Memory in Mind and Culture

by Edited by Pascal Boyer , James V. Wertsch

• ISBN13: 9780521758925
• ISBN10: 0521758920
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-05-29
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This text introduces students, scholars, and interested educated readers to the issues of human memory broadly considered, encompassing both individual memory, collective remembering by societies, and the construction of history. The book is organized around several major questions: How do memories construct our past? How do we build shared collective memories? How does memory shape history? This volume presents a special perspective, emphasizing the role of memory processes in the construction of self-identity, of shared cultural norms and concepts, and of historical awareness. Although the results are fairly new and the techniques suitably modern, the vision itself is of course related to the work of such precursors as Frederic Bartlett and Aleksandr Luria, who in very different ways represent the starting point of a serious psychology of human culture.

Author Biography

Pascal Boyer studied philosophy and anthropology at the universities of Paris and Cambridge, where he did his graduate work with Professor Jack Goody, on memory constraints on the transmission of oral literature. James V. Wertsch is Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors	p. vii
In Mind, Culture, and History: A Special Perspective
What Are Memories For? Functions of Recall in Cognition and Culture	p. 3
How Do Memories Construct Our Past?
Networks of Autobiographical Memories	p. 33
Cultural Life Scripts and Individual Life Stories	p. 62
Specificity of Memory: Implications for Individual and Collective Remembering	p. 83
How Do We Build Shared Collective Memories?
Collective Memory	p. 117
The Role of Repeated Retrieval in Shaping Collective Memory	p. 138
Making History: Social and Psychological Processes Underlying Collective Memory	p. 171
How Does Collective Memory Create a Sense of the Collective?	p. 194
How Does Memory Shape History?
Historical Memories	p. 223
The Memory Boom: Why and Why Now?	p. 238
Historians and Sites of Memory	p. 252
How Does Memory Shape Culture?
Oral Traditions as Collective Memories: Implications for a General Theory of Individual and Collective Memory	p. 273
Cognitive Predispositions and Cultural Transmission	p. 288
Index	p. 321
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