Jeffrey K Olick

Collective Memory

Olick’s work has played a major role in reviving the concept of "collective memory." As Olick and his colleagues have documented, the concept has a long history, but is most commonly traced back to Maurice Halbwachs, a student of Émile Durkheim. Olick’s early work sought to transcend debates between instrumentalist and functionalist approaches to memory, positing instead that collective memory is an ongoing process of meaning-making through time.

His empirical work focuses on Holocaust memory in postwar Germany, tracing the ways in which state leaders grapple with the difficult legacy of the Nazi past. He not only traces representations of the Holocaust in state rhetoric, but also builds on Mikhail Bakhtin to develop a dialogical approach to memory by examining the ways in which later moments in the discourse respond to earlier moments. In other words, commemorations are not merely discrete events, but instead attempts to come to terms with the past that are "structured in dialogue with each other and with the past," in which speakers draw upon the limited set of symbolic and rhetorical "resources...at their disposal." As Olick puts it: "Combining insights from the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin and from Karl Marx, I was motivated by the analytical principle that people do things with words, but not in circumstances of their own choosing."

At a theoretical level, one of Olick’s key contributions within memory studies is the distinction between "collective" and "collected" memory. While studies of "collected" memory examine "the aggregated individual memories of members of a group," studies of "collective" memory turn to "collective phenomena sui generis"--representations of the past that exist outside the confines of individual minds (e.g., memorials, speeches).

Historically, Olick identifies a shift in the underlying principles of political legitimation on the global stage. While state rhetoric once overwhelmingly focused on heroic commemorations of glorious pasts, states now increasingly must confront their own atrocities and misdeeds in order to establish or maintain legitimacy. Olick refers to this transformation as the rise of the "politics of regret."

Cultural Sociology and Sociological Theory

Olick is also a key figure in contemporary cultural sociology and sociological theory. His work on collective memory has been integral in the turn toward structuralist, hermeneutic, and semiotic approaches within the sociological study of culture. Such perspectives reject the tendency to conceptualize culture in subjective terms, arguing instead that culture ought to be understood as inter-subjective or objective. Taking inspiration from these perspectives, but also moving beyond them, Olick draws on Mikhail Bakhtin, Norbert Elias, and Pierre Bourdieu to formulate a "process-relational" approach to culture. Collective representations, he suggests, must not be reified or hypostatized, but instead seen as processes structured through ongoing practices.

Olick’s translations of Theodor W. Adorno’s Group Experiment and Guilt and Defense (with Andrew Perrin) have not only made this material available to English-speaking readers for the first time, but also complicated and challenged received narratives about Adorno’s relationship to empirical sociology. Thus, these works have significant implications for both intellectual history and sociological theory.

Translations of Olick's work have appeared in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Italian, Spanish, Estonian, Hungarian, Polish, and Russian.

Books

Translations

Articles and Book Chapters