Modalities and Criteria of Shared Memory

Joël Candau

The notion of shared memory is unclear. How can we ensure that representations of the past are really identical for a group of
individuals? In the first part of this text, I suggest that the blur surrounding the notion of shared memory is only a special case of
the floating meaning intrinsic to holistic rhetoric used in the social sciences to designate shared or supposedly shared repre-
sentations. In the second part, I present two of the three modalities of memory sharing (protomemory and memory itself ) and
propose 18 criteria intended to test the sharing of the second modality. The last part is devoted to collective metamemory—the
third modality—defined by its narrative dimension, that is, by the storytelling of a shared or supposedly shared memory. I argue
that the metamemorial narrative gives consistency to memory sharing by propagating belief in shared memory, notably through
narrative illumination effects of past events. The shape of this memory intersubjectivity can be paradoxical: often, what we take for
a shared memory is in reality the shared narrative of a belief in the sharing of this memory.

I define a shared memory as the sharing by all members of a
group of both the factual memory of an event and the
meaning given to that event. I call it deep memory sharing.
However, we do not know how to demonstrate it, for
methodological reasons and for reasons that stem from the
uncertain sharing of the subjective content of our mental
states (Nagel 1974), which our memories are part of. As a
result, our use of the notion of shared memory is generally
unclear. Nevertheless, progress can be made in two comple-
mentary directions. First, to limit the risk of undue generaliza-
tion inherent in any holistic rhetoric (Candau 1998), I distin-
guish three forms of memory work whose sharing does not have
the same degree of plausibility: protomemory, memory itself,
and metamemory. Second, I propose a list of criteria to support
the hypothesis of a shared memory.
In the first part of this text, I suggest that the blur sur-
rounding the notion of shared memory is only a special case
of the intrinsic floating meaning of terms and expressions
used in the social sciences to designate shared or supposedly
shared representations. In the next, longer part, I present two
of the three modalities of memory sharing (protomemory
and memory itself) and propose several criteria that I con-
sider useful in assessing the sharing of the second modality.
The third and last part is devoted to collective metamemory,
defined by its narrative dimension, that is, by the storytelling
of a shared or supposedly shared memory. I argue that the
metamemorial narrative gives consistency to memory sharing
by propagating belief in shared memory, notably through
narrative illumination effects of past events. This meta-
discourse feeds the communitarian imagination of the group
members and contributes to the emergence of a world in
which a certain memory intersubjectivity is built, in a form
that can be paradoxical: often, what we take for a shared
memory is in reality the shared narrative of a belief in the
sharing of this memory.
Individual Memory, Shared Memory,
and Holistic Rhetoric
In our speculations on shared memory, it is common to borrow
concepts from research on individual memory (Anastasio et al.
2012; Michaelian 2014). Are we justified in doing so? Individual
memory is a cognitive faculty that depends on neurobiological
facts, well documented in the literature. For example, research
on the Aplysia sea slugs by Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel
(Kandel, Dudai, and Mayford 2014) has led to decisive scientific
advances in understanding this memory. Thanks to these and
many other studies, we have a robust theory of memory, even if
it remains the subject of lively debate (Queenan et al. 2017).
Simultaneous biochemical and morphological modifications of
synaptic connections (Hebbian plasticity) are at the root of
the recording and consolidation of memory traces—that is,
engrams (Semon 1921)—in the brain (Josselyn and Tonegawa
2020). When nerve impulses reach the tip of a neuron, they
trigger the release of neurotransmitters in the intersynaptic
space. These neurotransmitters include acetylcholine and glu-
tamate, the latter being an excitor, the main precursor of the
gamma-aminobutyric acid inhibitor. These attach to channel
receptors located on the postsynaptic neuron. This results in the
increased ability of the synapse to transmit nerve impulses. The
easier mobilization of these “improved” synapses thus makes it
possible to remember. Without this, no memory is possible.
We also know that this individual memory is limited but can
be improved (Dresler et al. 2017); selective (Anderson and
Hanslmayr 2014); associative (Cai et al. 2016); forgetful, in-
cluding of the most tragic events (Hirst et al. 2015); and in de-
cline with aging (Koen, Hauck, and Rugg 2019). Individual
memory can be unstable and plastic, even to the point of making
false memories (Loftus 2005), and can be manipulable (Björk-
strand et al. 2016). Although this may seem counterintuitive, the
purpose of this cognitive faculty is to prepare or imagine future

Joël Candau is Professeur Émérite at Laboratoire d’Anthropologie et de Psychologie Cliniques, Cognitives et Sociales at Université Côte
d’Azur (25 avenue François Mitterand, 06300 Nice, France [joelcandau@gmail.com]). ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8249-8890. This
paper was submitted 23 VIII 20, accepted 11 VI 21, and electronically published 5 XII 23.

Current Anthropology, volume 64, number 6, December 2023. q 2023 The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. Published by The
University of Chicago Press for The Wenner‐Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. https://doi.org/10.1086/727893
 712
actions (Schacter, Addis, and Buckner 2007), especially in the
form of prospective memory, more than to cultivate memory of
the past. Today, we are capable of connecting each of these
characteristics to neurobiological processes. This robust knowl-
edge offers a real contrast with what we know about shared
memory.
Indeed, when we risk moving from this individual memory
to a shared or supposedly shared memory, as we regularly do in
social sciences, difficulties arise. Let us rule out the hypothesis that
shared memory is a kind of metaphysical entity (assimilated with
a set of representations of the past) extending over individ-
uals and existing independently of them. This hypothesis has
no scientific plausibility. Indeed, if social frameworks of memory
(Halbwachs 1925) exist and exert their effects, the container (the
frameworks) cannot be confused with the contents (shared mem-
ory). These contents cannot have consistency without the con-
vergence of individual memories, be it through production or
reception. Therefore, notwithstanding the existence of the social
frameworks that guide and constrain these contents, the question
remains as to what extent any one of them is really shared.
The notion of shared memory becomes plausible but blurred
when it refers to something other than the precise meaning
suggested by three trivial observations. First, human beings are
able to cumulatively transmit their experience from generation
to generation and thus have, from this point of view, a social
memory. In this sense, shared memory is simply the process of
cultural transmission, the most common example being the
transmission of one particular language within the home group.
The so-called mother tongue is unquestionably a shared memory
legacy. Second, this cultural transmission is not smooth, especially
when it comes to transmitting the narrative of events of great
historical depth. The notion of shared memory can refer to all the
social dynamics that compete to shape representations of the past
intended to be transmitted in the context of “memory conflicts”
(Candau 2004a), the issue being most of the time to know “to
whom the dead belong” (Aronson 2016). For instance, Roediger
et al. (2019) found striking differences between national memo-
ries. They surveyed 1,338 people from 11 countries that partici-
pated in World War II about their homeland’s contribution. In-
dividuals tended to overestimate their countries’ efforts, a skew
perception induced by ethnocentrism and national narcissism.
Notably, Russians’ collective memory of the war is quite different
from that of its former allies. Participants from outside Russia
minimize Soviet efforts, although far more Soviet soldiers died
than did soldiers from any other country. In this case, the notion
of shared memory refers to an agonistic process of shaping the
past. Third, individual memories often rely on the memories of
others. In this sense, shared memory describes the process of
influencing our memories by social frameworks (Halbwachs
1925), cultural scripts (Berntsen and Rubin 2004), schemata
(Beim 2007), and countless interactions with our peers from early
childhood onward (Reese and Fivush 2008).
However, while social scientists commonly refer to these three
meanings of the notion of shared memory, they also very often
use this notion in the sense of shared cognition—that is, a set of
Current Anthropology Volume 64, Number 6, December 2023
mental states deeply shared by all the members of a group—
which is problematic. This sharing can be observed in an exper-
imental context. For example, for subjects recalling various scenes
from an episode of the BBC Sherlock series, the memory traces
corresponding to each scene are similarly organized in their
brains (Chen et al. 2017). However, the discovery in a laboratory
of the sharing of the same memory substrate by a limited number
of individuals—22 in this experiment—and in connection with a
perfectly singularized event comes up against far fewer method-
ological and theoretical obstacles than evidence of this same
sharing in daily life within extended groups.
Generally used outside an experimental context in social
sciences, the notion of shared memory would be perfectly relevant
if all members of a group were able to fully share the same
representations of a past event, which would imply that their
brains carry the same engrams of that event. This is what is im-
plicit when this memory is defined as a “community of thought”
(Halbwachs 1925:144). For analytical purposes, one can even, as
Hirst and Manier (2008) do, distinguish between “collective” and
“shared” memory, arguing that the former is always related to the
representation of a collective identity, which is not the case with
the latter. According to this distinction, the death of Princess
Diana is part of the collective memory of the English because this
event is now constitutive of their identity, but it is only a shared
memory for the other inhabitants of the planet, at least those who
remember it. But how can we prove that there is a deep sharing of
representations of the past?
Memory is made of memories and forgetting. We can more
easily attest the existence of shared forms of oblivion (Con-
nerton 2008) than the actual sharing of representations of the
past. Indeed, the deep ontology of an absent phenomenon is
precisely its absence—provided that the absence is undeni-
able—whereas the ontology of a present phenomenon is less its
presence than the way in which it is (re)presented. For this
reason, it is much less risky to affirm that individuals share the
oblivion of an event than to suppose that they share its memory
since in the latter case we do not know how to certify the identity
of mental states.
What mental states are we talking about when we use the
notion of shared memory? Strictly speaking, we cannot
consider this memory as a cognitive faculty because, unlike
individual memory, it is currently impossible, without an
experimental context, to determine the neurobiological facts
on which it depends. Individual memories can be constituted
into data with relative ease (brain imaging attests more and
more to this reality, but we can also document in written or
recorded form the way in which an individual verbalizes
biographical memories). However, in a natural context, it is
adventurous to infer the existence of a shared memory from
the existence of these individual memories and then to ex-
press it through metaphors (collective, family, historical,
national, professional, social, etc. memory). These metaphors
can reflect a real sharing of memory (i.e., an effective sharing of
representations of the past). They can also be pure rhetoric
without any empirical basis or be a mixture of real sharing and
Candau Modalities and Criteria of Shared Memory
rhetorical register (Yamashiro, Van Engen, and Roediger 2022).
Therefore, we need to question the degree of our ontological
commitment when we talk about collective memory. This is all
the more necessary since the slack use of these notions can be
dangerous because it facilitates the use of memory strategies for
political or religious purposes, by persuading, for example,
people of a country or of different countries that they are divided
by antagonistic and irreconcilable memories (Candau 2004a).
The imprecise use of the notion of shared memory is related
to holistic rhetoric. By this I mean the totalizations that we tend
to by using terms, expressions, and figures aimed at designating
entities that are supposed to be roughly stable, durable, and
homogeneous. These entities are conceived as something other
than the simple sum of their parts and are supposed to aggregate
elements considered, by nature or by convention, as isomorphs.
Their rhetorical purpose is obvious: these terms aim to create
“an overall effect” (Thornton 1988) that refers to ideals of so-
ciety, models of social functioning, and visions of the Other
overhanging any empirical test. This includes both a grouping of
individuals (e.g., community, Africans, the Bororo, etc.) and a
set of representations, beliefs, memories (e.g., x or y ideology,
“national memory,” or “collective consciousness” as defined by
Durkheim [1985]), or real or imaginary characters (e.g., ethnic
identity or cultural identity). In the social sciences, as in ev-
eryday life, we most often treat these notions symbolically, as
terms referring to a reality but without having a precise idea of
their ontological implications. Many of these terms, indeed, are
problematic: “When we try to define them, they get slippery;
when we talk about their meaning, nothing stays put anymore,
everything begins to move” (Arendt 1971:429). “People,” for
example, is a totality that is indistinct and never present any-
where (Valéry 1945:16). These terms are convenient conven-
tions that are supposed to denote a reality but that, from a strict
linguistic point of view, do not designate it because they do not
refer unequivocally to things of the world.
This is particularly true in the field of shared representations,
where we have not been able to do anything other than adapt
terms designating individual mental states to denote the supposed
sharing of these representations: we will thus evoke collective
intelligence, collective beliefs, collective unconscious, and so on.
This transport of meaning from the individual to the collective is
both theoretically embarrassing—empirical import is dubious,
and the mental states designated by these terms are testified only
in individuals—and discursively practical, which explains the
proliferation of this type of metaphor, the floating meaning of
which can be a sign of conceptual degeneration. The challenge is
therefore to dispel the doubts and ambiguities surrounding this
empirical import, which I seek to do here for shared memory.
Criteria for Memory Sharing
Three Anthropological Categories of Memory
In my research (e.g., Candau 1998, 2005), I have approached the
question of memory sharing by considering three dimensions or
713
three levels of memory: protomemory, memory itself, and
metamemory, to which I dedicate the last part of this text.
Under the term protomemory, which is a low-level memory,
one can identify Bergson’s (1939:86–87) repetitive memory; the
ethos and multiple learning acquired during early socialization;
the “habitual body memory” (Tewes 2018), which emerges from
the experiential dimension of the entire living body; and the
habitus and bodily hexis as defined by Bourdieu (1997), espe-
cially everything that touches on incorporated and sedimented
dispositions and gestures (Candau and Halloy 2012). The
protomemory acts on the subject without her knowledge, like
the procedural memory that allows the cavalry rider to fight
without worrying about the horse that goes (Jousse 1974:75).
This protomemory comprises the most resistant and best shared
knowledge and experience of a majority of the members of a
group or society.
Let us now consider the question of the sharing of memory
itself, that of recall or recognition. Can such sharing emerge
among individuals? I contend that one can evaluate its consis-
tency, specifying straightaway that the sharing will never be
absolute for two obvious reasons. First of all, a memory is a
representation that is itself something other than the thing
represented. Indeed, our mental states are qualia, always lived
in the first person, and it being acknowledged that we are
not clones but irreducibly singular individuals, we logically de-
duce from the phenomenological character of the individual
memories that they are all slightly different and cannot be ab-
solutely identical to the represented thing, which, ontologic-
ally, is the same for all before its perception (except in the case
of metarepresentations). Second, when our mental states are
transformed into public representations (speeches, writings, etc.),
they only imperfectly reflect our phenomenal experience of the
world and, moreover, always in a labile way (Bloch 1995).
With these reservations, I presume it is possible to assess the
relevance of the notion of shared memory. I am going to do it
now, using a set of criteria of shared memory that I “limit” to 18,
while being convinced that this number will have to be further
increased. However incomplete this list of criteria may be, using
it in the same way as a toolbox could reduce the risk of an ad-
venturous use of the notion of shared memory. I will now dis-
cuss the following 18 criteria one by one: repetition of trans-
mission (C1), “natural” terms (C2), “intentional” terms (C3),
susceptibility to doubt (C4), moral valence of the event (C5),
degree of indubitability of the event (C6), social emotional load
of the event (C7), size of the group (C8), conformation of the
group (C9), sociotransmitters (C10), memory-inducing power
of sociotransmitters (C11), density of sensory stimuli (C12), use
value of past events (C13), degree of cognitive significance of the
memorized event (C14), primacy effect (C15), recency effect
(C16), singularity effect (C17), and biographical effect (C18).
Memory Contagion
Let us start with Dan Sperber’s epidemiology of represen-
tations, which focuses not on the representations themselves
 714
but on the process of their distribution. “To explain culture,”
writes Sperber (1996), “is to explain why and how some ideas
happen to be contagious” (1). Sperber distinguishes between
intraindividual and interindividual processes of thought and
memory, namely, mental and public representations. He ranks
beliefs, intentions, and preferences among the former and
signals, statements, texts, and images among the latter. When a
mental representation is communicated from one individual to
another—most are not—it is transformed into a public repre-
sentation. If the representation has an obviously material as-
pect,1 the description of this material aspect “leaves out the most
important fact, that these material traces can be interpreted: they
represent something for someone” (Sperber 1996:24). The
public representation stored in memory is thus retransformed
by the recipients into a mental representation, which, like any
mental state, is supposed inaccessible to those who are not ego.
Therefore, if distributed public representations are always im-
mediately transformed into inaccessible mental representations,
the degree of relevance of the holistic rhetoric supposed to de-
scribe their sharing will be impossible to assess.
However, Sperber adds, public representation can remain
relatively stable in some limited cases. Indeed, a small propor-
tion of the representations communicated are repeatedly com-
municated. Sperber rediscovers here an idea of Finley (1975), for
whom “group memory, after all, is no more than the transmittal
to many people of the memory of one man or a few men, re-
peated many times over” (27). These repeated representations
then spread in a human population in often lasting ways: they
“are paradigmatic cases of cultural representations” (Sperber
1996:25), made up of many versions, mental and public ones.
The anthropologist can “study these causal chains made up of
mental and public representations, and try to explain how the
mental states of human organisms may cause them to modify
their environment, in particular by producing signs, and how
such modifications of their environment may cause a modifi-
cation of the mental states of other human organisms” (25–26).
These mental states will become a “cultural imprint” (Changeux
2002:406), a phenomenon made possible by our brain plasticity.
For example, Gagnepain et al. (2019) found that the content of
30 years of media coverage of World War II on French national
television was reflected in the organization of French partic-
ipants’ memories in the medial prefrontal cortex, a key region
for social cognition. This content was reactivated during a visit
to the Caen Memorial Museum (in Normandy, France), con-
firming that social frameworks shape memory. More interesting
for my point, the strength of the alignment between neural
representations and the collective media model increased with
age, supporting the idea that collective schemata are constantly
enriched by repeated exposure to the relevant World War II
media. We thus have a first criterion for assessing the relevance
of the notion of shared memory: repetition, which promotes
long-term memorization (Karpicke and Roediger 2007). We
1. For example, the “sound pattern” comprising the story of Little Red
Riding Hood (Sperber 1996:61).
Current Anthropology Volume 64, Number 6, December 2023
can then venture the following provisional hypothesis: under
certain social conditions (i.e., repetition of transmission, crite-
rion C1) that interact with psychological factors, mental states
transformed into public representations become stable and
lasting cultural representations of the environment shared by
the members of a group. In this case, the notion of shared
memory will have a certain degree of relevance.
However, repetition has never prevented variation, espe-
cially when the “cognitive causal chain” (Sperber 2000b)
linking individuals to one another is long. For example, in-
formation repeated multiple times by person A to person B will
provide a more robust memory than the same information
repeated from A to B, then from B to C, and so on within a
whole group of n individuals. The first case, well documented
in memory psychology (Karpicke and Roediger 2007), offers
the optimal conditions for shared memory between two in-
dividuals. In the second case, each individual is not in these
optimal conditions since, in theory, they benefit from only a
single repetition. Thus, the longer the repetition chain, the
greater the likelihood that information produced at each link
of the chain will be transformed during its reception and then
possibly during its new transmission.
Factual and Semantic Representations
Repetition, therefore, does not guarantee sharing. One can
progress by distinguishing between two forms of cultural rep-
resentations: factual representations, related to the existence
of certain facts, and semantic representations,2 related to the
meaning attributed to these same facts. When the notion of
shared memory refers to factual representations assumed to be
common to a group, its degree of relevance is higher than when
it refers to semantic representations. For anthropologists, the
latter case is more interesting because it allows us to formulate
less trivial hypotheses than when we are dealing only with the
supposed sharing of factual representations. Indeed, to assume
that all French people share the memory of historical events
such as the occupation or the terrorist attack in Nice is not
taking a great risk. Let us assume that all French people (say, “al-
most all”) know that France was occupied during World War II
or that an Islamist attack caused the death of 86 people on July 14,
2016, on the Promenade des Anglais. We can therefore say that
there is a form of shared memory of these historical facts. In
this case, the rhetorical process that will consist in evoking “the
memory of the French” will have a strong degree of relevance,
but the scientific input will be poor. On the other hand, if we
look at the meaning given to these events, we guess that the
sharing of such a meaning by all the French becomes prob-
lematic. In this case, deep memory sharing is unlikely since we
have both a very large group (68 million individuals) and
memory of events that, beyond their factual content, are satu-
rated with various meanings depending on cultural, historical,
2. Here, I use the word “semantic” in its general meaning, unrelated
to its specific meaning in the notion of “semantic memory.”
Candau Modalities and Criteria of Shared Memory
family, and other contexts. So what hypotheses could we
imagine in answer to this question: How can the degree of
relevance of the notion of shared memory applied to (1) factual
representations and (2) semantic representations be evaluated?
A distinction made by Descombes (1996) may help us. It
contrasts natural terms (natural events) with intentional terms
(intentional events). The natural terms are observations (“it
rains”), equivalent to “observation sentences” in van Orman
Quine (1969:86–87), “indisputable facts” in Hacking (2001:54),
and “statements about the state of the world” in Chalmers
(1987:23). In contrast, the intentional terms are discussions
about supposed observations: “He said (it is said) that it rains.”
A natural event is not the object of a judgment (the event is
considered as judged for all eternity), whereas an intentional
event is exposed to one or more judging consciences. When the
event (phenomenon) is not judged and not said “to have been
told,” sharing is (almost) self-evident. If I fall down the stairs
when I leave my university, all those who witness this fall
(students, colleagues, etc.) will no doubt share with me the
idea—that is, a form of factual representation—that I fell. I will
simply be a little more “sensitive” to this event than they are.
No direct witness will have the idea of saying, “He says he fell.”
On the other hand, this will become possible for a person to
whom my misadventure would be told but who was not at the
scene: not having noticed the incident, this person would then
have to imagine the fall in question. This need to imagine the
event is a characteristic of postmemory (Hirsch 1992).
With this distinction between the observation (natural
terms) and the discourse on the observation (intentional terms),
which can be likened to that made by Tulving (1984) between
episodic memory and semantic memory, we have two new
criteria (C2 and C3) to evaluate the relevance of the notion of
shared memory. When this form of shared memory pre-
supposes that all members of a group share the memory of
events that they themselves have observed (C2), its degree of
relevance will be higher than when it presupposes the sharing
of the memory of events reported by narratives of indirect
witnesses to the events (C3).
Questioning the Event
However, the status of the observation is not obvious: it closely
depends on the words used to establish the observation (Loftus
and Palmer 1974) and on the meaning given to these words.
Furthermore, the status is often relative to a system of values and
beliefs. Consequently, if one can rigorously define natural and
intentional events from a purely theoretical point of view, in
practice, one passes easily from one to the other. Let us suppose
the following observation, made by an atheist doctor observing a
lifeless body in the presence of a witness: “This man is dead.” It
is, a priori, a natural statement relating to a deceased individual,
but for the witness, whom we will imagine believes in eternal life,
this observation can become “The doctor says that this man is
dead” (intentional statement that expresses the representation
of factual data). What characterizes the transition from the first
715
to the second statement and radically distinguishes each from
the other is the emergence of the doubt or, more exactly, the
appearance of the conditions that make this doubt possible.
Because the witness believes in the afterlife, she does not believe
(she doubts) that the person is really dead, as stated by the
doctor who has just “declared” his death. It follows that it is from
the interaction (intersubjective, intercultural, etc.) that doubt
can arise: an event can lose its status as a natural event and
become an intentional event as soon as it is exposed to new
individuals, both inside and especially outside the group. We
can push up against the limits of holistic rhetoric, which are
based on the hypothesis of the existence of “naturalized” (i.e.,
unquestioned) events held by all members of a group. In any
group, the statements are always submitted at one point or
another to an internal or external judgment and thus run the
risk of seeing the germination of doubt (disenchantment, “de-
naturalization” of the events). This doubt can be initially in-
troduced by individuals foreign to the group, then possibly
diffused by the members of the group who will have let them-
selves be convinced. This justifies the efforts of sects—and, in
generally less severe forms, by most social groups—to protect
themselves from any outside influence: in a sect that would
succeed in preventing any eruption of doubt thanks to the ab-
solute isolation of its members, the degree of relevance of ho-
listic rhetoric used to describe representations within this sect
would be very high. On the contrary, when the possibility of
questioning exists, the use of holistic rhetoric becomes risky.
Whenever something is said by someone “to have been told”
(even by one person in the group), unanimity is impossible,
whereby the presupposition of sharing (ideas, beliefs, memories)
that holistic rhetoric conveys becomes problematic, which does
not mean that it is always wrong.
With this type of questioning, we can put forward four new
criteria to establish the conditions of the relevance of shared
memory. The probability of doubting is a direct function of the
group’s susceptibility to doubt (C4) and of the moral valence of
the event (C5); it is inversely proportional to the degree of indu-
bitability of the event (C6) and to its social emotional load (C7).
The susceptibility to doubt (C4) depends on both internal
and external factors regarding the group. The internal factors
include (1) the group’s degree of social cohesion, (2) the his-
torical depth of the group, (3) the adherence of its members to a
project and to the idea of a community of destiny, (4) the relative
amount of charisma of a leader or the presence or absence of a
dominant narrator—that is, a person who has a keen sense of
narration (Hirst and Manier 2008)—(5) the choice of closed or
open cooperation (Candau 2012), and (6) the intensity of “re-
lational remembering” (Campbell 2008), notably under the ef-
fect of memory conformism (Gabbert, Memon, and Kevin
2003). External factors are the activism or proselytism of other
groups (“them”) in spreading their beliefs—right or false (e.g.,
fake news; Oreskes and Conway 2010)—to the home group
(“us”). The moral valence of the event (C5) is active on two
levels: an event tainted with immorality is not only more easily
forgotten (“unethical amnesia”; Kouchaki and Gino 2016) but
 716
also more exposed to doubt since it is psychologically costly for
members of the group to recognize themselves in it. The in-
dubitability of the event (C6) is not easy to identify. A crude
intuition suggests that a natural event (e.g., a disaster such as the
tsunami caused by the Indian Ocean earthquake of Decem-
ber 26, 2004) is less likely to be questioned than an event whose
direct cause is human (e.g., some people question the fact that
during the Apollo 11 mission, the astronauts Neil Armstrong
and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon on July 20, 1969). Finally,
the social emotional burden of an event (C7) depends on the
relative strength of its entanglement with various societal stakes
and upheavals (Svob et al. 2016), which are often political, re-
ligious, or, more widely, identity based, such as the assassination
of the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4,
1995, or, in France, the attacks of January 7, 2015, on the
newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
These four new criteria allow a more detailed assessment of
the degree of relevance of the notion of shared memory.
When the finding is questioned because of the group’s sus-
ceptibility to doubt (C4), the negative moral valence of the
event (C5), a real or supposed flaw in the indubitability of the
event (C6), its low social emotional load (C7), or these factors
combined, it is then considered as a narrative on the finding
(C3) and deep memory sharing becomes less probable.
Size and Internal Fluidity of the Group
Moreover, the plausibility of this sharing decreases drastically
according to the size (C8) and conformation (C9) of the group.
Sharing is easier in a small group than in a large one (Arango-
Muñoz and Michaelian 2020). For example, in the case of a news
story, it is more likely that the memories of two witnesses will
agree—although success is not guaranteed—than a dozen. In the
first case, moreover, it is easier for the researcher to control the
reality of sharing than in the second. We can therefore retain
the size of the group as the eighth criterion (C8) contributing
to the degree of relevance of shared memory. The ninth crite-
rion is group conformation (C9), that is, the structure of the
social networks that individuals are part of (Coman et al. 2016).
A group made up of relatively closed subgroups will facilitate
memory convergence less than a group made up of subgroups
with loose borders. Bakshy, Messing, and Adamic (2015), for
example, argue that Facebook acts as a “bubble filter” limiting
individuals’ exposure to perspectives across ideological bound-
aries. This bubble of “likes,” of what is identical to oneself,
reduces the experience of the diversity of memories and, at the
same time, decreases the probability of their in-group con-
vergence, as O’Connor (2019) observed for mediatized memory
in late-modern societies, where electronic and digital media are
the dominant forms of communication. In the same spirit,
memory convergence will be facilitated more in a group with
high social homogeneity than in a very heterogeneous group
where interactions remain compartmentalized—relatively so
because the partitions are always more or less porous—ac-
cording to differentiated social status. These two dimensions of
Current Anthropology Volume 64, Number 6, December 2023
the group conformation criterion can be summarized with the
notion of fluidity. The circulation of representations of the past
will be more fluid in a group consisting of open and socially
homogeneous subgroups than in a group consisting of closed
and socially heterogeneous subgroups. The probability of global
mnemonic convergence and memory sharing is thus negatively
correlated to the size of the group (C8) and positively correlated
to the fluidity of interactions within the group, where internal
fluidity is closely dependent on the group’s conformation (C9).
Density of Sociotransmitters and Sensory Stimuli
Human beings use innumerable memory prostheses, referred to
by the controversial (Michaelian 2012) but evocative notion of
extended mind (Clark and Chalmers 1998). Our environments
are saturated with sociotransmitters (C10) that, in turn, shape
the mind (Malafouris 2013). I thus call (Candau 2005) all hu-
man production and behaviors that establish a social or cultural
cognitive causal chain between at least two individuals. Meta-
phorically, sociotransmitters perform the same function be-
tween individuals as neurotransmitters between neurons: they
promote connections. I give some examples of such socio-
transmitters here: the “objects of affection” (objects that have
been acquired and kept not for their practical function, aesthetic
qualities, or market value, but for their emotional depth; Dassié
2010); the commemorative acts and artifacts, or “vehicles of
memory” (Confino 1997), in the context of trauma due to
neighborhood violence in the Rust Belt (“the material and lin-
guistic expressions of grief—tattoos, wristbands, memorial
shrines with teddy bears, music, funeral home videos . . . are the
bodily and social rituals through which collective memory is
constructed” [Rubinstein et al. 2018:440]); the mnemonic pro-
cess in communities of the Bolivian Andes consisting in de-
positing lists of the deceased on the altars of those who died in
the year during All Saints’ Day (Geffroy 2021); the memorial
function of the images of Abraham Lincoln during World
War II (Schwartz 1996); the role of the internet in shaping the
memory of September 11, 2001 (Wessel and Moulds 2008); and
from a general perspective, the immense literature that high-
lights the importance of language, material culture (Seremetakis
1994), and what I have coined as iconorrhoea (Candau 1996)—
the contemporary profusion of images—in the social trans-
mission of memory. The higher the density of the sociotrans-
mitters, the more memory is distributed or extended (Sutton
et al. 2010) and the higher the probability of memory sharing.
Conversely, the lower the density of the sociotransmitters, the
less memory is shared. Taking a big-data approach aimed at
exploring the dynamics of collective attention, Candia et al.
(2019) found a universal feature of the decay of collective
memory that characterizes a wide range of cultural products,
from academic papers to popular songs. All the types of cultural
products they tested follow a biexponential function: a decay of
attention interrupted by an inflection point that is earlier for the
“communicative memory” (e.g., family discussions, narrative
templates) than for the “cultural memory” (e.g., monuments,
Candau Modalities and Criteria of Shared Memory
memorials, archives, textbooks). Thus, this universal decay is
correlated with the decrease of sociotransmitters, identified by
Candia et al. in the form of two variables: the communicative
memory and the artifacts relating to a cultural product.
Also at play is the power of the induction and memory
focusing ( C11) of these sociotransmitters. In her article ex-
ploring the role of material culture in the construction of
identity and the negotiation of social memory, De Lucia (2018)
shows how Black-on-Orange ceramics were used by emerging
city-states in Postclassic central Mexico to help materialize an
idealized Toltec heritage. As lasting vestiges of the past, these
ceramics are good memory inductors. Massard-Vincent (2003)
gives another example of these memory inductors in a small
town in the British Midlands. Associations (Royal British Le-
gion, St. John Ambulance), youth movements, the clergy,
songs and poems, the media, and monuments all participate in
the process of social construction of the issues shared around
the question of an “appropriate” commemoration of the ar-
mistice of November 11, 1918. Yet some of these sociotrans-
mitters (hymns, flags, uniforms) seem to be better memory
inductors than others.
The density of sensory stimuli (auditory, gustatory, olfac-
tory, tactile, visual) is another criterion (C12) to be taken into
consideration. The robustness of sensory memories is well
documented (Seremetakis 1993). The perception of an odor,
for example, may recall the sharing of a memory in a family
(Wathelet 2009) or a professional group (Candau 2000).
Moreover, the density of these stimuli is likely to promote
associative memory. Finally, the intermodal construction of
the mental scene (integration of the various sensory stimuli)
makes it possible to attenuate, compensate, or neutralize the
memory singularities (Proust syndrome) that can be induced
in an individual by a particular sense, by reducing, so to speak,
the memory to a common denominator in the form of a better
shared representation of the past event.
Universal Psychological Constraints
I now turn to the last six criteria that can modulate memory
sharing, which are all subject to universal psychological
constraints (UPCs). I begin with the first of these: the use value
(practical, social, interest) of past events (C13) promotes
memorization (Ghazizadeh et al. 2018). A memory will be all the
more easily memorized and shared if it has had use value for the
group in the past. For example, a group of hunter-gatherers will
more easily memorize and share the location of a territory with
game than that of a territory without resources, just as urbanites
can memorize and share more easily the location of a good
restaurant than that of a bad canteen.
The following criterion is the degree of cognitive significance
of the memorized event (C14). It refers to the memorability of
the information. Some of it is more easily transmitted, learned,
memorized, shared, and stabilized within a group of individuals
than others. It seems to owe this property to resonating with the
innate structures of the mind brain. Thus, we memorize a
717
musical work better if it is melodious than if it is an experimental
piece of music. The same applies to the transmission of certain
narrative forms (unless we are a stock trader, we more easily
keep the account of Little Red Riding Hood in mind than that of
the previous day’s stock market prices; Sperber 1996:63), geo-
metric shapes (we remember the figure of a circle better than
that of an irregular polygon), some “bad” smells, such as the
smell of a decomposing body (Candau and Jeanjean 2006), and
so on. Similarly, Scott Atran (2003) notes that species in popular
biology are well structured, eye-catching, memorable, and easily
transmitted from mind to mind. Like totemic groups, they are
excellent examples of things “good to think with” (Lévi-Strauss
1962) and, let us add, worth remembering. Many objects of
thought—for example, the “meme,” defined as an “item mem-
ory” (Blackmore 1999:5)—thus have the feature of satisfying
principles of cognitive economy, inducing convergent infer-
ential mechanisms of representation and communication, and,
again, being easily memorable and transmissible. Whenever
these characteristics are present, the “transmission coefficient”
(Cavalli-Sforza 1996:267) is particularly high, and at the same
time, the probability of sharing transmitted and stored infor-
mation increases considerably.
In their experiments on the memory of American presidents
shared by American people, Roediger and DeSoto (2014)
highlighted a primacy effect (C15), a recency effect (C16), a
singularity effect (C17), and at a generational level, a bio-
graphical effect (C18). The primacy effect is that, generally and
across generations, Americans remember the first presidents
(George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson) better
than those who immediately succeeded them. The recency effect
is the fact that Americans remember the latest presidents
(Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, George Bush Jr.,
Barack Obama) better than those who immediately preceded
them. The uniqueness effect is that Americans remember the
presidents of the Civil War period (Abraham Lincoln and, to a
lesser extent, Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant) better than
those who immediately preceded or succeeded them. The bio-
graphical effect, which has various forms, lies in the possible
crossing of a personal trajectory with that of a president. For
example,3 a group of people will better share the memory of
Ronald Reagan than the average American of his generation
because the day of the assassination attempt on the president,
March 30, 1981, coincided with graduation day at their uni-
versity. These different effects produce narrative and memory
biases varying according to the topic. For example, because of
the recency effect, there is an overrepresentation of recent events
in national stories published in Wikipedia (Samoilenko et al.
2017), but this effect seems to be inoperative in the collective
memory of popular music (Spivack et al. 2019).
I can now formulate a hypothesis that incorporates the
18 relevant criteria. When shared memory presupposes the
sharing of semantic representations (C3), its degree of relevance
3. This example is mine.
 718
is always lower than when the sharing of factual representations
(C2) is presupposed. In both cases (C2, C3), this degree of rel-
evance is proportional to the frequency of repetition (C1) of
these representations, the degree of moral valence of the past
event (C5), the event’s degree of indubitability (C6) and social
emotional load (C7), the group’s internal fluidity (C9), the
density of sociotransmitters (C10) and their power to induce
and focus memory (C11), the density of sensory stimuli (C12),
and the presence of UPC effects (C13–C18). The degree of
relevance of the shared memory is inversely proportional to the
size of the group (C8) and its susceptibility to doubt (C4).
Wertsch and Roediger (2008) justifiably lament that unlike
research on individual memory, where there is consensus on the
methods to be used, work on shared memory is methodologi-
cally poor. The 18 criteria I propose could mitigate this meth-
odological weakness and are intended as instruments for
assessing the reality of a sharing of representations of the past.
They are incomplete. Consider, for example, the criterion of the
time elapsed since the memorized event. It is absent from my
model because I do not see how to apply it. If, intuitively, one
can assume that the memory of a recent event will be more easily
shared, this is far from always being true. It is highly likely that
Americans remember 9/11 better than Donald Trump’s last
tweet. Furthermore, even if memories are less accurate over time
(Talarico et al. 2019), this does not imply that the residual
memory content is less well shared. More annoying, I do not
know how to assign a weight to each of these criteria. Should it
be done on an ordinal scale? That poses the problem of mea-
surement. This question is crucial because the 18 criteria
probably do not all have equal weight. I suspect that repetition
(C1), the social emotional load of the event (C7), the size of the
group (C8), the sociotransmitters and their memory-inducing
power (C10, C11), and the primacy and recency effects (C15,
C16) are variables that play a greater role in the memory-sharing
process than the other 11 criteria. Unfortunately, in the absence
of measurement, this remains pure speculation. However, de-
spite these serious flaws, these 18 criteria make possible a first
step toward the operationalization of concepts (a task always
more difficult in the social sciences than in the other sciences;
Diamond 1987) that we need to describe the shared memory
processes. Nevertheless, they are not sufficient to account for
these processes because, very often, they have less to do with
deep memory sharing than with a narrative conveying belief in
this sharing. We now touch on the metamemorial dimension of
sharing representations of the past.
The Metamemory
At the individual level, metamemory is a modality of human
aptitude for metarepresentation (Sperber 2000a) and meta-
cognition (Proust and Fortier 2018). Metamemory is the rep-
resentation that each of us makes of our own memory and
what we say about it. It is the reflexive gaze (Miyamoto et al.
2017) on memory processes that we are capable of mobilizing
in the accomplishment of a task. Individual metamemory is a
Current Anthropology Volume 64, Number 6, December 2023
memory that gives itself as an object, for example, when I say:
“I have a bad memory.” In children and adolescents, the de-
velopment of this ability to assess the accuracy and reliability
of memory through introspection—the metacognitive feel-
ing of being right or wrong—is accompanied by structural
changes in the anterior insula and ventromedial prefrontal
cortex. This development is positively correlated with general
cognitive development and performance in learning and
decision-making (Fandakova et al. 2017).
At the collective level, there are many narratives on memory
that can be described as being metamemorial. For example,
political actors or ordinary citizens of a country may say, “We
have a national memory.” The consolidation of this collective
metamemory consists less in the solidification of memory
(Anastasio et al. 2012) than in the semantic unification of the
diversity of individual representations of the past in the form of
a shared narrative. Collective metamemory is fusional. By in-
tegrating memories of an event into a narrative that erases
differences and exalts similarities, the social entity under con-
sideration (family, community, nation) produces and conveys a
discourse that homogenizes individual memories that are by
nature heterogeneous. This reductive semantization of the di-
versity of individual memories facilitates the sharing of sim-
plified representations of the past (e.g., in France, the mention
“our ancestors the Gauls” in old school textbooks), but above
all, (1) it contributes to the consolidation of the collective
metamemorial narrative, and (2) it encourages its recall in the
form of a claim, such as when all or part of a group claims a
shared memory, or of a lamentation, when all or part of a group
grieves over a lost memory. In complex, unequal, or fragmented
societies, these narratives are generally multiple and competing,
each aiming to become hegemonic. In highly cohesive societies,
metamemorial conformism may be so dominant as to prevent
the expression of any other metamemory.
It is from the confusion between memory and metamemory
that the feeling of shared memory can arise. Indeed, at the level
of a group or an entire society, the fact of saying or writing that a
shared memory exists—a metamemorial fact that is easily
attested—is often confused with the idea that what is said or
written accounts for the existence of such a memory. We then
confuse the fact of the speech with its content. To say that we
have a national memory does not necessarily imply that we
really have one, any more than to say that we have a national
identity implies that we really do have such an identity.
This confusion has an important social function: it reinforces
the feeling of a shared memory in individual consciences and
thus plays an essential role in the emergence of a feeling of
memorial intersubjectivity. Added to the sharing of the subjec-
tive feeling of such memory is the sharing of a narrative con-
veying the belief that this subjective feeling is based on a real
shared memory. We do not only believe what we believe but also
say that we believe it, which will give more authority to what is
believed. We are not born alike, de Tarde (1993:78) argued;
rather, we become so. On the one hand, we probably become
alike by believing that we will become so, but certainly also by
Candau Modalities and Criteria of Shared Memory
believing we share the same memory. The coherence of a social
world, whatever it may be, is due not only to the different forms
of sharing but also to what the members of a group believe and,
above all, say about this sharing. Therefore, when they claim to
share a memory, the important point is the collective expression
of a belief in that sharing, an expression that is also conducive to
repetition. Indeed, more information will be repeated within a
group if its members believe that this information is well shared
(Wittenbaum and Park 2001). In other words, repetition of a
memory will be all the more frequent when individuals already
believe they share that memory, a belief that may or may not be
true. Here, there is a bias of optimization of memory sharing, in
the sense that belief in this sharing induces a more frequent
repetition of representations of the past that will in turn
strengthen the consistency of sharing.
Functioning as a repeated and shared account of a supposedly
deep memory sharing, shared metamemory is a metadiscourse
that, like any language, has powerful effects: First, it nourishes
the imagination of the members of the group and contributes
to forging a mnemonic community (Zerubavel 2003). Second,
being performative, shared metamemory contributes to shaping
a world where sharing is ontologized, particularly in its meta-
mememorial forms. It is the researcher’s responsibility not to err
in the level of analysis by assimilating this shared metamemory
into the deep memory sharing.
Conclusion
The theoretical framework and methodological tools I have just
proposed are imperfect, but as things stand, this approach to
memory phenomena could be useful in three ways. First, it is an
attempt to articulate two perspectives that are generally disjointed
in collective memory research: (1) a top-down perspective that
emphasizes the social construction of shared memories during
historical processes and (2) a bottom-up perspective that em-
phasizes the identification of cognitive processes that play a role
in how memories come to be shared, without necessarily refer-
ring to any extant collective memory. By merging these two per-
spectives, in line with consilience (Slingerland and Collard 2012),
research on collective memory would be able to emerge from
“its infancy” (Hirst, Yamashiro, and Coman 2018).
Second, most of the relevance criteria proposed above cannot
be understood outside a sociocultural context. This constraint
may encourage cognitive sciences to more resolutely combine
experimental and ethnographic methods. This could help these
sciences to definitively break away from the Western, educated,
industrialized, rich, and democratic societies model (Henrich,
Heine, and Norenzayan 2010), of which they are still too often
prisoners. Thus, they would be in a better position to evaluate the
differentiated way in which cultural matrices may or may not
promote the memorization abilities of human beings, a phe-
nomenon I called the Theuth effect in reference to Plato’s Phae-
drus, in which Plato (1950:274–275b) explicitly posed the ques-
tion of the effect of a cultural invention—writing—on memory
(Candau 2016).
719
Third, my approach can help us in what should be an on-
going concern: documenting our generalizations based on
robust empirical data and thus avoiding undue generaliza-
tions. Why this concern? The first reason is scientific. As I have
tried to show, deep memory sharing is not self-evident. To
suggest otherwise therefore amounts to bad science. The sec-
ond reason refers to the researcher’s civic responsibility. Let us
always bear in mind that we very easily embrace the belief in
deep memory sharing, notwithstanding the difficulty of shar-
ing. How can we understand this paradox? This is due to a
panhuman characteristic: not only a general ability to share,
but also a strong inclination to believe in sharing, regardless of
whether or not it is real. We share, and we believe we share, a
belief linked to our personal, social, and cultural identity. As
soon as we are engaged in an interaction (our daily lot), we feel
that, by this very fact, we share something with our partners.
Simply, in ordinary times, we often make mistakes about the
nature of this shared element. We strongly believe in deep
sharing (of practices and representations), whereas we share
above all the belief in this sharing. For reasons that have to do
with the power of cultural matrices and that anthropology
must explain, we are more inclined to anchor this belief in
contingent forms of sharing—those related to birth, primary
socialization, and education, practices that identify parents,
the group to which we belong, the territory, the language, re-
ligion, and so on—than in more substantial forms of sharing,
such as our deep identity as members of the same species,
hypersocial and hypercooperative human nature, nomadic or
migratory tropism, and so on. When beliefs in contingent
forms of sharing invade the public space (e.g., because of a
political project that instrumentalizes them or researchers who
validate them without care), they can be dangerous and even
deadly, as the new “iron century” that was the twentieth cen-
tury sadly showed. Therefore, when using the notion of shared
memory, the researcher’s responsibility is always to remember
that (1) what we take for a shared memory is mainly the shared
narrative of a supposedly shared memory and (2) this narra-
tive, which generally conceals our deep identity in favor of
contingent identities, can be used for malice when it excludes
those who are suspected of not sharing that memory.
Comments
David Berliner
Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains,
Université Libre de Bruxelles, Institut de Sociologie, 44 avenue
Jeanne, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium (david.berliner@ulb.be). 20 IX 22
The question raised by Joël Candau’s article is crucial for
memory studies, but it also concerns the social sciences in
general. It reveals an old enigma that researchers face with
anxiety, an epistemological puzzle that the last decades of
 720
“critique of representation” have made even more prominent,
namely, how to operate a leap from the individual to the col-
lective. Specifically, how to describe and explain the mecha-
nisms through which personal mental representations become
shared by many. Most of the notions that we sociologists and
anthropologists use are indeed metaphors derived from indi-
vidual experiences. However, since the foundation of the social
sciences, scholars have had the correct intuition, that certain
psychological contents are distributed. “To what extent” and
“how” remain scientific grails. In response, generations of
academics have denounced for (at least) the last 30 years the
perils of holistic essentialization and social determinism trig-
gered by this assumption. Under which epistemic conditions
can one grasp such oxymoronic complexity, humans being
individual and collective at the same time, aptly referred to by
Agamben as “des singularités quelconques,” without falling
into essentialism, an essentialism whose dangers, notably na-
tionalistic, are very real? In that regard, what Candau terms
“metamemory” very much resembles what anthropologists
have dubbed the “politics of memory” to describe conflicted
arenas of remembrance and, in particular, the way in which
certain dominant narratives about shared memory contribute
to the erasure of other mnemonic discourses and practices.
This paper lucidly reminds us that the notion of memory is
one of those concepts expressly concerned by these epistemo-
logical and political threats. Since Connerton’s classic How So-
cieties Remember, such imprudent semantic extensions have
been legion. As Funkenstein (1989) observes, “Memory can only
be realized by an individual who . . . remembers. Just as a nation
cannot eat or dance, neither can it speak or remember” (6). Still,
groups of humans recall common events and attribute similar or
varied meanings to them. Personal representations of lived pasts
can become recounted by large communities. It is not an ex-
aggeration to say that the genesis and modalities of shared
memories constitute one of the crucial debates in this field of
study today. I am very sympathetic to Candau’s desire to ask for
more “clarity,” as I did in my work about the oft-abusive usages
of the concept and the ignorance of the psychological and so-
ciological processes at stake (Berliner 2005).4
To do so, Candau presents 18 criteria that are likely to play a
major role in the distribution of memories. The author himself
acknowledges that this list constitutes a heuristic device that needs
to be amended and that not all the 18 ingredients are expected
to be equally mobilized throughout diverse social and cultural
contexts. Although I enjoyed some aspects of his explanatory
approach (a perspective that is quite popular in French-speaking
anthropological circles) aimed at producing a theory of shared
memories, I am more skeptical about the lack of ethnographic
scenes to illustrate the mechanisms at work. One would like to see
how these 18 criteria, which are presented as a catalog, function in
the midst of interactions. As they are orchestrated in real life, we
4. One should also discuss the hazardous use of the notion of “bodily
memory,” which serves most of the time as a vague metaphor to express
the persistence in time of nonverbal elements from the past.
Current Anthropology Volume 64, Number 6, December 2023
know nothing. Yes, “repetition” often seems to be required, but
are some contexts (A family dinner conversation? A reunion of
veterans? A political meeting? A classroom?) more susceptible to
contributing to sharing? Yes, it needs “sociotransmitters,” these
material affordances that will make dissemination possible, but
are they the same in diverse sociocultural settings and according
to generations (think of the crucial role played by the internet in
the production of memories among young people in the West)?
While I have the impression that Candau minimizes the benefits
of “distributed” (or “extended”) cognition approaches (although
he cites some of them), this research has rightly emphasized the
intersubjective property of mental phenomena (Michaelian and
Sutton 2013), underlining the intrinsically transactive nature of
remembering, as among elderly couples who use each other to
reminisce about their past and collaborate to create a common
vision of it. Such complex scenes, which are extremely rich the-
oretically, can (and should) be described ethnographically, a di-
mension that Candau laconically invites his readers to take into
account without giving them any conceptual or methodological
key. How then to explore, in the midst of human interactions, the
production of these shared memories?
From this inspiring text, one last important aspect appears
missing to me. In the field, the anthropologist will encounter
different types of memories whose psychological and sociological
ingredients are in contrast. I am thinking in particular of traumatic
memories and nostalgic recollections and their social circulation,
the modalities of which might require specific theoretical and
methodological considerations. Take traumatic memories. Since
Freud, it has been abundantly demonstrated that violent events
produce peculiar forms of remembering and forgetting. Some
atrocities trigger amnesia, while others keep haunting the vic-
tims as flashbacks and nightmares. Some of these are not repeated
more than once, yet their imprint is massive. Such memories can
be highly transmissible, albeit silenced (Kidron 2009). Overall,
traumatic reminiscences are extremely shareable ones. An iden-
tical line of reasoning can be applied to nostalgia, a distinct type
of memory. Is it distributed in the same ways as episodic memo-
ries of historical events that would not affect someone much? How
do these different varieties of memories cohabitate within one
single individual, and how does sharing imply specific styles of
transmission in nonetheless specific ontological temporalities?
In short, Candau’s piece made me think. As is the case for
any typological attempt, readers always try to see “where” it
does not work. And that is what makes it stimulating.
Zuzanna Bogumił
Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences,
Aleja Solidarności 105, 00-140 Warsaw, Poland (zbogumil@iaepan
.edu.pl). 25 X 22
The article comes from the assumption that there are some
social scientists who believe in the existence of shared memories,
which, according to Candau, is a false assumption. However, no
Candau Modalities and Criteria of Shared Memory
literature is called on to show who these scientists are. Instead of
shared memory, Candau encourages us to talk about shared
narrative, which he defines as collective metamemory. At the
same time, he claims that it is possible to assess some relevance
in the notion of shared memory. Thus, he introduces 18 criteria
that he believes may be used as a toolbox to “reduce the risk of an
adventurous use of the notion of shared memory.”
Candau’s argumentation is based on the psychological and
cognitive studies literature, from which he generously draws
to criticize the concept of shared memory. To support his
critiques, he refers to knowledge on neurobiological processes
that occur at the individual level of memory. Even if Candau
refers to Maurice Halbwachs’s concept of social frames of
memory, he does not find his concept useful. It is because he
is not interested in how the framework works but would like
to establish what “is really shared.” Furthermore, Candau
does not give a clear definition of what he understands as the
shared memory. One time, he writes that it is a representa-
tion of the past shared by various individuals; another time,
he stresses that shared memory is the process of cultural
transformation; and finally, he argues that the category refers
to an agonistic process of shaping the past. At the same time,
he gives many examples that refer to shared knowledge rather
than to shared memory.
Interestingly, when Candau comes to define his criteria of
shared memory, he does not refer to neurobiology, which would
be very interesting, but to the sociological and cultural explana-
tions for how social representations work. He uses Bourdieu’s
category of habitus and bodily hexis, which he believes participate
in the construction of protomemory, a kind of collective, pre-
individual memory in Candau’s concept. However, neither in his
understanding of protomemory nor in the development of his 18
criteria does he refer to the growing literature on memory studies.
This literature has intensively developed since the 1980s and
discusses various aspects and mechanisms of collective memory
work. It shows that different gender, family, national, or global
groups have different remembering strategies and that their
memories have different textures and use different, often con-
tradictory patterns. Thus, instead of asking about what is shared,
these researchers ask what the similarities and differences among
these groups’ remembrances of the past are. The question is about
similar or comparative features and not identical ones. Even
more, Halbwachs already clearly showed that memory changes,
mutates, and develops all the time. Thus, a question of what is
shared is wrongly put. It should be asked what the mechanisms
enabling a process of sharing are (Halbwachs 1992).
Even if Candau does not refer to memory studies, his criteria
of shared memory to a great extent correspond with some
categories and concepts developed by researchers of memory
studies. For instance, what Candau calls the sociotransmitters
Astrid Erll calls different media that transmit the memory. She
argues that media have their specific conventions and formal
structures that affect the nature of how memories are articulated
and communicated. While Candau builds his understanding of
sociotransmitters by making a comparison to “neurotransmit-
721
ters between neurons,” Erll, being a literature scholar, focuses on
how memories move between different audiences (Erll and
Nunning 2008) and travel among various media, times, and
spaces (Erll 2011). In turn, Sue Campbell (2003) observes that
people’s success in remembering is not merely a matter of their
private experience, but of cognitive abilities that enable indi-
viduals to act with other people. As a result, she does not talk
about collective memory, but about relational remembering.
Candau’s other criteria could also be developed with refer-
ence to memory studies literature. His criterion of “social
emotional load of the event” corresponds, for instance, with
the concept of hot and cold memory used to describe experi-
ences that have remained strongly or weakly engraved in
personal and collective memories (Maier 2002). It also corre-
sponds with the concept of affective memory (Stockwell 2010)
or deep memory, which resists historicization and establishes
its own chronology (Delbo 1995). Finally, it is worth stressing
that concepts existing in memory studies would probably en-
able Candau to develop the time criteria that he could not
establish in his article. There are a lot of concepts discussing
the impact of time on memory processes and the shape and
texture of memory. The best known are the concepts of col-
lective and cultural memories developed by Jan Assmann.
German Egyptologists argue that communicative memory is
orally transmitted to the next generation by witnesses of the
events. However, when the last witnesses die and the oral
transmission of memory is broken, communicative memory
transforms into cultural memory. The latter is based on vari-
ous carriers of memory, such as literature, cultural landscapes,
archives, and art, and may be transmitted from one generation
to another for ages (Assmann 2008).
The critical tone of my comment does not mean that I do not
find Candau’s argumentation interesting—just the opposite. I
am highly interested in his toolbox, but to fully understand its
originality and use it, I need to link Candau’s criteria to existing
concepts and discussions. Broadening the theoretical frame-
work would enable researchers of memory studies coming from
various disciplines, not only psychology and cognitive studies, to
operationalize the toolbox for their research.
Laurent S. Fournier
Laboratoire d’Anthropologie et de Psychologie Cliniques, Cognitives
et Sociales, UPR 7278, Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France (laurent
.fournier@univ-amu.fr). 8 X 22
From Shared Memories to Memory Practices:
Comment on Candau’s “Modalities and Criteria
of Shared Memory”
It is undeniable, as Candau says, that there is a significant risk of
generalization in moving from observations targeting the indi-
vidual level to analyses concerning the collective level. This risk
 722
is both scientific and political: scientific because it is satisfied
with a lazy holism, political because it inevitably reinforces
cultural stereotypes. It is therefore not a question of contesting
here the central proposition made by Candau—namely, that it
is urgent and important to better understand and characterize
the nature of “shared memory.” To accept this notion uncriti-
cally would indeed be to yield once more to the fascination of
the Volksgeist or to the all-pervasive temptation to essentialize
cultural identities.5 However, the entire history of anthropology
has precisely consisted of an incessant struggle aimed at dis-
tancing itself from a culturalist reading of social reality to de-
velop a finer interpretation of fieldwork data, which are by
nature collected at the individual scale and must therefore be
able to account for very localized processes.
The secondary propositions that Candau makes—by trying
to establish a set of precise criteria concerning the operating laws
of shared memory—thus have the merit of going far beyond the
sweeping uses that are still often made of notions such as
“people,” “identity,” “collective memory,” or “heritage” in our
disciplines. The fact of combining many criteria allows Candau
to consider probabilities that a memory is more or less deeply
“shared” within a group; what emerges is a convincing theory
suggesting varying degrees and various modalities of this shar-
ing, even “transmission coefficients” that can be tested empiri-
cally in all sorts of social situations. However, if the approach
proposed here seems likely to advance the study of shared
memories, it also calls for some remarks to better take into ac-
count the specificities of the anthropological approach.
First, during fieldwork, the collective memory is always soli-
cited by the researcher. It is therefore coconstructed, which raises
the question of self-reflexivity in the constitution of memory data.
We know that the interviewer induces a certain number of things
and that there are always some feedback effects. How can these
effects be measured in the constitution of memory data? The role
of anthropologists has been very important in the construction of
the cultural references of the groups, which implies that studies on
shared memory should also raise the question of the sharing of
memories with the anthropologists who take charge of the col-
lection of memory data.
Then what applies to individual memory, through cognitive
approaches, does not necessarily apply to collective memory,
which has its own modes of operation. It is therefore a nonissue to
want to transpose the observations that are made at the individual
level to those that can be made at the collective level—to speak of
“neurotransmitters” or “engrams” for a group consists in applying
scientific models that do not necessarily apply on a collective scale,
and in this it seems to follow the myth of artificial intelligence.6
The transposition is not necessarily relevant because it supposes
the use of analytic concepts as metaphors. Candau thus replaces
5. For a discussion on identity, see Brubaker and Cooper (2000).
6. On the limits of artificial intelligence, see Searle (1992).
Current Anthropology Volume 64, Number 6, December 2023
what he criticizes (reductive holism) with another perspective that
is also open to criticism and reduction when dealing with human
cultures (objectivist scientism).
The inductive, patient, and situated, pragmatic approach
necessary to address the dynamics of groups in their social
contexts does not correspond to the experimental approaches
that can be deployed with regard to simple individuals. Even
without following the Durkheimian idea that the social includes
a sacred part and that the group is something more than the sum
of the individuals who compose it, it seems difficult to do
without a study of the group effect when dealing with collective
memory.7 Thus, Candau calls for a more robust model through
a systemic approach, but this is perhaps a utopia insofar as the
larger the group, the more unpredictable it is. This unpredict-
ability, inherent in the situation of togetherness, would consti-
tute a limit to the anthropological exercise; wanting to go be-
yond this limit would disregard the conditions specific to
ethnographic observation. It might then be more consistent to
be content with the limits set by the nature of the terrain and the
uncertainty of the social and cultural situations.
We must also distinguish between memory and history:
When does shared memory become history? Can we really
evacuate this category? By approaching shared memory through
linguistics, Candau evacuates the problem because he assumes
that metamemory is mainly centered on narrative and belief.
But this does not take into account the specificities of proto-
memory, which Candau describes elsewhere but which he does
not analyze sufficiently. History is not made only of stories that
reinforce the collective belief in a shared memory. It is also based
on live performances and on incorporated knowledge, which are
fully involved in protomemory. It should therefore be remem-
bered here that the meanings exist not only through a posteriori
verbalizations, but also a priori as structuring schemes of social
habitus.8
Thus, rather than focusing attention on the modes of the
functioning of memory, should we not question the diversity
of memory practices and map this diversity to found an an-
thropology of collective memory? The examples given by
Candau about the memory of past wars on a national scale or
about certain traumatic episodes on a more local scale are not
totally satisfactory from this point of view. Studies carried out
on collective systems for promoting heritage, on the consti-
tution of museums, on historical recollections in the context
of living history, or on folkloric parades staging an imagined
past in a festive mode would make it possible to evaluate
pragmatically the situated social processes of the construc-
tion of shared memories. These studies could advantageously
complement the theoretical proposals made by Candau in his
article.
7. On this debate, see Durkheim (1912) and Halbwachs (1925).
8. In the sense of Bourdieu (1979).
Candau Modalities and Criteria of Shared Memory
Kourken Michaelian and Shin Sakuragi
Institut de Philosophie de Grenoble, Université Grenoble Alpes,
Bâtiment ARSH, CS 40700, 38058 Grenoble CEDEX 9, France
(kourken.michaelian@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr)/307 Fukasaku,
Minuma-ku, Saitama-City, Saitama 337-8570, Japan. 17 X 22
Shared Metamemory and (the Feeling of )
Shared Memory
The theme of Candau’s stimulating paper is shared memory, of
which he distinguishes three “modalities”: protomemory (in-
cluding bodily forms of memory), memory proper, and meta-
memory. While shared memory proper—which he defines as
“the sharing by all members of a group of both the factual
memory of an event and the meaning given to that event”—is
the primary focus of Candau’s paper, our focus in this brief
commentary will be on what he has to say about shared meta-
memory, for which he endorses a narrative conception, and, in
particular, on what he has to say about the role of metamemory
in giving rise to the feeling of shared memory.
Metacognition, in its broadest sense, refers to one’s thinking
about one’s thinking, with metamemory referring to one’s
thinking about one’s remembering in particular (see Proust
2013). A number of theoretical approaches to metacognition are
available, but there is, in line with dual-process theories of cog-
nition, an approximate consensus on the need to distinguish be-
tween type 2 (conscious, deliberate, slow) metacognition and
type 1 (unconscious, automatic, fast) metacognition. Whereas
type 1 metacognition is generally taken to be feeling based, type 2
metacognition is understood as involving explicit propositional
thought. Given that he works with a narrative conception of
metamemory, Candau is presumably concerned, in the first
instance, with type 2 metamemory.
“Collective” metamemory and “shared” metamemory are
not, we take it, “modalities” of memory. The distinction rather
reflects how we understand each modality. While the notion
of shared memory assumes only the existence of individuals
sharing a memory, Candau suspects the notion of collective
memory to be ontologically more demanding because it as-
sumes the existence of a group of people sharing the memory.
While we ourselves are impressed by the difficulty of doing
without collective memory and other collective notions (e.g.,
that of a nation) in both lay and social scientific explanations of
the social world and thus are less suspicious than is Candau, an
attempt to adjudicate such a large-scale issue would, for obvious
reasons, be out of place in this commentary. Moreover, no such
attempt is necessary, for we ourselves are suspicious with respect
to the notion of collective metamemory in particular: while the
concept of individual metamemory is well established, the le-
gitimacy of the concept of collective metamemory is doubtful
(Arango-Muñoz and Michaelian 2020).
Now, Candau does not provide an explicit definition of
shared metamemory, but a relatively modest notion is sufficient
for his purposes: whereas individual metamemory refers to the
subject’s thinking about his own memory, we will take it that
723
shared metamemory refers to subjects’ thinking about the
memories of the members of their group and arises where each
of the members of a group subscribes to a narrative according to
which each of the members of the group remembers a given
item (e.g., an event from the past of the group) in a given way.
Candau argues that shared metamemory plays two roles in the
emergence of shared memory. On the one hand, it plays a role in
the generation of shared memory itself. On the other hand, it
plays a role in the generation of the feeling of shared memory.
As far as the first role is concerned, the idea appears to be that,
when the members of a group subscribe to a narrative according
to which the members of the group remember a given item in a
given way, they are more likely to come, in practice, to remem-
ber the item in question in the way in question. The claim that
shared metamemory plays this role strikes us as plausible, and
we do not wish to challenge it here. As far as the second role in
concerned, the idea appears to be, roughly, that it is because each
of the members of the group believes that the members of the
group remember a given item in a given way that the feeling of
shared memory for that item emerges. Through those processes,
Candau appears to suggest, shared metamemory ultimately
shapes “a world where sharing is ontologized, particularly in its
metamememorial forms.” The claim that shared metamemory
plays this role seems to us to be in need of further discussion.
There are two issues that we wish to flag here. First, although
Candau provides an explicit definition of shared memory, and
although it is clear how shared metamemory is to be defined, it is
not entirely clear how the feeling of shared memory is to be
defined. The difficulty has to do less with the “content” of the
feeling—which presumably tells the subject that the relevant
memory is shared by the members of the relevant group—than
with its character. The feeling in question is naturally taken to be
a metacognitive feeling. If it is a metacognitive feeling, however,
it is a metacognitive feeling of an unusual sort since it results not
from monitoring of remembering but from beliefs about re-
membering: the feeling of shared memory is, if Candau is right,
generated by the subject’s belief that a memory is shared. Sec-
ond, and relatedly, it is not entirely clear what is supposed to be
gained by the introduction of the notion of the feeling of shared
memory. Shared memory itself is, as noted above, meant to be
an ontologically less demanding notion than that of collective
memory, and the analogous point holds with respect to shared
metamemory. Occam’s razor would, however, seem to suggest
that the feeling of shared memory is simply redundant: once
type 2 shared metamemory (acceptance of a narrative according
to which the members of a group remember a given item in a
given way) is in the picture, there would seem to be no theo-
retical work left for type 1 metamemory (the feeling of shared
memory) to do since type 2 metamemory already explains the
generation of shared memory.
Its inclusion of this puzzling redundancy notwithstanding,
Candau’s picture is coherent and might, therefore, turn out to
be correct. Nevertheless, we suggest that additional argument
for the existence of the feeling of shared memory—as well as
a more explicit definition of the notion—would be in order.
 724
Luis Carlos Toro Tamayo9
Escuela Interamericana de Bibliotecologia, Universidad de
Antioquia, Calle 67 53-108, Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia
(lcarlos.toro@udea.edu.co). 21 X 22
Images and Memory
In 2021, I participated as an editor of the film titled Recuerdos
Prestados Memorias Comunes, a documentary essay directed
by Ana López (2021) and made from footage found on the
boulevard Jourdan in Paris. The tape contained unpublished
images of a family trip to Noirmoutier en l’Île in the summer
of 1962. The characters, spaces, and experiences reflected in
this 16-mm film were carefully thought out by the amateur
filmmaker, who captured the details of the trip and extolled
the experiences of each of the characters involved in the vi-
sual narrative. Seeing these images, confronting the inscribed
memory of someone else’s vacation by the sea, allowed us to
appreciate borrowed memories as if they were our own. The
shared memories of a group of strangers from the past be-
come their memories in the present through the emotional
transfer caused by the images. A succession of frames that
contain everyday situations, without pretensions or assem-
blies, generates in the viewer a feeling of closeness and inti-
macy. An individual memory in the life of others becomes a
collective memory of all.
To Candau (2005), there are a series of sociotransmitters that
act as emotional devices to evoke memories and trigger a series
of links between individual and collective experiences. It is about
the construction of a symbolic order of reality linked to
traditions, institutions, and social formations, as defined by
Williams (2000) in his structure of feeling. This type of approach
allows us to understand that in each experience there are un-
derlying dominant, residual, and emerging elements of culture
that, concerning the sociocultural context in which they are
immersed, create a transcendent community of memory asso-
ciated with images in which there is a symbolic power capable of
creating a collective visual memory.
Warburg (2010) defines a kind of Mnemosyne Atlas, in
which a visual narrative is created through which we build a
production context semantically associated with the power of
the images that surround us. There are images, sensations, and
lived experiences that make sense when they are activated
socially with the use of networks, media, and public demon-
strations. In an article by Da Silva Catela (2018), we observe
the description of what happened with the murder of Santiago
Maldonado, a social leader who participated in the demon-
strations carried out for the struggle for the ancestral land and
the liberation of the Mapuche referent on Route 40 in
Cushamen, Argentina. With the viralization of this fact, the
images of this murdered young man occupied the front pages
of the newspapers, generated marches, and opened legal cases,
9. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1793-8751.
Current Anthropology Volume 64, Number 6, December 2023
placing on the public agenda modes of repression that seemed
to have been abolished by the state.
His face, but above all his look, his eyes, were present on the
Facebook pages, on the T-shirts, on the agendas, on the walls,
on the banners, and in the marches. They appeared in the same
act that Santiago disappeared. Those eyes were and are there
on the street to build their own denunciation, their existence,
their life, and their death. They questioned every man and
woman who circulated through the cities. There were small
gestures of reproduction in photocopies of his face or collective
rituals that generated an impressive visual culture such as the
one carried out in the commemoration march one month after
his disappearance. (Da Silva Catela 2018:41)
Both references, the film with found footage and the article on
the case of Santiago Maldonado, allow us to approach material
evidence that operates as an activator of collective memories.
These memories appear as instant photographs in our memory
and will enable us to understand out-of-field information that
goes beyond what we see in the images and that is completed
with the context of production and the mental associations
that we build from our experience (Toro-Tamayo 2021).
Memories occupy a place in our memory throughout life, and
they are common as long as they are shared and transmitted
socially through narratives of memory.
Reply
We have a number of experiences which we call “seeing the
sun.” . . . But what we want to know is the resemblance, if
any, between the sun and “seeing the sun”; for it is only
in so far as there is resemblance that the latter can be
a source of knowledge concerning the former. (Russell
1943:117–118)
I am deeply grateful for the time and effort all of these six
colleagues have invested to comment on this article. I begin
from a point of consensus. Berliner stresses the lack of eth-
nographic scenes to illustrate the mechanisms at work. He is
right. An undoubted weakness of my model is that it has not
yet been tested as such. Its testing is essential—for example,
in the field of traumatic memories, as Berliner suggests, or in
that of festivals and museums, as Fournier invites me to do.
However, empirical studies suggest the validity of several of
the criteria proposed in this model. Take, for example, a
recent study aimed at assessing the effects of collective events
on the convergence of autobiographical memories. In a lon-
gitudinal assessment of memory of the onset of the COVID-
19 pandemic across three memory collections conducted one
year apart (December 2020, December 2021, and January
2023) among 1,000 American adults, Rouhani et al. (2023)
Candau Modalities and Criteria of Shared Memory
found that this natural event (in my model, an event less ex-
posed to doubt, C6) consolidated the memory of this period in
all participants, with the combined effects of primacy (C15),
recency (C16), emotional context (C7), repetition (C1), flash-
bulb memories (singularity effect, C17, and biographical effect,
C18), and event memorability (C14). Other research highlights
the importance of topologies of communication networks (C9;
Momennejad 2021) or artifacts that I call sociotransmitters (C10
and C11; Rubinstein et al. 2018; Zijlema, van den Hoven, and
Eggen 2017). Regarding the criterion of group size (C8), I agree
with Fournier: the larger the group, the more unpredictable it is.
But it also seems to me that science becomes a lot more fun
when it gets harder! From this point of view, the question of the
respective effects of the criteria C2 and C3 is interesting because
it is very complex. I argue that the sharing of semantic repre-
sentations (C3) is more uncertain than the sharing of factual
representations (C2). But this hypothesis is fragile given the
results, in some respects contradictory, of two recent studies.
Kramer et al. (2023) conducted a study of object memorability.
They have collected more than 1 million memory ratings for a
naturalistic dataset of 26,107 object images designed to com-
prehensively sample concrete objects. They found that semantic
features (e.g., categorical information) exert a stronger influence
on what we remember than perceptual features (e.g., color or
shape). However, a study of the memorability of artworks
(Davis and Bainbridge 2023) shows that ResMem,10 a deep
learning neural network designed to estimate image memora-
bility, could significantly predict the sharing of this memory,
suggesting that perceptual features of a painting play a major
role both in memory for a museum visit and in cultural memory
over generations. The prediction was confirmed empirically:
people who had viewed a selection of paintings tended to recall
the same works. These C2 and C3 criteria therefore need to be
further refined. When we consider the criteria as a whole, it is
certain that (1) testing them will reveal their shortcomings and
(2) their number needs to be increased. Regarding the latter, I
can only suggest some additional criteria without having the
space to elaborate on them: the reputation of the narrators, the
social support they receive, the importance of memoricide
strategies (Webster, forthcoming), the nature of communicative
memory (Wiessner 2014), the individual and cultural variability
of the mnemonic judgment of time, the impact of informational
overload, the time elapsed since the memorized event, the life
span distribution of memories, in the future the availability of
memory enhancement techniques, and so on. In short, my
model needs to be enriched both theoretically, as Bogumił notes,
and methodologically. However, imperfect as it may be, this
model could represent a modest advance for the science of
shared memory, particularly necessary in today’s context of the
spread of misinformation and memory manipulation.
Contrary to the opinion attributed to me by Bogumił, I find
the concept of “social frameworks of memory” very useful and
10. https://brainbridgelab.uchicago.edu/resmem/.
725
even indispensable when we admit that, in a group, it is indi-
viduals who represent them or incorporate them as such. In the
text, I underline that they “exist and exert their effects,” that they
“guide and constrain” the memory contents. When I proposed
the term sociotransmitter in an article published almost 20 years
ago (Candau 2004b), I was indeed thinking of Halbwachsian
social frameworks. If I prefer “sociotransmitter” to the static
term “framework,” it is because it seems more appropriate for
capturing the processual dimension of cultural matrices. A
sociotransmitter is what Halbwachs (1950) calls a “seed of re-
membrance” (5), which may be fertile in an overt or silent form
or may simply propagate “the illusion of a common memory”
(Young 1993:6). Bogumił and Tamayo are right to consider the
media as a sociotransmitter, as I suggest by citing O’Connor
(2019). Notwithstanding the existence of these sociotrans-
mitters (or social frameworks) that constrain the memory
contents, the question remains as to what extent these contents
are really shared. There is one last point about my analogy be-
tween sociotransmitters and neurotransmitters: obviously, I
am not talking about neurotransmitters on a collective scale,
as Fournier suggests. I argue that sociotransmitters act between
individuals in the same way neurotransmitters act within an
individual: they establish connections. It is a metaphor.
The question raised by Fournier about the link between
memory and history is an important one, albeit outside the
scope of this paper. It is not just a question of “When does
shared memory become history?” It must also consider
“When does history become shared memory?”—which may
be a consequence of the alteration over time of the teaching
of history received at school. His argument that my definition
of metamemory as “mainly centered on narrative and belief ”
evacuates the “problem” of the link between memory and
history is not clear to me, and neither is the causal link he
suggests between my emphasis on metamemory and an un-
derestimation of the specificities of protomemory. They are
two distinct memory processes, and recognizing the impor-
tance of one in no way implies minimizing the other. I coined
the term protomemory (Candau 1998) precisely to highlight
this shared form of embodied memory. Shared procedural
memories (or techniques du corps), such as the extraordinary
ankle dorsiflexion of some hunter-gatherers while climbing
tall trees in pursuit of honey (Venkataraman, Kraft, and
Dominy 2013) and the squatting posture typical of some
population groups (Boulle 2001), are good examples, as are
the pastry skills of the young women in southern Brazil
(Ferreira and Cerqueira 2012) and, more generally, all em-
bodied routines, including custom that, according to Pascal
(1897), “drives the mind without its thinking about it”
(Brunschvicg 252). The reason I have given this notion little
space in this article is that protomemory is the form of cul-
tural memory that a good ethnography can most easily attest
to being shared. Making it operative presents no great theo-
retical or methodological difficulties, unlike the other two
anthropological categories of memory (memory proper and
metamemory) that are at the heart of my argument.
 726
This brings me to my main point. As Michaelian and
Sakuragi note, the sharing of memory proper is the primary
focus of my paper. Throughout my life as an anthropologist, the
key word has been “sharing” (Candau 1999). This question of
sharing is at the heart of the never-ending debate about the
passage from the individual to the collective. I agree with
Berliner: how to describe and explain the mechanisms through
which personal mental representations become shared by many
is a crucial question for memory studies and also for the social
sciences in general. The risk inherent in misunderstanding these
mechanisms is that of unwarranted generalizations. First of all,
when applied to the individual, referring to the memory is
perhaps already an excessive generalization since observation in
fact reveals a plurality of memories (Michaelian 2010) that are
themselves controversial (Neisser et al. 2023). Let us assume,
however, that this notion of an individual memory has an em-
pirical correlate (in this case, neuroanatomical). Can we also
identify an empirical correlate when we describe a memory as
“collective” or “shared”? I do not regard the latter two terms as
equivalent. It is no coincidence that, in my text, I use the words
“shared” or “sharing” almost seven times more (183 vs. 27) than
I use the word “collective,” in the latter case often to criticize its
use. Many social scientists seem to consider collective memory
as transcending individuals, but I do not see how we can give an
empirical correlate to this memory located in a kind of Platonic
heaven. On the other hand, it does become possible when we
consider shared memory as an aggregate of shared individual
memories (Hirst and Manier 2008). As Rajaram (2022) cogently
writes, “By studying the fundamental processes of bottom-up
accumulation of shared memory representations, we are be-
ginning to understand how the individual shapes what the
collective remembers” (1057). Schematically, then, we can
contrast a holistic conception of shared memory (“collective
memory”) with what I propose we call, in the spirit of Occamian
empiricism, a serial conception of this memory (“shared indi-
vidual memories”). Within this serial theory of shared memory,
I do not think that “to transpose the observations that are made
at the individual level to those that can be made at the collective
level” is a “nonissue,” as Fournier maintains. On the contrary, it
seems to me to be the only way to attest that representations of
the past are actually shared by the members of a group. For the
collective to emerge, there must first be individuals. Also, unlike
Bogumił, I do not think that the question “what is shared” is
“wrongly put,” especially as it seems strange to me to be inter-
ested in the “mechanisms enabling a process of sharing” while
neglecting the outcome of this process. The raison d’être of an
anthropology of memory is to determine to what extent, within
a group, the memories of a series of individuals converge, always
asymptotically, toward a deep sharing—that is, when the vast
majority of the group shares both the same representations of
the past and the behaviors associated with them. This mne-
monic convergence presupposes the distribution of similar,
ideally identical, memories among these individuals. It is made
possible by the power of cultural matrices and, more specifically,
by the social frameworks of memory (or sociotransmitters) that
Current Anthropology Volume 64, Number 6, December 2023
provide scaffolding for memory sharing. By proceeding in this
way, I endeavor to articulate individual mental mechanisms
with mechanisms specific to cultural matrices, namely, the
socio-ecological configurations generating a deep sharing that is
temporarily stable among individuals caught up in the matrices.
I therefore subscribe to the scientific agenda that maintains that
remembering is not merely a matter of private experience and
not merely a matter of social frameworks.
To paraphrase Russell, quoted above, the serial conception
of shared memory bears some resemblance to memory itself.
In my view, the holistic conception does not bear any. As Mi-
chaelian and Perrin (2023) rightly note, it “is not truly mnesic”
(50–51). This obviously does not exempt us, as anthropologists,
from studying the belief that human groups may share in the
existence of such a holistic memory, notably in the form of a
shared metamemory. This manifests itself when, within a group,
all or some of the individuals share and manifest the belief
(1) that the so-called collective memory exists and (2) that all
members of the group share this belief. Paradoxically, this
second-order belief, generally erroneous, gives a certain con-
sistency to the notion of shared memory in the form of shared
autonoetic consciousness.
—Joël Candau
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