Personal and Popular Memory

Abstract

In the two previous chapters we have paid considerable attention to processes of remembering and their interaction with our imaginative capacities as these relate to the individual person. In doing so we hope to have made clear that although anyone’s memories are in various ways specific to them, some are borrowed and adapted, many are shared and pooled, while together as a complex and changing ensemble they contribute as much to our social make-up as to our sense of selfhood. Added to this, how memories are organised, used and refashioned is dependent on the various social groups and environments in which people move during the course of their lives. In Edward Casey’s words, memory ‘is already in the world: it is in reminders and reminiscences, in acts of recognition and in the lived body, in places and in the company of others’.1 There is always an interactive relationship between the ways in which memory helps sustain the development of our own individualities, the ways in which it is shaped by the cultural resources available to us, and the ways in which it is given point and purpose by the social conventions that order our way of life. Certain aspects of personal remembering clearly need to be considered in light of their particular distinctive features, but these do not hold independently of social and historical context