Product Description

In treating memory as a cultural rather than an individual faculty, this book provides an account of how bodily practices are transmitted in, and as, traditions. Most studies of memory as a cultural faculty focus on written, or inscribed transmissions of memories. Paul Connerton, on the other hand, concentrates on bodily (or incorporated) practices, and so questions the currently dominant idea that literary texts may be taken as a metaphor for social practices generally. The author argues that images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by ritual performances and that performative memory is bodily. Bodily social memory is an essential aspect of social memory, but it is an aspect which has until now been badly neglected. An innovative study, this work should be of interest to researchers into social, political and anthropological thought as well as to graduate and undergraduate students.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #123955 in Books
• Published on: 1989-11-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 121 pages

Customer Reviews

Communal ways of knowing
Connerton's thesis about the communal/social aspects of memory prompted me to recall the proposed research project of a friend of mine in a doctoral programme, dealing with aspects of received knowledge of children - how do children of each successive generation, across social classes and often across cultural divides, seem to know certain things that are not taught to them by adults, particularly as adults seem to have forgotten these things themselves, but that are known by other children. How is this collective childhood body of knowledge maintained and continued without any formalised structure of preservation or transmission? This type of question can have relevance toward many types of study.

Connerton's distinction between social memory and historical reconstruction is an important one. We might know the factual (or, at least, the conjectured factual) details of lost cultures and societies, but their social memory is, by virtue of their disappearance, inaccessible to us, save in the possible elements that have been continued in present cultures or societies. However, I am not sure I can subscribe to Connerton's complete application of the principle of historical reconstruction being necessarily removed from social memory. Connerton writes, `A historically tutored memory is opposed to an unreflective traditional memory.' (p. 16) We none of us operate as pure historical reconstructionists; our social memory influences even the manner in which we pursue an historical memory; surely there is a cross-influence as work as some level (and perhaps often different levels).

Connerton works with distinctions: distinctions between myths and rites; distinctions between gestures referential and notational; distinctions between rites as symbolic, rites as quasi-textual, rites only in context; distinctions between literate and oral cultures and cultural aspects. However, it is in the blending of these elements that most of life is lived. For instance, Connerton states:

`The impact of writing on social memory is much written about and evidently vast. The transition from an oral culture to a literate culture is a transition from incorporating practices to inscribing practices.' (p. 75)

However, our culture is not an exclusively literate culture; it has not become a non-oral culture. Perhaps the most non-oral, literacy-dependent aspect of modern culture and information/learning transmission is the advent of the internet, yet even here, the trend even in the infancy of the internet is toward an incorporation of oral aspects - from examining aspects as formal as those internet teaching methods that are most effective to as simple an analysis of which websites are most popular, those which are text-only seem to be less effective and have less impact, whereas those which have `multi-media' elements (voice, music, etc.) are more effective.

Still, one must not neglect the very different character of certain kinds of information. Particularly when examining the past, the difference between oral-based cultures and oral/literate cultures (there have been no exclusively literate-based cultures in history), the kind of history formed, maintained and transmitted is different.

`The oral history of subordinate groups will produce another type of history: one in which not only will most of the details be different, but in which the very construction of meaningful shapes will obey a different principle.' (p. 19)

One of the difficulties with much religious study (which is the lens through which I approach this work) is the problem of dealing in a predominantly literate way with cultural aspects that were originally oral. This is true even of those groups that arise in a culture with literate base - groups may have foundational documents (a literate device), but the formulation of those foundational documents is often an oral recollection, rarely committed to paper, and even if such deliberations are committed to paper, such as gets recorded is selectively chosen, and important elements are frequently omitted.