The role of historical memory in the formation of group identity of imagined communities

The paper focuses on the importance of historiography in the formation of the identity of imagined communities — “we-groups” — through the conceptualization and standardization of ideas about the past. We investigated the question of how historiographic concepts are used to determine the boundaries of a group and the self-identification of its members. Furthermore, we analyzed the phenomenon of historical memory, whose distinguishing feature is the appeal to mythological images and mutually exclusive interpretations of the same events of the past for different communities. Historical memory acts as an ideologically determined model of the past and serves as the basis for justifying the claims of this “we-group” in the present.

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