Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T05:36:00.872Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction: Memory and the Nation—Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Extract

Since at least the nineteenth century, scholars and politicians alike have recognized the fundamental connection between memory and the nation. While political elites invented and propagated legitimating traditions, historians objectified the nation as a unitary entity with a linear descent. At the same time, critics like Ernest Renan pointed out that forgetting—that is, forgetting alternative possible stories and alternate possible identifications—is at the heart of national self-understanding, while Nietzsche bemoaned the proliferation of “monumental” history. World War I seemed to many good enough reason to abandon nationalist chauvinism, but for others a myth of the war experience “provided the nation with a new depth of religious feeling, putting at its disposal ever-present saints and martyrs, places of worship, and a heritage to emulate” (Mosse 1990: 7). And the anemic internationalism of the 1920s was just that—inter-nationalism rather than postnationalism, based on a nebulous and misunderstood notion of “self-determination”—where the burning memory of stabs in the back and imposed settlements fanned old antipathies to new heights. Memory has long been the handmaiden of nationalist zeal, history its high counsel. Even those like Nietzsche and Renan who worried about it understood its centrality.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1998 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abbott, Andrew (1988) “Transcending general linear reality.” Sociological Theory 6: 169–86.Google Scholar
Abbott, Andrew (1990) “Conceptions of time and events in social science methods: Causal and narrative approaches.” Historical Methods 23 (4): 140–50.Google Scholar
Abbott, Andrew (1994) “History and sociology: The lost synthesis,” in Monkkonen, Eric (ed.) Engaging the Past: The Uses of History across the Social Sciences. Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 77112.Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. 2d ed. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Boyarin, Jonathan, ed. (1994) Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Crane, Diana, ed. (1994) The Sociology of Culture: Emerging Theoretical Perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Duara, Prasenjit (1995) Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Englund, Stephen (1992) “The ghost of nation past.” Journal of Modern History 64 (June): 299320.Google Scholar
Hutton, Patrick (1993) History as an Art of Memory. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.Google Scholar
Huyssen, Andreas (1995) Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
McDonald, Terrence J., ed. (1996) The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Mosse, George (1990) Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nora, Pierre, ed. (1989) “Between memory and history: Les lieux de memoire.” Representations 26: 725.Google Scholar
Olick, Jeffrey K., and Robbins, Joyce (1998) “Social memory studies: From ‘collective memory’ to the historical sociology of mnemonic practices.” Annual Review of Sociology 24:105–40.Google Scholar
Renan, Ernest. (1990 [1882]) “What is a nation,” in Bhabha, Homi K. (ed.) Nation and Narration. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Sewell, William H. Jr. (1996) “Three temporalities: Toward an eventful sociology,” in McDonald, Terrence J. (ed.) The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press: 245–80.Google Scholar
Smith, Anthony (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Somers, Margaret (1996) “Where is sociology after the historic turn?: Knowledge cultures, narrativity, and historical epistemologies,” in McDonald, Terrence J. (ed.) The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press: 5389.Google Scholar
Swidler, Anne, and Arditi, Jorge (1994) “The new sociology of knowledge.” Annual Review of Sociology 20: 305–29.Google Scholar
Wood, Nancy (1994) “Memory’s remains: Les lieux de memoire.” History and Memory 6 (1): 123–50.Google Scholar