Psychological, social, cultural, literary and legal dimensions of memory

Despite the fearful predictions of ‘the end of history’ made at the beginning of the 1990s, the past 20 years have not only proved to be at least as fruitful in terms of historical events as all the previous ones, but have also seen an unprecedented interest in memory. This, as I note later, led some researchers to say we are living in times of ‘hypertrophy of memory’. Never before have so many different disciplines investigated the mysteries behind the ways we remember, trying to show that memory does influence various sciences, from sociology, to law and to literature. But can we, ‘the people of the 21st century’, answer this very simple question: What exactly is memory? Encyclopaedia Britannica states that memory is ‘the encoding, storage, and retrieval in the human mind of past experiences.’ 1 Later on in this definition, we learn that there are different kinds of memory: musical, short-term, long-term, logical, local, mechanical, eyewitness, autobiographical. Such a perplexing definition does not help us understand what exactly memory is, and it fails to indicate that the question of the workings of memory lies not only in the scope of medicine (neuroscience in particular) and psychology (particularly the cognitive variety), but also philosophy, sociology, law, history, and literature, all of which have created numerous theories explaining how it works. In my paper, looking at memory from a socio-legal perspective, I hope not only to show exactly how it works in each and every one of us, but also to collate different hypotheses formed by the disciplines listed above, which are trying to explain the workings and the influence of memory on the world around us.