Paper long abstract:

The increasing of a memory culture related to dramatic events such as the wars, the genocides, and colonization is one of the great characteristics of our current modernity. Since the work of memory cannot existe without intersubjective exchanges, this paper introduces in the study of memory the concept of « social acting » created by Weber. The intention is to point out the plurality of the practices that feed the various forms of socio-memorial movements. The goal is also to highlight the forms of the creativity intervening in the raising memorial effervescence, and the major social importance that the cultural, artistic and pedagogical activities take in the current culture of memory . This anthropological approach is based on participating observations carried out for more than twenty years in various countries in Western, Central and Baltic Europe, in the U.S., and Israël. That, in the memorial context of the Second World War and of the genocides against the Jews and the Tsiganes. Ethnographical fieldwork was also carried out in France and in the Island La Reunion in the Indian Ocean concerning specifically the history and the memory of French colonization.