Social or collective memories are no fixed entities: their content will change over time, because they are contingent on societal norms and power. As David Gross argues, society plays a powerful role in determining which values, facts, or historical events are worth being recalled and which are not. Secondly, society has a hand in shaping how information from he past is recalled, and, thirdly, society has a say in deciding the degree of emotional intensity to be attached to memories. And in most cases it is the state that decides on behalf of society, thus imposing state’s politics of memory.
Thus, “none of the features of social memory are themselves by any means free from power relations, pre-existing discursive formations, and the effects of strongly influential forces,” as Tanabe and Keyes write in a recent book about social memory in Thailand and Laos.