NATURE OF MEMORY STUDIES, PERSONAL OR CULTURAL?

The magnitude of memory as an essential faculty of human beings was understood and admired from ancient times; later it was considered to be one of the most significant gifted abilities of man that could gratify the personal demands of the individual, as well as the requisites of society, in capturing past events and creating an authentic version of it. In recent studies, memory has emerged from the personal, individual realm and has converted into a collective and social matter, articulated by cultural agreements. Thus, like each discursive discipline, memory becomes the site of constitution, disjunction and allusion to past, bundled up with pleasure, desire and power, in order to make coherent and reasonable narratives that are determined by socio- cultural paradigms of a society. Accordingly, the existence of personal and subjective memories is an illusion and even the most private recalling of past events is articulated by social frameworks. This investigation is an analysis of the nature of memory that actualizes it from personal domains to cultural areas of interest.