Collective Memory And Collective Identity

This book analyzes the evolution and cultivation of modern Palestinian collective memory and its role in shaping Palestinian national identity from its inception in the 1920s to the 2006 Palestinian elections.

Is it possible to create a collective European identity? In this volume, leading scholars assess the link between collective identity construction in Europe and the multiple memory discourses that intervene in this construction process. The authors believe that the exposure of national collective memories to an enlarging communicative space within Europe affects the ways in which national memories are framed. Through this perspective, several case studies of East and West European memory discourses are presented. The first part of the volume elaborates how collective memory can be identified in the new Europe. The second part presents case studies on national memories and related collective identities in respect of European integration and its extension to the East. This timely work is the first to investigate collective identity construction on a pan-European scale and will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students of political sociology and European studies.

When we think of a pariah group, we think of an ethnic or racial group that shares a language and a culture; is marginalized by those in power; considered to stand below or outside the law; and whose members are the objects of persecution, viewed by the dominant population as less than fully human, dirty, inferior, or deemed impure. In this issue of Social Research, nine distinguished authors examine not only why a particular group is or may have been considered pariah and how it became so, but what role this designation played or plays within the society and, in cases where the situation has changed, what accounts for the change. Since it is probably the case that pariah minorities have existed in almost all societies, this issue does not confine itself to one area or period, but spans east and west, and considers the past, present, and future. These groups include Kurds, Roma, Jews, Blacks, Dalit, lepers, Burakumin, and Hijras.

This edited collection offers an empirical exploration of social memory in the context of politics, war, identity and culture. With a substantive focus on Eastern Europe, it employs the methodologies of visual studies, content and discourse analysis, in-depth interviews and surveys to substantiate how memory narratives are composed and rewritten in changing ideological and political contexts. The book examines various historical events, including the Russian-Afghan war of 1979-89 and World War II, and considers public and local rituals, monuments and museums, textbook accounts, gender and the body. As such it provides a rich picture of post-socialist memory construction and function based in interdisciplinary memory studies.

In this collaboratively authored work, five distinguished sociologists develop an ambitious theoretical model of "cultural trauma"—and on this basis build a new understanding of how social groups interact with emotion to create new and binding understandings of social responsibility. Looking at the "meaning making process" as an open-ended social dialogue in which strikingly different social narratives vie for influence, they outline a strongly constructivist approach to trauma and apply this theoretical model in a series of extensive case studies, including the Nazi Holocaust, slavery in the United States, and September 11, 2001.

Five sociologists develop a theoretical model of 'cultural trauma' & build a new understanding of how social groups interact with emotion to create new & binding understandings of social responsibility.

Karin Tilmans is an historian, and academic coordinator of the Max Weber Programme at the European University Institute, Florence. Frank van Vree is an historian and professor of journalism at the University of Amsterdam. Jay M. Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale. --