1.1 A Brief Introduction on Collective Memory “A social process The way individuals collectively remember, forget, and of reconstruction recall events, people, places, etc., has been a prominent of the past lived topic of research on collective memory. However, the and experienced notion of collective memory as a socially generated by a certain group, common perception of an event itself has been introduced and studied only recently. Maurice Halbwachs is generally community or recognized as the father of collective memory research. society” Halbwachs developed the concept of collective memory, arguing that individual memories are only understood Halbwachs within the context of a group, unifying the nation or community through time and space. Halbwachs defined collective memory as: “A social process of reconstruction of the past lived and experienced by a certain group, community or society”. It differs from history for the shorter time period to which it refers, about a century, and the lack of scientificity. Collective memory has an ethnic character, that is, it is the set of facts that have become the culture of the group and therefore paradigms of interpretation of the present. While history tries to account for the transformations of society, collective memory insists on ensuring the permanence of time and the homogeneity of life, as in an attempt to show that the past remains and therefore, the identity of that group also remains. History is the remembered past to which we no longer have an organic relation – the past that is no longer an important part of our lives – while collective memory is the active past that forms our identities. 16