We Are What We Remember: the Power of Collective Memory

Catalog description

As complex and multifaceted individuals, we all belong to a diverse array of communities. Those groups may differ greatly from one another in their nature and scope, from one's immediate family or neighborhood to one's nation, ethnicity, or religious community. Despite their differences, our sens of belonging to those groups and our strong feelings of connection with our fellow group members are often founded upon our sharing a history. Such understandings of a common past constitute a group's collective memory, and the cultivation of a group's collective memory, through practices including storytellings, erecting memorials, or writing histories, is a key element to how members of all groups forget identities, differentiate themselves from others, and compose grand narratives which give their past significance and inform their visions for a collective future. Through this course and its diverse global case studies, we learn how to recognize collective memory and critically consider how people understand themselves by means of harnessing their great, and fundamentally ambivalent, power by which groups generate unity and connectedness and/or futher animosity and conflict.