Locating Family in Cultural Memory Studies

Cultural memory studies addresses the question of how the “past” is created and recreated within sociocultural contexts. What is the place of “family”–and of family memories–in this burgeoning field? And how can the concept of memory be used as a tool in comparative family research? This article presents, first, the main notions of Maurice Halbwachs’s theory of mémoire collective and asks how the sociologist places family within collective memory. Second, it discusses how the “new memory studies” of the 1980s and 1990s, which clearly showed a bias towards large-scale, often national memories, can be refocused through the lens of small-scale family memories. Third, it provides an overview of current research on the dynamics of remembering within families. It discusses how new approaches, which are based mostly on qualitative interviewing, have adopted innovative transgenerational, transnational, and media culture perspectives.