Adaptive Collective Memory: Bartlett, Enactivism and Group Identity
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour May 9, 2025 Daniel Gyollai
This theoretical article argues against recent proposals that memory studies should focus on implicit memory processes and move away from explicit, identity-creating collective memory such as commemorative remembering. Drawing on Bartlett's theory of remembering and contemporary enactivist accounts of cognition, the authors contend that no form of collective memory is independent of identity, and all collective remembering has an implicit aspect. They propose that collective past and group identity are dynamically and reciprocally constructed through habitual interactions within the group. Commemorative remembering, they argue, is better understood as an adaptive, future-oriented becoming rather than a backward-looking, explicit recollection.