Modalities and Criteria of Shared Memory

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 representations. 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.