Social memory and decolonial challenges: reflections from a study on representations of historical personalities in Brazil and Portugal

In this paper, we aim to reflect on social memory and the decolonial challenges of the present by analysing a study on representations of historical personalities carried out in Brazil and Portugal. We conducted a survey in which participants were asked to freely evoke people or groups they considered to be the most important in national history, and to what extent they considered their impact on the country to be positive or negative. 260 people took part: 96 Brazilians (M= 34.6; SD = 11.8), mostly men (55.2%) and 164 Portuguese (M= 19.92; SD = 2.66), mostly women (78%). Among the results, we observed that there was not a single woman – androcentrism -among the 10 most evoked personalities in each country. We also observed a focus on politics, with an emphasis on individual agency to the detriment of collective agency – solipsism. This is particularly evident in the data collected in Portugal, where the emphasis is on kings, rulers, navigators and writers. Personalities associated with the ‘Discoveries’ were frequent, but there was almost no mention of personalities related to decolonisation. In the data from Brazil, on the other hand, ‘Indigenous’ and ‘Afro-descendants’ were among the most evoked. We discussed the implications of ‘rememberings’ and ‘forgettings’ for social memory and the decolonisation of thought as a crucial and particularly challenging task.

Reference:

Lins, L., Cabecinhas, R., Lima, M. E. O., Valentim, J. P., & Techio, E. M. (2025). Memória social e desafios decoloniais: reflexões a partir de um estudo sobre representações de personalidades históricas no Brasil e em Portugal. Revista Interamericana de Psicología/Interamerican Journal of Psychology, 59, e2020-e2020. https://doi.org/10.30849/ripijp.v59(2025).e2020