Memory and place: geographies of a critical relationship

Abstract

In recent years, investigations of social or cultural memory have become a major field of inquiry throughout the humanities and social sciences. No longer the sole preserve of psychology, the study of memory now extends to anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, literary studies, communication, history and, increasingly, to geography. This article assesses some of the major trends in this burgeoning literature, especially those works spatial in nature, which we find to be of considerable cross‐disciplinary importance. Together, memory and place conjoin to produce much of the context for modern identities; providing a modest overview of that critical, dynamic relationship, this article serves as an introduction to this special issue of Social & Cultural Geography.

Keywords:

• memory
• place
• landscape
• performance

Notes

Nelson Mandela first arrived on Robben Island in 1962, before it was fully established, and remained there until 1982, when he was transferred with a few other prisoners to Pollsmoor Prison in the white middle‐class Cape Town suburb of Tokai, and then, in 1988, to Victor Verster, where he was finally released in 1990 (Mandela 1994).

Other scholars like Pierre Nora (1989), Anthony Giddens (1990), Andreas Huyssen (1995) and David Lowenthal (1996) have made similar claims, while Eric Hobsbawm (1983) has famously described the turn of the twentieth century as a period of ‘mass‐producing traditions’. In either case, the key point is that periods of rapid social transformation are often accompanied, in the modern world, by moments of intense collective remembering.