Съвременни разбирания за социалните и колективните репрезентации
Current understandings of social and collective representations

Summary/Abstract: Moscovic's "social representations" turn into a basic concept of the European social cognition mainline. They develop Durkheim's notion of collective representations, nevertheless, they have more limited and dynamic character. Collective representations embrace every kind of intellectual form — science, myth, religion, etc. Thus, they relate to social cognition shared by all members of society. On the other hand, social representations characterize the representational unity of separate groups within heterogeneous and diversified societies. It is suggested that social representations are much more appropriate for explaining social cognition phenomena in modern societies, where competitive and dynamic views prevail. Collective representations could only serve as an explanation of social phenomena in small, homogeneous and traditional societies, where they have been handed down to the next generations, as well as transformed into a stable framework of communal life. Thus, collective representations, as they have been defined by Durkheim, do not present a general category nowadays, but a separate level of social representations, since such entity and invariability of views have not existed even in communities, where tradition still prevails.

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