The central issue I would like to address in this paper is the way in which cultural memory evolves through public acts of remembrance against the background of changing social hierarchies. In emphasizing the ‘dynamics’ of cultural memory I am anxious to provide some counterweight to the rather static view of memory which has tended to dominate discussions (as exemplified for instance in Nora’s spatialized notion of isolated lieux de mémoire) and to the tendency to talk about ‘memories’ is isolation from each other rather than in relation to each other as part of an economic memory.

Elaborating on the social-constructivist accounts of cultural memory advanced by Jan and Aleida Assman among others, I shal try to put forward a model for describing how cultural memory evolves with the help of public media and through the identification of counter memories or areas of cultural amnesia. Central to my discussions is the idea that memories are alway ‘scarce’: memory erosion and loss is as important a feature of cultural memory as conversation and storage.

Having reflected again on the call for papers and looked a the titles of the other papers, I decided that I’d prefer to offer a more theoretical paper, in which I survey a number of models of cultural memory and try to add to them in a way which will, I hope further the aims of the conference.