Social amnesia is a collective forgetting by a group of people. The concept is often cited in relation to

Russell Jacoby Russell Jacoby (born April 23, 1945) is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), an author and a critic of academic culture. His fields of interest are twentieth-century European and American intellectual and cul ...

's scholarship from the 1970s. Social amnesia can be a result of "forcible repression" of memories,

ignorance Ignorance is a lack of knowledge and understanding. The word "ignorant" is an adjective that describes a person in the state of being unaware, or even cognitive dissonance and other cognitive relation, and can describe individuals who are unaware o ...

, changing circumstances, or the forgetting that comes from changing interests.David Rothenberg, Marta Ulvaeus
The new earth reader
the best of Terra Nova page 57, 74 Protest, folklore, "local memory", and collective nostalgia are counter forces that combat social amnesia. Social amnesia is a subject of discussion in

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

and among some

political activist A political movement is a collective attempt by a group of people to change government policy or social values. Political movements are usually in opposition to an element of the status quo, and are often associated with a certain ideology. Some t ...

s. In the U.S., social amnesia has been said to reflect "the tendency of American

penology Penology (from "penal", Latin ''poena'', "punishment" and the Greek suffix '' -logia'', "study of") is a sub-component of criminology that deals with the philosophy and practice of various societies in their attempts to repress criminal activities ...

to ignore history and

precedent A precedent is a principle or rule established in a previous legal case that is either binding on or persuasive for a court or other tribunal when deciding subsequent cases with similar issues or facts. Common-law legal systems place great valu ...

when responding to the present or informing the future... discarded ideas are repackaged; meanwhile, the expectations for these practices remain the same." Fits of social amnesia after difficult or trying periods can sometimes cover up the past, and fading memories can actually make mythologies transcend by keeping them "impervious to challenge". Historian

Guy Beiner Guy Beiner (born in 1968 in Jerusalem) is an Israeli historian of the late-modern period. He was formerly a full professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel. In September 2021, he was named the Sullivan Chair in Irish ...

opted to use the term social forgetting and has shown that under scrutiny this is rarely a condition of total collective oblivion but rather a more complex dynamic of tensions between public forgetting and the persistence of private recollections, which can at times resurface and receive recognition and at other times are suppressed and hidden.

In biology

Another meaning of social amnesia has been studied in

biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...

among mice whose sense of smell is the primary means of social interaction.Mahlon B. Hoagland, Bert Dodson, Judith Hauc
Exploring the way life works
the science of biology page 173 It is affected by oxytocin, and mice without the gene to produce that brain protein are said to suffer from "social amnesia" and an inability to recognize "familiar" mice." The role of oxytocin in the

amygdala The amygdala (; plural: amygdalae or amygdalas; also '; Latin from Greek, , ', 'almond', 'tonsil') is one of two almond-shaped clusters of nuclei located deep and medially within the temporal lobes of the brain's cerebrum in complex verteb ...

in facilitating social recognition and bonding as well as how oxytocin receptor antagonists might induce social amnesia has also been investigated.Social Amnesia in mice lacking the oxytocin gene. Nature genetics, 25, 284-285 Francis, DD, Champagne, FC & Meaney, MJ (2000)

In biology

See also

References

Further reading