History as the narrative of a people: From function to structure and content

Abstract

We summarize our perspective on social representations of history first presented by Liu and Hilton and extended in later publications. We situate our functional approach in the context of contemporary social psychological approaches to intergroup relations, particularly realistic conflict theory, social identity theory, and the literature on social cognition/stereotypes. We note that this approach leads us to analyze social representations of events and people as narratives, with properties of verisimilitude rather than factuality often governing their acceptability. We highlight the moral functions of historical figures for a group, as well as the lessons (schemas) afforded by historical events, and analyze history as a symbolic reserve for constructing social identities with historical narratives. We review evidence supporting our functional analysis of the group functions of social representations of history and focus on the “charters” that sometimes form the core of these representations. We identify future challenges, in particular the need to better understand how to characterize the narrative structure and elements of social representations of history.

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