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| A REVIEW AND REVELATION ON MEMORY STUDIES OF FOREIGN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY |
| LI Yan-hui1, ZHU Hong1,2 |
1. School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China;
2. Geography School, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China |
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Abstract 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.
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Received: 10 June 2011
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2012, Vol. 27 
