The Importance of National Museums in Preserving Collective Memory

Abstract

Research into memory, which has been carried out in recent decades by researchers in the fields of social sciences and humanities, is also important in the field of museology. Museums collect objects that, at the time of transition, lose their original function they have in previous everyday life and acquire a new one. Objects are generators of memory, and memory works through objects. However, the stories of individual objects are necessarily less comprehensive than stories that are made up of broader semantic wholes. At some stage of the narrative a transition from the collection of individual memories or memories of individuals to a wider whole appears – a collective memory. It is not composed of a multitude of individual memories, but is processed and transformed into a whole that corresponds a particular community. Memory is connected with time, and individual memories are fixed at the points of collective time. Museums are creators of collective memory. Collective memory is connected with the concepts of historical memory, (cultural) heritage and witnessing. The collective memory generated by objects creates an identity. This can be created at every level, from personal to local, from regional to national. Structuring a particular past has an extremely important role in structuring identity. The concepts of memory, heritage, witnessing and history in the field of cultural heritage refer to national museums in the purest form. Each national museum is a guardian, researcher and promoter of a professionally and scientifically transformed collective memory, and thus a constitutive element of national consciousness.

Keywords

• national museums
• memory
• heritage