Léthnologie

Léthnologie is a term sometimes used to describe an interdisciplinary approach to studying forgetting and memory within human cultures, drawing on elements of ethnology, memory studies, and related disciplines. The name combines léthe, the Greek root associated with forgetfulness, with the suffix -logie, meaning the study of. In some contexts, léthnologie is presented as a subfield or a cross-disciplinary perspective rather than a fully established discipline.

The scope of léthnologie includes cultural memory, collective forgetting, memory politics, and the ways in which archives, institutions, media, and technologies shape what communities remember or choose to forget. It considers rituals, commemorations, laws, and digital platforms as agents that preserve, erase, or transform memory. The field often emphasizes the social and political dimensions of memory, including how forgetting can be intentional, strategic, or involuntary.

Historically, léthnologie is not widely institutionalized in mainstream academia and appears mainly in philosophical discussions, speculative writing, and some regional scholarly debates. There is no universally agreed methodology or set of standards, which has limited its formal acceptance as a distinct scholarly field.

Methods associated with léthnologie typically include ethnographic fieldwork, discourse analysis, archival research, and digital humanities approaches to trace the trajectories of memory and forgetting across time and space. It often engages with related areas such as ethnology, anthropology, memory studies, and archival science while foregrounding forgetting as a phenomenon worthy of study in its own right.

Critical discussions of léthnologie highlight its potential to illuminate how societies govern memory and oblivion, but also point to definitional vagueness and risks of conflating memory with mere data retention. Proponents call for clearer concepts and rigorous methodologies to clarify the field’s scope and value.