Why this particular collection? There is a tide in the affairs of memory, which we thought we should take at the flood. The study of memory in cognitive psychology – one of the most venerable traditions of the discipline – has grown by leaps and bounds in the last twenty years, providing us with new tools and models, from the neural foundations of recollection to the creation and maintenance of autobiographical and historical memories (as well as many other things in between). In the same period, historians have thrown themselves with great abandon into the study of official and private memories, of celebrations and monuments, and of the invention and use of traditions. Even anthropologists have, to some extent, overcome their belief in culture as a deus ex machina or prime mover, and are beginning to describe it as the aggregation of myriad operations of remembrance and forgetting. Since these developments happened in isolation, as guaranteed by the cordons of academic specialization, it was time to understand how they all relate to each other.

Mere juxtaposition would be of little interest, as the lowliest search engine can do precisely that – juxtapose results, if nothing else – and especially as these are exciting times for anyone interested in memory as a psychological process fundamental to history and culture. As we report in the following chapters, in a whole variety of domains it makes little sense to think of memory as “individual” (for psychologists) or “cultural” (for historians and anthropologists), as the most fascinating phenomena occur in the individual creation of cultural and historical representations.