How Societies Remember

Bibliographic Data

ID23398105
AuthorsPaul Connerton (0000-0001-9025-2946, corresponding author)
Year1989
Publication date1989-08-25
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueHow societies remember (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/cbo9780511628061
OpenAlexW2043488627
Open LibraryOL34449826M
ISBN9780511628061
LanguageEN
Citations received2.197

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.

Aesthetics · Art · Cognitive science · Epistemology · Focus (optics) · Inscribed figure · Linguistics · Metaphor · Performative utterance · Social memory · Sociology · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Psychology · Costume · Human body · Memory · Mind and body · Mind and body. 0 · Psychohistory · Psychological aspects · Psychological aspects of Costume · Psychological aspects of Rites and ceremonies · rites and ceremonies · Social aspects · Social aspects of Memory · Social psychology

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