Collective memory and social movements LORENZO ZAMPONI The widespread interest in the processes of construction of collective identities, typical of the most recent scholarship on social move- ments (Polletta & Jasper 2001), focusing on the symbolic dimension of collective action, has been the bridge across which collective memory entered the study of social movements. In this context, memory studies, and in par- ticular the sociology of memory based on the seminal work of Maurice Halbwachs, have become a fundamental tool for the develop- ment of research on social movements. This relationship also works the other way around: scholarship on contentious politics has been a model for the study of contention in the memory field (Jansen 2007). The definition of collective memory as the set of symbols and practices referring to the past which are shared by a community of people, commonly used by most scholars (Kansteiner 2002; Aguilar 2008), has required researchers to face the problem of pluralism: different com- munities refer to different sets of symbols and practices, and the same individual can belong to more than one group, developing a multi- level identity based on different mnemonic practices. This line of work has challenged the common-sense idea of a unique shared mem- ory linked to national identity, and has put together a set of definitions able to account for the intrinsic pluralism of memory. Thus, collective memory is now defined as the mem- ory shared by a community or a group, social memory as the memory spread across the entire society, and public memory as that part of the latter which refers to the public sphere (Jed- lowski 2007). The study of collective memory has been characterized by two main approaches: the The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, Edited by David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam.  2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbespm040 individualistic perspective, based on psychol- ogy, that considers collective memory to be an “aggregation of socially framed individ- ual memories” and focuses on “neurological and cognitive factors,” and the collectivis- tic perspective, rooted in the Durkheimian sociological tradition, that “refers to collec- tive phenomena sui generis” and emphasizes “the social and cultural patternings of pub- lic and personal memory” (Olick 1999: 333). This distinction between collected and collective memory is based on “two radically different concepts of culture”: “one that sees culture as a subjective category of meanings contained in people’s minds versus one that sees cul- ture as patterns of publicly available symbols objectified in society” (Olick 1999: 336). The contemporary sociology of memory is, for the most part, rooted in the Durkheimian perspective started by Halbwachs, focusing on “public discourses about the past as wholes” and on “narratives and images of the past that speak in the name of collectivities,” in order to resist the temptation of methodological indi- vidualism and “sociobiological reductionism” and to defend the relevance of the historical context (Olick 1999: 345). Nevertheless, there is an increasing interest in the effort to com- bine the two approaches in the construction of a new “historical sociology of mnemonic prac- tices” (Olick & Robbins 1998: 105), able to take into account both public and private contexts and factors. This debate, situated in the so-called “new political culture” perspective, which calls for a new interest in the role of culture in politics and in particular in the “symbolic structuring of political discourse” (Olick 1999: 337), echoes the topics of the cultural turn in social movement studies, and the interest in the sym- bolic construction of conflict. Some scholars, for example, have recently pointed out the role of external cultural factors in structuring the symbolic environment in which the collective