How Societies RememberIn 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. |
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actions activity Aeschylus amnesia behaviour bodily practices body Cambridge celebration characteristic clothing cognitive memory commemorative ceremonies consciously context conveyed and sustained cultural distinction Edmund Leach everyday experience explicit explicitly expressed fact festivals formal French Revolution gestural habit habit-memory Halbwachs hand hermeneutics historians Hitler Youth identity images incorporating practices individual inscription interpretation invented kind king language legal humanists liturgical language liturgy London mandura Marcel Masada matricide Maurice Halbwachs meaning mémoire memory claims mental mnemonic modern movements Muslim myth mythic material narrative National object oral organised particular past performance Performative Utterances person possible posture present principle Proust Psychoanalysis question re-enactment recall recollection recurrent reference regicide religions remember repeated repetition representation rites ritual Roman Law rules sacred Saint-Loup sense sequence social memory society Sophocles speech acts structure symbolic things tradition utterance verbal Winch words writing