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Social amnesia, or collective amnesia, is the act of collectively forgetting things or failing to perform due to shared forgetfulness. The concept is often cited in relation to Russell Jacoby's scholarship from the 1970s. Social amnesia can be a result of "forcible repression" of memories, ignorance, changing circumstances, or the forgetting that comes from changing interests.Michael J. Dear, Allen John Scott Urbanization and urban planning in capitalist society page 555David Rothenberg, Marta Ulvaeus The new earth reader: the best of Terra Nova page 57, 74 Protest, folklore, "local memory", and collective nostalgia are counter forces that combat social amnesia.
Social amnesia is a subject of discussion in psychology and among some political activists. In the U.S., social amnesia has been said to reflect "the tendency of American penology to ignore history and precedent when responding to the present or informing the future... discarded ideas are repackaged; meanwhile, the expectations for these practices remain the same."Thomas G. Blomberg, Karol Lucken American penology: a history of control page 223
Fits of social amnesia after difficult or trying periods can sometimes cover up the past, and fading memories can actually make mythologies transcend by keeping them "impervious to challenge". Joe L. Kincheloe, William Pinar Curriculum as social psychoanalysis: the significance of place
Historian Guy Beiner opted to use the term social forgetting and has shown that under scrutiny this is rarely a condition of total collective oblivion but rather a more complex dynamic of tensions between public forgetting and the persistence of private recollections, which can at times resurface and receive recognition and at other times are suppressed and hidden.Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford University Press, 2018).
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