MEDIATION OF MEMORY: TOWARDS TRANSDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES IN CURRENT MEMORY STUDIES. PREFACE TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE … (original) (raw)
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2020
Is memory an example of successful adaptation among homo sapiens? – this hypothesis permeates the 40 chapters of the Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies. This volume edited by Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen approaches the field of memory studies from multiple perspectives, from sociology and philosophy to psychology and biology even. The book is divided into six parts, complemented with index, illustrations, all carefully edited. Part One presents a number of theories and perspectives. Here, main concepts of memory studies are discussed with the hindsight of several decades that have passed since they first stormed social sciences. Collective, communicative and cultural memory as well as their relation to history all receive attention there. Patrick H. Hutton's thorough analysis of Pierre Nora's 'sites of memory thirty years after' deserves special praise for its careful reconstruction of the process in which this concept arose, as well as for a succi...
Cultural memory studies : an international and interdisciplinary handbook
De Gruyter eBooks, 2008
Over the past two decades, the relationship between culture and memory has emerged in many parts of the world as a key issue of interdisciplinary research, involving fields as diverse as history, sociology, art, literary and media studies, philosophy, theology, psychology, and the neurosciences, and thus bringing tagether the humanities, social studies, and the natural sciences in a unique way. The importance of the nation of cultural mem ory is not only documented by the rapid growth, since the late 1980s, of publications on specific national, social, religious, or family memories, but also by a more recent trend, namely attempts to provide overviews of the state of the art in this emerging field and to synthesize different research traditions. Anthologies of theoretical texts, such as The Collective Memory Reader (Olick et al.), as weil as the launch of the new journal Memory Studies testify to the need to bring focus to this broad discussion and to consider the theoretical and methodological standards of a promising, but also as yet incoherent and dispersed field (cf. Olick; Radstone; Erll). The present handbook represents the shared effort of forty-one authors, all of whom have contributed over the past years, from a variety of disciplinary per spectives, to the development of this nascent field, and it is part of the effort to consolidate memory studies into a more coherent discipline. It is a first step on the road towards a conceptual foundation for the kind of memory studies which assumes a decidedly cultural and social perspective. "Cultural" (ar, if you will, "collective," "social") memory is certainly a multifarious nation, a term often used in an ambiguous and vague way. Media, practices, and structures as diverse as myth, monuments, historiog raphy, ritual, conversational rememberihg, configurations of cultural knowledge, and neuronal networks are nowadays subsumed under this wide umbrella term. Because of its intricacy, cultural memory has been a highly controversial issue ever since its very conception in Maurice Halbwachs's studies on memoire collective (esp. 1925, 1941, 1950). His con temporary Marc Bloch accused Halbwachs of simply transferring concepts from individual psychology to the level of the collective, and even today scholars continue to challenge the nation of collective or cultural memory, c1ai.ming, for example, that since we have well-established concepts like "myth," "tradition," and "individual memory," there is no need for a
2009
This text introduces students, scholars, and interested educated readers to the issues of human memory broadly considered, encompassing both individual memory, collective remembering by societies, and the construction of history. The book is organised around several major questions: How do memories construct our past? How do we build shared collective memories? How does memory shape history? This volume presents a special perspective, emphasising the role of memory processes in the construction of self-identity, of shared cultural norms and concepts, and of historical awareness. Although the results are fairly new and the techniques suitably modern, the vision itself is of course related to the work of such precursors as Frederic Bartlett and Aleksandr Luria, who in very different ways represent the starting point of a serious psychology of human culture.
Memory and History: An Introduction
Collective Memory and Collective Identity: Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History in Their Context, 2021
Memory and History: An Introduction "Collective memory" is one of the issues that has attracted the attention and discussion of scholars internationally across academic disciplines over the past five decades.1 The origin of its theoretical frameworks derives from pioneering works of great thinkers in the 19th century. Despite the fact that Émile Durkheim never utilized the expression "collective memory," he is regarded as the one who gave the foundation to the idea, specifying the social importance of remembrance in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim characterizes society as an objective reality that maintains "collective consciousness." For him, "collective consciousness" has an impact on individual consciousness.2 "Collective consciousness" is the supreme form of the psychological life, because it is "the consciousness of the consciousnesses."3 Durkheim asserts that being located outside of or above individual and local contingencies, the "collective consciousness" sees things through their perpetual and essential nature, which it shapes into transmittable ideas. On the other hand, Henri Bergson accentuates the subjective facets of time, perception, reality and memory when he writes: Memory actualized in an image differs, then, profoundly from pure memory. The image is a present state, and its sole share in the past is the memory from which it arose. Memory, on the contrary, powerless as long as it remains without utility, is pure from all admixture of sensation, is without attachment to the present, and is, consequently, unextended.4 One generation later, Maurice Halbwachs, who was a student of both Durkheim and Bergson, presented the term "collective memory" in a sociological context, employing it not only to allude to collective portrayals but also to indicate the 1 The literature that discusses "collective memory" is extensive. A few selected monographs should suffice to get a glimpse of the general situation in current scholarship: