
culture and habitus provides members of a generation ‘with collective
memory that serves to integrate the cohort over a finite period of time’
(1998: 91). Habitus is a system of durable dispositions to act which are
produced by objective structures and conditions but are also capable of
producing and reproducing those structures (Bourdieu 1977: 72). Habitus
comprises strategies and practices through which social order ‘accomplishes
itself’ and makes itself ‘self-evident’ and ‘meaningful’ (Bourdieu and
Wacquant 1992: 127–8), as the dispositions to act are incorporated in social
interaction within a historically formed social context. Being made up of
‘the cognitive structures which social agents implement in their practical
knowledge of the social world’ (Bourdieu 1984: 468), habitus organizes the
way in which individuals see the world and act in it. As such, it is at the heart
of the dialectic between the objective and the subjective, because dispositions
and frames of perception are at once historical, social and individual.
Although people internalize ‘the immanent law of the structure in the form
of habitus’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 140), they are still capable of
creativity within the limits of the structure. In a similar vein, Marias (1970:
92) argues that prevailing conventions, which define generations, are
imposed on us but our reactions to them are not. Recent studies of generational
memory also suggest that people increasingly develop greater
independence and sophistication in their thinking, frequently acquiring
knowledge beyond officially available information, and this places limits
on the kind of élite manipulation of collective memory visualized by the
presentist approach (Schuman and Corning 2000).
The concept of habitus, as ‘a past which survives in the present and
tends to perpetuate itself into the future by making itself present in practices
structured according to its principles’ (Bourdieu 1977: 82), also allows us to
identify the importance of collective memory in creating a generational
culture. Being a ‘principle of continuity and regularity’ (1977: 82), habitus is
a system of practice-generating schemes which expresses identities and
memories constituted by structural differences. Bourdieu’s main focus is
on the role of class location in the structuring of habitus. However, while
examining the construction of collective identity and memory in contemporary
societies we should emphasize the structuring role of generation
as a mode of distinction based on age differentiation. Other dimensions
of classification, such as class, gender or ethnicity, are also important as
structuring forces and, moreover, all four of them often overlap. Nevertheless,
in modern society, as Eyerman and Turner (1998) observe, there is a
shift in favour of generation. From the perspective of generational habitus,
all significant social, political and cultural events that a given generation
experiences at first hand can be perceived as part of the social space in which
THE REMEMBERING PROCESS 89
that generation defines its collective identity. Within this space the marks
of generational distinction are realized and generational memory is constructed.
Of course, while the main events provide a space for selfproduction
of a generational identity, ‘the commercial mass media amplified
and, at the same time, commodified it’ (Eyerman and Turner 1998: 103).
Thus, generational identity can be conceptualized as a social identity
linked to cultural differentiation, based on age distinction. Generational
habitus, which is the foundation of generational memory, and therefore
identity, can be seen as a system of practice-generating schemes rooted in the
uniqueness of the sociohistorical location of a particular generation. Generational
memory is to some degree a question of understanding human variations
by means of history since, as Nora (1996b: 528) notes, generation is
the ‘spontaneous horizon of individual historical objectification’. While any
classification of those generational variations needs to start with habitus,
it should be followed by attempts to grasp the nature of the ‘secondary
variation’ or ‘vital sensitivity’ of a given generation (Ortega in Marias 1970:
93). As generations ‘with greater or lesser activity, originality and energy’
constantly fashion their world they apply their unique sensitivity, rooted in
and carried forward by their habitus, to interpret and make sense of later
developments (Mannheim 1972: 300). The uniqueness of generational
memories and differences expresses itself through a given generation’s
choice of meaning from the past to interpret the present.
However, despite unquestionable distinctiveness, no generation creates its
own beliefs, norms and perspectives. Moreover, some events are so important
that no single generational cohort develops greater knowledge of them
than another, while, on the other hand, some occurrences ‘stick’ in the memories
of people of different ages but who are related by other social characteristics,
such as race, gender, social status or occupation. The study by
Schuman et al. (1997), while confirming that early adulthood is a stage of
life uniquely open to gaining knowledge about the wider world and that
knowledge of a past event decreases with cohort distance from that event,
also discovered that some social characteristics interfere with demographic
division in terms of what is remembered. For example, African Americans in
all age groups tend to know more about the historical events significant in
the history of race relations, while women of all ages attach more importance
to memories of events related to women’s rights movements. World
War II is now not only widely recalled, but the generational effect is less
sharp and less visible due to the saturation of popular culture with various
recollections of the war and the emergence of many memories of the
Holocaust (Schuman et al. 1997: 71).
Such wider national remembering as well as cases of more narrowly
defined intergenerational communication focus our attention on the essence
of the notion of tradition, understood as a process of handing down
from one generation to the next a set of practices, beliefs and institutions.
90 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING
Traditions, while referring to the social transmission of cultural inheritance
within a group, and therefore resembling Halbwachs’ notion of collective
memory, allow us to grasp the complexity of the links between groups and
their respective memories without assuming that the shared experiences
directly imply shared memories. This allows us to analyse how traditions
constitute groups and to examine how groups, ranging from occupational to
national, reaffirm their identities by constructing their memories through
rituals, celebrations and narratives. In what follows, we employ the notion
of tradition to further explore how groups remember.
Tradition: a chain of memory
Writing about tradition as being eroded has itself become ‘tradition’ (Luke
1996). There is a well established tradition of thought according to which
tradition is something static, backward and conservative, something
impervious to change and devoid of reflection, as well as connected with
ignorance, dogma and irrationalism. This perspective is a result of the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment which proclaimed tradition to be ‘merely
the shadow side of modernity’ (Giddens 1999: 2). As Enlightenment
thinkers sought to destroy the authority of tradition, itself being a creation
of modernity, they established yet another tradition – the classical tradition
in sociology with its focus on the problem of social order (Nisbet 1966).
Following widespread criticism of this classical approach, since the late
1960s sociology has become preoccupied with the uniqueness of modernity
and its main feature: change’. As a result, it is now common for writings
about tradition to start with an observation about the absence in sociological
literature of any analysis of the nature and mechanism of tradition
(Szacki 1971; Shils 1981; Thompson 1996; Giddens 1999).
Apart from sociology’s preoccupation with modernity, the present lack of
interest in tradition can also be seen as a result of the widespread treatment
of the concept – on the one hand, as something of the past which, by its very
nature, is homogeneous and unproblematic, and on the other as something
inherently ambiguous, almost too difficult to conceptualize. Consequently,
as the main approaches to tradition confuse facts with values and diagnoses
with appraisals, the appeal of the notion suffers. This confusion is present,
for example, in the two opposite attitudes towards tradition in the history of
European thought: traditionalism, expressing itself in attachment to and the
idealization of the past, and utopianism, advocating future orientation
(Szacki 1971: 279). Further ambiguities connected with this notion are due
to the fact that traditions can be tied to different interests. For instance,
radical thought, on the one hand, views traditions as ‘inextricably embroiled
in the legitimation of the status quo’, and therefore necessarily conservative,
while on the other hand, it admits that ‘to be really radical, i.e., to go back to
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