Collective memory and the uses of the past
Earlier this month, I went to a fascinating, interdisciplinary conference on "Collective memory and the uses of the past", organised by a team around Andy Wood at the School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. The full programme is available here (text file).
I was one of only a handful of archaeologists there. No single discipline dominated, in fact everybody seemed to enjoy genuinely the encounter with representatives of other disciplines: historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, politologists, representatives of literary studies, area studies, etc.
The international conference illustrated to what extent the themes of "collective memory" and "the uses of the past" have been en vogue in a wide range of social sciences and humanities for some time. For the papers assembled in Norwich were, on the whole, not unpolished explorations of a new subject entering academia but instead mature discussions of case-studies in an already well-established field.
My full report has been published on the blog of the European Journal of Archaeology available here.