Resumen de Creating Shared Memories in Conversation: Toward a Psychology of Collective Memory

William Hirst, Gerald Echterhoff

• Problems of memory are salient in today´s world: struggles by present-day Germans to face the atrocities of the Holocaust, by South Africans to confront the legacy of apartheid, or by East Europeans to deal with those who collaborated with the former communist regimes.' In each instance, at stake is the form a collective memory of a problematic past takes and the way this memory shapes and reshapes present and future collective identity. Solutions to these problems of memory may not be readily forthcoming, but the questions th at need to be addressed are well appreciated, including: How are collective memories formed, shaped, reshaped, forgotten, and renewed? How can one talk about collective memory in a way that encompasses situations as diverse as the Holocaust, apartheid, and the velvet revolutions, yet still say something meaningful about the concept itself? How do communities shape and reshape the collective memories their members hold? Are there constraints on the power of communities to restructure collective memories? And what is the relation between the memories an individual of a community holds of the past and the collective memories held by the community?