We all know that in many human groups people have created a particular version of their own collective past, represented by most members in roughly similar ways, and passed on from generation to generation. So far so good. But how does that occur?

Vague notions, especially when they seem profound and richly evocative, often stand in the way of precise empirical investigation. That is a common occurrence in the social and behavioral sciences, and nowhere is a warning against such seductive concepts more apposite than in the study of shared memories and the collective past. It is not clear in precisely what manner the notion of “collective memory” helps us make sense of how people create distinctive versions of their collective past and come to share these versions. The metaphor is not just unclear but also misleading, as James Wertsch points out (this volume). First, talking about memory rather than remembering obscures the fact that there are agents here, people who actively listen, select, modify, or rigidify particular versions of their past. Second, it also blurs the functions of such memories, which are not about the past but emphatically about present interests and conflicts. This marks the simplest contrast between scholarly history and collective remembering – the latter has an agenda rather than a method, particular goals but no explicit standards (Wertsch, 2002). The process of construction, as in the case of individual memories, is largely implicit.

“Collective memory” is a term that appears frequently in the media and everyday conversation. We use it when talking about the causes of ethnic violence and geopolitical miscalculation, political leaders invoke it in times of crisis, and it is behind massive expenditures on museums and holidays. In general, it is hard to go more than a few days without encountering the notion somewhere, but when we try to say just what collective memory is, we realize how little we understand about its workings.

Despite – or perhaps because of – this conceptual muddle, a renewed “memory industry” (Klein, 2000) has sprung up over the past two decades. The open-ended nature of this enterprise is reflected in the plethora of terms that can be found in writings on the topic, terms such as “public memory” (Bodnar, 1992), “social memory” (Burke, 1989; Connerton, 1989), “cultural memory” (Berliner, 2005), “bodily memory” (Young, 1996), “historical consciousness” (Seixas, 2004), and “mnemonic battles” (Zerubavel, 2003).

Part of the difficulty in bringing together all these strands of inquiry stems from the number of disciplines involves. The list includes anthropology (Berliner, 2005; Cole, 2001), history (Novick, 1999), psychology (Pennebaker, Paez, & Rimé, 1997), and sociology (e.g., Schuman, Schwartz, & D'Arcy, 2005). Further complications arise from the fact that collective memory can be at the center of debates – often quite heated – in the public arena and popular media where little attention is given to clear definitions.

L. S. Vygotsky was an early twentieth-century Russian psychologist whose writing exerts a significant influence on the development of social theory in the early years of the twenty-first century. The greater part of his legacy was produced in the 10 years that preceded his death in 1934. It now influences a wide range of disciplines and professions. His nondeterministic, nonreductionist account of the formation of mind provides current theoretical developments with a broadly drawn, yet very powerful sketch of the ways in which humans shape and are shaped by social, cultural, and historical conditions.

As David Bakhurst notes in Chapter 2, Vygotsky insisted that in order to understand the mature human mind, we must comprehend the processes from which it emerges. These ideas were originally forged at a time of rapid and intense social upheaval following the Russian Revolution. They were developed by a scholar who was charged with developing a state system for the education of “pedagogically neglected” children (Yaroshevsky, 1989, p. 96). This group included the homeless, of which there were a very large number. Thus, he was working at a time of profound social change (which was influenced by the Soviet adaptation of Marxist theory to social and political practice) and also working with a group of people who had profoundly different cultural experiences from “mainstream” members of society. He sought ways of intervening in the lives of these young people that would either compensate for or ameliorate their experience of marginalization. Consequently, it is, in some way, unsurprising that he should have attempted to develop a theory of social, cultural, and historical formation of the human mind.

Mediation is a theme that runs throughout the writings of Lev Semënovich Vygotsky. In his view, a hallmark of human consciousness is that it is associated with the use of tools, especially “psychological tools” or “signs.” Instead of acting in a direct, unmediated way in the social and physical world, our contact with the world is indirect or mediated by signs. This means that understanding the emergence and the definition of higher mental processes must be grounded in the notion of mediation.

Mediation also provides the foundation for another of Vygotsky's theoretical goals, namely, building a link between social and historical processes, on the one hand, and individuals' mental processes, on the other. It is because humans internalize forms of mediation provided by particular cultural, historical, and institutional forces that their mental functioning sociohistorically situated.

The importance that Vygotsky attached to mediation is reflected in a lecture he delivered near the end of his life, where he asserted, “A central fact of our psychology is the fact of mediation [oposredovanie]” (Vygotsky, 1982, p. 166). But this is an issue that concerned him from the beginning of his career onward. In a 1930 report on “The Instrumental Method in Psychology,” for example, he focused on the importance of signs as “artificial formations . . . [that] are social, not organic or individual” (Vygotsky, 1981, p. 137) and he included under this heading: “language; various systems for counting; mnemonic techniques; algebraic symbol systems; works of art; writing; schemes, diagrams, maps, and mechanical drawings; all sorts of conventional signs” (Vygotsky, 1981, p. 137).