Group Identity Formation

As with naming, another key aspect of group identity formation is its relationship to the past, through a historicizing and history-possession process of heritage, groups identify their common past, recent shared history, and employ historical narratives, shaped or selected to represent contemporary views, to bind their members and legitimate their existence by an appeal to tradition and the authority of pastness. Huyssen argues that museums, places of a group’s shared past or the past of others displayed in relation to the group, are a result of the rapid changes of modernity and the desire to anchor the chaotic present to the past (Huyssen 1995). The displays of objects no longer in use are arranged, categorized, labeled, and exhibited
In the present, these terms swim in a self-congratulatory swamp of collective memory” (Lowenthal 1994:41). It is the collective remembrance of the past, owned in part or in whole by the community or group as an icon of their identity, which delineates heritage from history and history from collective memory. Although history is as interpretive as memory, filtered through the lens of the historian, and by this I do not disparage history or memory as false, simply understood as discussed with influenced by the present set of knowledge and values, history is granted an impersonal flavor of investigation without emotional investment. Heritage and collective memory, conversely, are saturated with emotional investment. As pivotal elements of collective identity, which is then part of a personal identity, the past represented in collective memory and heritage is the past-as-self for the group and the individual. Wrongs and atrocities in the collective memory are not just details, they are wrongs committed against the group, even if no members were alive to experience the event. So too are the occurrences of tragedy, triumph, and even shame. Reinterpretation of the past can force a reinterpretation of identity, potentially threatening the group or