Contemporary history of Iran in the Iranian collective memory: A cross_ethnic study

The pressent paper investigates Iranian collective memory quantitatively and considers four social cadres of collective memory, namely ethnicity, generation, religion and education. Halbwach’s, Hobsbawm’s, and Ranger’s theories of social cadres of memory, Mannheim’s theory of generation and Schuman’s and Scott’s theory of education were used. Having considered the cross-ethnic character in this study, 384 samples from three capitals of provinces, Rasht (Gilan), Tabriz (East Azerbaijan) and Sanandaj (Kurdistan), were chosen by quota-hazard sampling. Results show that ethnicity as one of the social cadres is not so effective and collective memory among Iranians is more of national rather than ethnic issue. On the other hand, social cadres of religion, education and, specially, generation is highly capable of explaining the differences in Iranian collective memory.