Non-memory

Remembering beyond the discursive and the symbolic

Bibliographic Data

ID12905149
AuthorsRoma Sendyka (0000-0001-7647-2002, Jagiellonian University, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume15
Issue3
Pages523-538
Publication date2022-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMemory Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1750-6980 • E-ISSN: 1750-6999
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/17506980221085528
OpenAlexW4281734217
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited46

Central and Eastern Europe—scenes of brutal genocides in the past century—are dotted with sites of trauma. Only some of those potential sites of memory are currently marked with plaques or memorials. Mnemonic responses to such sites do occur but are not part of an easily readable symbolic system within official culture. They are often contradictory: at once supporting and blocking memory about a given event. The concept of “non-memory” developed by Polish sociologists might be helpful in grasping vernacular memorial activities that do not privilege verbal contact as the norm in the transfer of memory. Non-memory tends to combine dismantled symbolic means and extra-symbolic embodied tools and performative acts. Non-memory therefore takes part in the transmission of an experience of the past in particular when the past turns out to be difficult or impossible to inscribe within available cognitive frameworks

Aesthetics · Art · Cognition · Cognitive psychology · Cognitive science · Collective memory · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Mnemonic · Performative utterance · Psychoanalysis · Recall · Repetition (rhetorical device · Symbolic communication · The Symbolic · Vernacular · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Neuroscience · Philosophy · Polish-Jewish Holocaust Memory Studies · Psychology

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Open DOIOpen Access