Collective Remembering and the Making of Political Culture

James H. Liu is Professor of Psychology at Massey University, New Zealand. His research focuses on social, cross-cultural, and political psychology. He has been influential in the development of Asian social psychology, including an indigenous psychology of Confucianism, and he advocates for psychology as a human science.

• Part I. Introduction to Collective Remembering: 1. The rise of research on collective remembering; 2. Top-down approaches to collective remembering; 3. Bottom-up approaches to collective remembering; Part II. Developing a Theoretical Approach to Collective Remembering: 4. The organization of collective memory; 5. Social representations of world history as a symbolic resource: content informs process in future making; 6. Historiography and human agency: collective memory as history, and history in collective remembering; 7. A dialectical approach to collective remembering; Part III. Idiographic Case Studies of Collective Remembering: 8. China and the United States of America: going beyond the Thucydides trap; 9. Colonization and decolonization in Israel-Palestine and Aotearoa-New Zealand; 10. The COVID-19 pandemic and the reciprocal relationship between past, present, and future.

'Building on a lifetime of work, James Liu presents a penetrating exploration of the ways in which collective memories serve as symbolic resources for understanding and interpreting the complex world we live in. He carefully and insightfully demonstrates how the study of collective memory can help us understand the more perplexing crises of our day. A must-read for any student of collective memory, or, indeed, for anyone interested in history and politics.' William Hirst, Malcolm B. Smith Professor of Psychology, The New School for Social Research, USA