Contenu du sommaire : Générations et mémoires

A. Belden Fields, The Problem of Generation» as Seen by Mentré, Ortega and Mannheim François Mentré was the first to write an intellectual history of the notion of generation. For him, a generation reveals a collective mentality, an unique way to feel and understand life. For Ortega y Gasset, generations are rather a reflection of a universal need for change. He isolated five stages in the life of human beings : childhood, youth, initiation to adulthood, dominance and old age. In contrast to Mentré, Ortega sees generations as transnational phenomena. Karl Mannheim is the most rigorous theorist of generation, as he employs the concept of situation in order to elucidate the complexity of its formation.

Nia Perivolaropoulou, Socio-Historical Time and Generations in the World of Karl Mannheim A re-reading of Karl Mannheim's classic work on the question of generations allows a consideration of the relations between historical time and the phenomenon of generations. Generations appear to be temporal modalities characteristic of modern societies and their appearance as a contemporary historical process of the rise of modernity.

Bennett Berger, Generations, Politics and Culture : The 1960s in the United States The notion of generation is not as useful in the analysis of social movements as that of generational unit. Generational units are formed out of the ranks of the elites of a particular age group ; they then compete in the formation of generational identity. The confusion between age cohorts and the effects they produce has been caused in part by neo-freudians like Erik Erikson and Kenneth Keniston who celebrated youth and stages of human development. In doing so they tended to reinforce the existing tendency to pander to an already privileged age group.

René Galissot, Generations without Memory Throughout the Nineteenth-Century, the formation of identifiable generations seems to have been linked to specific moments in the development of the nation state. Even when generational movements were expressions of an identification with the cause of the People as the collective subject of history, the experience was still bounded by a certain conception of the nation. More recently, however, and especially beginning with May 1968, the nation as an important component of memory seems to be lacking. It appears that identification with territory or a centralized national culture has been considerably weakened. We may be entering a period when the idea of generation takes precedent over those of "blood", family and nation.

Patrizia Dogliani, Twentieth-Century Generations and Revolts in Italian Historiography The themes of youth and generation are recent ones for the social sciences in Italy and there is still little interaction between historians, sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists in their study. Still, historians have placed the problem of generations in perspective, especially in relation to labor movements, to leisure and sports and to the emergence of fascism. However, in Italy as elsewhere, historians have not yet given the movement of May 1968 the degree of attention the development merits.

Claire Auzias, Political Generations Are political generations historical spaces of memory and forgetting ? Far from being a simple aspect of years of crisis, the social act of forgetting has a long history of political practice. Political generations are themselves the products of memory and forgetfulness.

Alain Maillard, The Communist Generation of 1840 and the Memory of Gracchus Babeuf The emergence of a communist movement in 1840 is in part linked to the generational situation of neo-babeufist theorists of the time. The intervention of Buonarroti, the executor of Babeuf's legacy, was decisive during their years of intellectual and political formation. As young romantic revolutionaries, they learned that regeneration must be the work of their generation. But the work of memory does not only allow an orientation in time, it helps the young generation to define its identity in political space as it differentiates itself from competing forces. In this way the conflict between Cabet and the neo-babeufists was a generational conflict.

Jean-Claude Caron, Romanticism and Generation The notion of generation is particularly useful in the historical analysis of the nineteenth century. The role of historians of romanticism will be important in determining the relation between youth and generation. The notion of generation indicates how a value-transfer has taken place from the private sphere (the family) to the public sphere (politics).

Alain Monchablon, The Student Movement and Its Memory : The UNEF after 1945 between Tradition and Loss of Memory There are student generations, but is there any transmission of memory between them ? The historical experience of the UNEF, the oldest and most important student organization in France, seems to indicate that there is no such active transmission of memory, but only the perpetuating of a kind of social heredity.

Yolande Cohen, May 1968 : The Student Movement as a Generational Movement ? The history of the student protest movement suggests a generational analysis. The events of May 1968 were the starting point of such an interpretation which deals both with a generational upheaval and the perspective of establishing the student movement as an autonomous one. An overview of the studies devoted to the 1960s shows how little is said about such a movement. Linked to the emancipation of the working class, or considered as a revolt of the affluent, the student protest is rarely studied as such ; which explains the relative success of its interpretation as a generational phenomenon.

Larry Portis, On "Postmodernist" Social Theory : Generation Gap, Epistemological Break and Historical Crisis The new perspectives called "postmodernist" and the methodologies called "deconstructionist" have not generally considered the question of generational change. This silence is understandable in terms of the social perceptions shared by the first generation of social thinkers of the postwar period who came of age during the 1960s. It is in terms of social perceptions and how political events structured them that recent tendencies in the evolution of social theory must be understood.

Abdelmalek Sayad, Generation among "Immigrant" Generations In addition to the age factor and the way in which the passage of time and history can be seen as a succession of generations, the concept of generation must also be thought of as a mode of classification that is necessarily contested. Immigration poses a question of generation that is special in that it, firstly, involves the addition of an external factor in the evolution of a society and, secondly, involves the creation of a new type of generational identification within that society. The social milieu of immigrants therefore represents a laboratory where all the latent meanings engendered by the relationships between the individuals and the group and between the different generations may be studied.

Marie-Christine Anest Couffin, Mythical Time and the Egg in the Greek popular calendar The ritual use of the egg in the Greek holiday calendar is associated with the cyclical dimension of a highly-charged-sense of time. The festive days of Spring represent the tradition between the Winter and Summer seasons and symbolize the abolition of time and regeneration. Socially, it is the time of the regeneration of the individual and of the group. In this calendar-time-space, the egg plays a fundamental role in symbolizing the passage from one state to another.