Memory Studies in the “Memorial Era”

A typology of theoretical approaches to the study of collective memory developed in the 20th century is proposed in this article. The main difference of the selected sociological and cultural-sociological approaches to its conceptualization is shown. The first approach (Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Ulrich Beck, Niklas Luhmann, and others) focuses on structures and reified values. Thereby it implicitly inserts memory into the mechanism of reproduction of social structures and allows identifying it with ideology as a “false consciousness”. The theoretical significance of this approach is that within its framework the concept of memory was associated with the concept of identity. The idea of Zygmunt Bauman about the need to study not only identities, but also processes of open identification was of great importance. According to this idea the memory of a collective must be viewed as a constant process of reactivation, correlated with changes in culture. The second approach explores the transformation of symbolic values attached to events of the past by collective memory without reduction to the state of social structure. As the theoretical foundation of this approach, the author proposes the “strong program” of the sociology of culture by Jeffrey Alexander. The advantage of the culturological approach is that it allows revealing the connection between the strategies of collective memory and the dominant temporal images of culture (Zygmunt Bauman, Aleida Assmann, Andreas Huyssen, Pierre Norah, Hermann Lubbe). So, the dependence of the new relevance of memory for European culture on the crisis of the ideology of modernity and the onset of the postmodern era with its awareness of the impossibility of finding the past is shown. In conclusion, the necessity of complementarity of the above mentioned approaches is substantiated. As a variant of the theoretical basis of such complementarity, the project of Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic anthropology is proposed. It is shown that, through the concepts of “mutuality” and “reciprocity” used by Ricoeur as moduses of social being, it is possible to reveal the relationship between the two levels of collective memory functioning: the level of meanings and the level of establishing social existence.

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