Social and Cognitive Determinants of Collective Memory for Public Events.

There are some events of the past that are recurrently present in the individual's memory and public discourse: they are expressed in the names of streets, monuments, commemorations, conversations, in publications, and history books. They are never isolated, because they organize the knowledge at different levels, from the personal and idiosyncratic one to the "social", public one. They can be a sort of reference point in the time stream of the personal and collective past of social groups, emblems of periods or the most important stages of social life, a sort of bridge between different ways of perception of the self, culture, and society. These memories belong simultaneously to the individual and to social groups: they are salient, either easy or difficult to access, and are shared with other members of a significant social group. In this chapter we deal with these "collective" memories, the factors that affect them, and the psychological/social functions they accomplish. In the last part of the chapter we will discuss the classic construct of "collective memory" first proposed by Halbwachs at the beginning of the 20th century, and will try to explain how this apparent paradox of a memory of an abstract entity which does not exist independently from the individuals is possible.