| Abstract | Of course any act, not just mental, is "absolutely and completely personal." Speaking of "collective action" can hardly be justified even if every individual member of the group could be said to be acting in the same way. However, to speak of a group as some integral entity with a will and capacity of its own is to commit the fallacy of "concrete generalization," namely of treating a generalization as though it were some concrete entity. The employment of "collective memory" can be justified only on a metaphorical level -- and this is how historians of old have always employed it -- as a general code name for something that is supposedly behind myths, traditions, customs, cults, all of which represent the "spirit," the "psyche," of a society, a tribe, a nation. Even with respect to the latter most commonly used terms -- "society," "tribe," "nation" -- it is not necessarily suggested by historians that these terms have any real, living substance that can actually be experienced separately or independently from the members who comprise such a group. "Nation," "tribe," "society" are general names whose sole substance lies in their actual members who share common myths, traditions, beliefs, etc. This is the only sense in which a nation or a society can be said to exist, but never as a separate, distinct, single organism with a mind, or a will, or a memory of its own.
According to [Maurice Halbwachs], there is really no such thing as "individual memory"; the only "real memory" is "collective memory." Halbwachs prefers the term "recollection" to "memory" because of its obvious affinity to "collective" and to the way "collective memory" is formed, as though by means of collecting various blurred impressions (pictures) from various sources and molding them into a well-structured and stable memory. However, Halbwachs does not provide us with a clear theory which would describe and explain the way collective memories are formed. His argument rather inclines toward a somewhat literary description of how one recollects one's past experiences, always within the framework of a certain social group -- family, social class, religion: "The individual calls recollections to mind by relying on the frameworks of social memory."(16) For example, whatever "individual image" one has of a certain person or an event in one's family, it cannot be dissociated from the general ideas, types, patterns that comprise the "family memory," to which Halbwachs also refers as the family's "traditional armor"; for "there exist customs and modes of thinking within each particular family that equally impose -- and even more forcibly -- their form on the opinions and feelings of their members."(17)
Anita Shapira, in an article on "Historiography and Memory: The Case of Latrun 1948," starts off with a note on the relation between academic historiography and "collective memory," claiming that notwithstanding the fact that historical research today enjoys considerably improved methods, it has no effect on the shaping of "collective memory"; on the contrary, "collective memory" is actually affecting the work of professional historians.(29) Had she chosen to speak of stereotypes instead of "collective memory," we would have no argument with her statement; historians are indeed often captivated or predisposed by conventional images and ideological fixations. As long as we stick to the term "stereotypes" we confess to a weakness, a limitation in the work of the historian, something to be overcome, something that never attains a status equal to that of critical research. However, once we introduce "collective memory," we seem to imply something as potent as historical research. According to Shapira, professional historians join politicians, social elites, "a whole line of `memory agents' that shape the picture of the past according to the needs and agonies of the present, and furthermore project this picture back onto the historical research that cannot free itself from them."(30) Consequently, "academic historical writing" merely "pretends to be based on impartial research"; and historians actually "seek to shape a certain historical memory" rather than reconstruct the past. The term "collective memory" becomes interchangeable with the more distinguished "historical memory," and the next move is to relate to "collective memory" as if it were a historical version on a par with any other historical version or interpretation, including those substantiated by historical research.(31) History no longer appears to be suspicious of memory. On the contrary, it turns out that history has been duped by memory all along.
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