| Abstract | The article presents information on collective memory. Two models frame present understandings of collective memory. In the first model, memory is context-dependent and changes as it is invoked across generations. Whether focusing on the politics of memory or memory over the longue duree , Western studies endeavor to show how beliefs about the past become hostage to the circumstances and problems of the present and how different elements of the past become more or less relevant as these circumstances and problems change. Memory thus becomes a social fact as it is made and remade to serve new power distributions, institutional structures, values, interests and needs. In the second model of collective memory, images of the past are stabilized by the context-transcending requirements of society itself. Every society, even the most fragmented, requires a sense of sameness and continuity with what went before. Stable images of the past are not always demonstrably true images. Sometimes false ideas are transferred across generations and accepted as if they were true. And sometimes we do not know whether an account of the past is true or not.
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