Vázquez and Muñoz displace memory from the model of individual storage toward an account of remembering as social action. Their key proposition is that the past is not simply retained and retrieved; it is reconstructed through language, interaction, artefacts, institutions and present concerns. The distinction between “social” and “collective” memory becomes analytically productive because it forces the question of how a collectivity can remember without being reduced to an aggregate of individual brains. Methodologically, the chapter moves from conventional psychological treatments of memory toward constructionist and discursive approaches, emphasising shared meanings and the practical consequences of versions of the past. Remembering and forgetting are therefore not neutral cognitive operations but ways of organising responsibility, continuity and possible action. The chapter bridges social psychology with historiography, memory studies and public culture. Its strongest implication is that identity depends on temporal infrastructures: groups and persons become intelligible by sustaining narratives of continuity whose form is negotiated in the present.
