Remembering and forgetting: A crossroad between personal and collective experience

Abstract

This chapter presents some theoretical developments to understand the way people remember and forget their collective past by their interactions with the physical environment. Mainly such developments come from the social representations theory and developmental psychology. To this aim we analyze findings from two different studies. On the one hand, we analyze a study about the sociogenesis of the social representations of an historical process describing the narrative expressed by different symbolical resources (monuments, names of streets, commemorative objects, and museum exhibitions). On the other hand, we consider some findings form a study on remembering by drawing maps, to show that individuals are not drawing elements which they are not related to. The person's drawn map shows how the environment is perceived from a personal perspective. During this process the person is imaging himself/herself into the environment or specific place that they are drawing. Analyzing both research projects, we try to explain the complex relations between collective and personal process in remembering, since this process implies the articulation between collective created symbolic resources with the personal history of each individual with them.