| Notes | '\n{1402} I have proposed in this essay a double move:that the history of memory be more rigorous theoretically in articulating the relationship between the social, the political, and the cultural and, at the same time, more anarchical and comprehensive in using the term memory as an explanatory device that links representation and social experience.\n'
'\n{1393} The problem with memory defined in terms of politics and political use is that it becomes an illustrative reflection of political development and often is relativized to ideology...\nMore important, the result of memory being sacrificed to an analysis of politics and political use is, often, to ignore the category of the social. In this case, representations of the past derive from and are mainly used to explain relationships of political nature, but they are considerably silent about the effect of memory on the organization, hierarchization, and arrangements of social and cultural relationships.\n'
'\n{1391} I would like to view memory as an outcome of the relationship between a distinct representation of the past and the full spectrum of symbolic representations available in a given culture. This view posits the study of memory as the relationship between the whole and its component parts, seeing society as a global entity - social, symbolic, political - where different memories interact.This approach [informed by the work of Aby Warburg} also seeks to reconstruct the meaning of a given collective memory by using an intertwined, double move: placing it within a global historical context and a global symbolic universe, analyzing the ideas, values, and practices embedded in and symbolized by its particular imagery.\n'
'\n{1389} ...the history of mentalités is useful not only in order outline the dangers faced by the new history of memory. There is also a great advantage in thinking of the history of memory as the history of collective mentality. This way of reasoning resists the topical definition of the field and, conversely, uses memory to explore broader questions about the role of the past in society. The history of memory is useful and interesting not only for thinking about how the past is represented in, say, a single museum but also about, more extensively, the historical mentality of people in the past about the commingled beliefs, practices, and symbolic representations that make people\'s perceptions of the past.\n'
'\n{1388} The aim of this essay is not to propose an alternative strategy, for there is no one, correct way to \"do\" memory. It is, rather, to think through how it is effective to think with memory. At the center of the essay is the problem of how the term \"memory\" can be useful in articulating the connections between the cultural, the social, and the political, between representation and social experience.\n'
'\n{1387} The history of memory defined topically becomes a field with neither a center nor connections among topics. It runs the danger of becoming an assemblage of distinct topics that describe in a predictable way how people construct the past.\n'
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