Social memory

We remember the past in a number of different ways, some of which we can barely describe. But we talk about the past in more specific social contexts, at home, at work, in the bar, reminiscing about past experience or narrating past events with specific groups of family friends and colleagues. How people talk about the past helps define their identity. In this book the perspective, the philosophy and the psychology of remembering and the ways in which events are narrated are used to help work out how remembering and talking define societies in circumstances as diverse as medieval France and Iceland and contemporary Brazil and South Wales.