Das kulturelle Gedachtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identitat in fruhen Hochkulturen
Citations
263 citations
Cites background from "Das kulturelle Gedachtnis. Schrift,..."
...Various authors (e.g. Assmann, 1992; Gross, 2000; Terdiman, 1993) have pointed to a ‘memory crisis’ in modern Western cultures....
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...In the wake of Halbwachs’ (1925/1980) concept of mémoire collective, Assmann (1992, 1997) has argued that each culture develops a sense of coherence that is grounded in an underlying connective structure....
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...From a historical point of view, Assmann (1992) suggested distinguishing two aspects of the transition through which cultural memory passes on a moral order, one being normative, the other being narrative. The normative is expressed and enforced by law, political, economic and, in part, religious power. The narrative is articulated and dispersed through a culture’s countless discursive registers: from myth and fairy tales to literature, film, advertisement and everyday conversation. This is, of course, neither to say that the normative cannot use or include narrative forms—just consider the crucial role of narrative in law (Amsterdam & Bruner, 2000)—nor to say that narratives cannot give form to normative principles—for example, in the plot forms and genres of canonical ‘master narratives’ and in ‘moral stories’ often used in a seemingly peripheral fashion in everyday conversation (see Plummer, 1996). Yet there is still another and, perhaps, more fundamental potential of narrative at work that I would like to highlight here because, I suspect, it leads to the very essence of cultural memory. This is narrative’s distinctive capacity to give shape to the temporal dimension of human experience. Put differently, narrative endows the inherent historicity of human existence with cultural meanings. On a similar note, Freeman (1993) has claimed that it is only narrative that enables us to think about our lives and ourselves historically. And for Carrithers (1991), ‘it is narrativity which allows humans to grasp a longer past and a more intricately conceived future, as well as a more variegated social environment’ (p....
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...From a historical point of view, Assmann (1992) suggested distinguishing two aspects of the transition through which cultural memory passes on a moral order, one being normative, the other being narrative. The normative is expressed and enforced by law, political, economic and, in part, religious power. The narrative is articulated and dispersed through a culture’s countless discursive registers: from myth and fairy tales to literature, film, advertisement and everyday conversation. This is, of course, neither to say that the normative cannot use or include narrative forms—just consider the crucial role of narrative in law (Amsterdam & Bruner, 2000)—nor to say that narratives cannot give form to normative principles—for example, in the plot forms and genres of canonical ‘master narratives’ and in ‘moral stories’ often used in a seemingly peripheral fashion in everyday conversation (see Plummer, 1996). Yet there is still another and, perhaps, more fundamental potential of narrative at work that I would like to highlight here because, I suspect, it leads to the very essence of cultural memory. This is narrative’s distinctive capacity to give shape to the temporal dimension of human experience. Put differently, narrative endows the inherent historicity of human existence with cultural meanings. On a similar note, Freeman (1993) has claimed that it is only narrative that enables us to think about our lives and ourselves historically. And for Carrithers (1991), ‘it is narrativity which allows humans to grasp a longer past and a more intricately conceived future, as well as a more variegated social environment’ (p. 306). In another work, Carrithers (1992) went on to argue that narrative consists not merely of telling stories, but also of understanding complex nets of actions and events....
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...From a historical point of view, Assmann (1992) suggested distinguishing two aspects of the transition through which cultural memory passes on a moral order, one being normative, the other being narrative....
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Cites background or result from "Das kulturelle Gedachtnis. Schrift,..."
...…seek to express the memory of their own experience in terms that are understandable by others, and that they may end up identifying with someone else's recollection even if this does not correspond in all respects with their own experience (Halbwachs, 1997 [1950]: 53; also Assmann, 1997: 35–7)....
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...1 Jan Assmann distinguishes usefully between two phases of collective memory: communicative memory or living memory, corresponding to the earliest phase when multiple narratives...
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...participants and eyewitnesses circulate and compete with each other, and cultural memory proper, corresponding to the much longer phase when all eyewitnesses and participants have died out, and a society has only relics and stories left as a reminder of past experience (Assmann, 1997: 48–66)....
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...The work of Jan Assmann (1997) and Aleida Assmann (1999) has been extremely important in working out the concept of 'cultural memory,' though it should be noted that attempts to conceptualize the relations between the various aspects of collective remembering are still in full swing....
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