Recent work in cognitive psychology and social cognition bears heavily on concerns of sociologists of culture. Cognitive research confirms views of culture as fragmented; clarifies the roles of institutions and agency; and illuminates supraindividual aspects of culture. Individuals experience culture as disparate bits of information and as schematic structures that organize that information. Culture carried by institutions, networks, and social movements diffuses, activates, and selects among available schemata. Implications for the study of identity, collective memory, social classification, and logics of action are developed.

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Culture and cognition

Despite substantial work in a variety of disciplines, substantive areas, and geographical contexts, social memory studies is a nonparadigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless enterprise. To remedy this relative disorganization, we (re-)construct out of the diversity of work addressing social memory a useful tradition, range of working definitions, and basis for future work. We trace lineages of the enterprise, review basic definitional disputes, outline a historical approach, and review sociological theories concerning the statics and dynamics of social memory.

Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices

The study of identity forms a critical cornerstone within modern sociological thought. Introduced by the works of Cooley and Mead, identity studies have evolved and grown central to current sociological discourse. Microsociological perspectives dominated work published through the 1970s. Sociologists focused primarily on the formation of the “me,” exploring the ways in which interpersonal interactions mold an individual's sense of self. Recent literature constitutes an antithesis to such concerns. Many works refocus attention from the individual to the collective; others prioritize discourse over the systematic scrutiny of behavior; some researchers approach identity as a source of mobilization rather than a product of it; and the analysis of virtual identities now competes with research on identities established in the copresent world. This essay explores all such agenda as raised in key works published since 1980. I close with a look toward the future, suggesting trajectories aimed at synthesizing tradi...

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IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION: New Issues, New Directions

This article presents a tripartite model of identity that integrates cognitive, social, and cultural levels of analysis in a multimethod framework. With a focus on content, structure, and process, identity is defined as ideology cognized through the individual engagement with discourse, made manifest in a personal narrative constructed and reconstructed across the life course, and scripted in and through social interaction and social practice. This approach to the study of identity challenges personality and social psychologists to consider a cultural psychology framework that focuses on the relationship between master narratives and personal narratives of identity, recognizes the value of a developmental perspective, and uses ethnographic and idiographic methods. Research in personality and social psychology that either explicitly or implicitly relies on the model is reviewed.

Narrative and the Cultural Psychology of Identity

The article presents a conceptual framework that concerns the sociopsychological foundation and dynamics of intractable conflict. First, it defines and characterizes the nature of intractable conflict, and then it describes how societies involved in this reality adapt to the conditions of intractable conflict. This adaptation meets three fundamental challenges: satisfying the needs of the society members, coping with stress, and withstanding the rival. In trying to confront them successfully, societies develop appropriate sociopsychological infrastructure, which includes collective memory, ethos of conflict, and collective emotional orientations. This infrastructure fulfills important individual and collective level functions, including the important role of formation, maintenance, and strengthening of a social identity that reflects this conflict. Special attempts are made to disseminate this infrastructure via societal channels of communication and institutionalize it. The evolved sociopsychological inf...

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Sociopsychological Foundations of Intractable Conflicts

Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition

A History of the Jewish People

A history of the Jews in Babylonia

By viewing Bellum Judaicum and the Vita in the greater context of Josephus's life and not in isolation from each other, Cohen traces Josephus's development as a historian, as an apologist, and as a Jew. Comprehensive and contextual, this work will be of general interest to students and scholars of ancient Judaism and classical antiquity. Please note that Josephus in Galilee and Rome was previously published by Brill in hardback (ISBN 90 04 05922 9, no longer available).

Shaye J. Cohen. Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His Vita and Development as a Historian

HE most important recent analysis of the significance of purity in the study of religions is Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger.' Our interest is not in the criticism of Douglas' ideas, for none of the data we shall survey decisively affects her main theses. We seek rather to construct an agendum out of anthropological thought for the interpretation of the various expressions of the idea of purity in ancient Judaism. Douglas' fundamental perspective on purity provides the foundation for the interpretation of the data concerning purity and impurity produced by ancient Judaism. As we shall see, she shows what is at issue and allows us to interpret the full weight and significance of the Temple and its destruction in the structure of being created by Israelite faith. She states, "The more deeply we go ... the more obvious it becomes that we are studying symbolic systems .. ."2 This constitutes the main result of the inquiry before us. Ideas of purity and impurity were intimate to, and expressive of, the larger conceptions of reality of the communities that held them. Certainly without a notion of the meaning of purity, one cannot understand either the Dead Sea yahad ("commune") or the Pharisaic havurah ("fellowship"). Purity serves to differentiate one sect from another. Because of that fact, the ideas adduced to explain or interpret purity are going to carry implications for the larger system of which they are a part. And that fact is admirably explained within Douglas' larger theory:

Jacob Neusner

Papers

Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition

A History of the Jewish People

A history of the Jews in Babylonia

Shaye J. Cohen. Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His Vita and Development as a Historian

The Idea of Purity In Ancient Judaism