The Landscape of Holocaust Museization: Social Remembering −and Forgetting− as a Product of the Interaction between Agency and Contexts of Memory

Collectively held ideas can be conceptualized as social facts. These can manifest themselves as social relations and institutions as well as cultural artifacts, impacting on the material world insofar as they reflect and express social reality as experienced by those who share them. In this sense, some modes of social memory, such as Cultural Memory of the Holocaust, can be construed as a set or series of social facts.

Notwithstanding, shared social knowledge and its material representation do not coalesce ‘automatically’ or ‘unconsciously’ into social facts; the crystallization of the past as monument, commemoration practices or other forms of cultural mediation requires motivated human conduct; social action or agency, especially so for museistic institutions, strongly linked to group identities and requiring conscious and long-term sourcing of cultural, political and material resources. As a non-material dimension of social memory, social action can be discerned through an analysis of social facts.

Holocaust Museums and other cultural institutions where this historical event is represented −such as Tolerance Centers, War or Peace Museums, National History and Thematic Jewish Museums− have sprung up almost ‘all over the world’. The systematization of a comprehensive ensemble of these instances of museization provides the corpus for an analysis centered on the interaction between subjective and active dimensions of memory and structural constraints.

The resulting ‘Landscape of Holocaust Museization’ sheds light on active and passive social remembering and forgetting in museum settings and highlight its transformations and permanencies as a product of social agency embedded in sociohistorical context