记忆是当前西方人文社会科学的一个重要概念。记忆是与时间和空间密不可分的,空间是承载记忆的容器。二战以来,西方社会文化史家从时间的角度对记忆进行了大量研究。21世纪以来,关于记忆的研究也日益成为西方人文地理学者关注的领域。本文是对国外(主要是欧美)人文地理学者关于记忆研究的文献回顾,文章首先对记忆的相关概念进行阐释,然后从研究方法和研究主题的角度探讨了国外记忆地理的研究进展,探讨了国外人文地理学者关于记忆的研究内容以及对国内研究的借鉴与启示。总体来看,地理学的记忆研究还未形成固定的范式,研究的内容和方法体系都有待进一步完善。

Memory has clearly become a central concept in the humanities and the social sciences of western countries. Memory is inextricably linked with time and space, and space is the container of memory. Since the World War II, social and cultural historians in the western world have been done a lot of research on this topic. It is obvious that space is a key component of memory formation. Science 2000, research on memory has become an area focused by human geographers in western world. This paper is a review of this geographical literature. First, we summarize the general situation of memory studies, such as the theoretical origins and the academic platform, and focus on the contributions of discipline of human geography. Second, we discuss the progress in memory studies from the view of research methods and topics. Third, we try to give some advices for domestic research. We find that there are four important topics in the western literatures. That is memories of war (especially the World War I and the World War II), Civil Rights Memorials, memory of Holocaust and the memorials of mid and west European in the post-socialist time. We also find that interpretativism and constructivism are their philosophical basis. The dynamic, openness and competitiveness meanings of the memorial landscape and memory space are the core concern of the western human geographers. In a word, memory study has not yet formed a fixed paradigm, and systematic research contents and methods are to be further improved. For the domestic research, we can explore the Nanjing Massacre, the commemorative street names, the Wenchuan Earthquake and so on, using the method of memory study. The limits of this paper lie in the following two aspects. First, the related literatures of domestic history, anthropology, sociology and other disciplines are not included. Second, the problem of localization of western memory theory is not take into consideration.