How Societies Remember (Themes in the Social Sciences) (Paperback)

~ Paul Connerton (Author) "All beginnings contain an element of recollection..." (more)
Key Phrases: incorporating practices, commemorative ceremonies, dynastic realm, Roman Law, Southern Italian, Old Testament (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Most studies of memory as a cultural faculty focus on written practices and how they are transmitted. This study concentrates on incorporated practices and provides an account of how these things are transmitted in and as traditions. The author argues that images and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by ritual performances, and that performative memory is bodily. This is an essential aspect of social memory that until now has been badly neglected.

Book Description

An essential aspect of social memory, until now badly neglected, is stressed in this study of memory that concentrates on incorporated practices and provides an account of how they are transmitted in and as traditions.

Product Details

• Paperback: 121 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; First Edition edition (November 24, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521270936
• ISBN-13: 978-0521270939
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #219,558 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars For what it's worth, March 19, 2004

By A Customer

I read this book and was not unimpressed with Connerton's analysis. However, the book opens with one of the most egregious acts of plagiarism I have ever seen. Compare these passages. The first is from Connerton's opening chapter. The second is from Hannah Arendt's ON REVOLUTION (Penguin Books):

"All beginnings contain an element of recollection. This is particularly so when a social group makes a concerted effort to begin with a wholly new start. There is a MEASURE OF COMPLETE ARBITRARINESS in the VERY NATURE of any such attempted beginning. The BEGINNING HAS NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO HOLD ON TO; IT IS AS IF IT CAME OUT OF NOWHERE. FOR A MOMENT, THE MOMENT OF BEGINNING, IT IS AS IF THE BEGINNERS HAS ABOLISHED THE SEQUENCE OF TEMPORALITY ITSELF AND WERE THROWN OUT OF THE CONTINUITY OF THE TEMPORAL ORDER." (Connerton, p. 6).

"It is in the VERY NATURE of a beginning to carry with itself a MEASURE OF COMPLETE ARBITRARINESS. Not only is it not bound into a reliable chain of cause and effect, a chain in which each effect immediately turns into the cause for future developments, THE BEGINNING HAS, as it were, NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO HOLD ON TO; IT IS AS THOUGH IT CAME OUT OF NOWHERE in time or space. FOR A MOMENT, THE MOMENT OF BEGINNING, IT IS AS THOUGH THE BEGINNER HAD ABOLISHED THE SEQUENCE OF TEMPORALITY ITSELF, or as though the actors WERE THROWN OUT OF THE TEMPORAL ORDER AND ITS CONTINUITY." (Arendt, p. 206).

Arendt's book was published some 25 years prior to Connerton's and Arendt's name appears nowhere in the text or the bibliography.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Important and well-crafted, March 10, 2000

By	Johan Meire (Leuven, Belgium) - See all my reviews

A short book that has been very important in opening up the field of social memory and in bringing the work of Maurice Halbwachs back into focus. The book is a good introduction to the basic problems of social memory, useful to historians, sociologists and anthropologists. Connerton makes the important point that social memory is essentially performative in character and points to the importance of the bodily practices in memory. The final chapter on bodily practices is however rather disappointing in that he tends to equate bodily memory with 'habit memory', thereby putting stress too much on repetition and the incorporation of codes and missing important points on the phenomenological primacy and agency of the body. Still a classic, though.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Communal ways of knowing, May 20, 2003

By	FrKurt Messick "FrKurt Messick" (Bloomington, IN USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)

Connerton's thesis about the communal/social aspects of memory prompted me to recall the proposed research project of a friend of mine in a doctoral programme, dealing with aspects of received knowledge of children - how do children of each successive generation, across social classes and often across cultural divides, seem to know certain things that are not taught to them by adults, particularly as adults seem to have forgotten these things themselves, but that are known by other children. How is this collective childhood body of knowledge maintained and continued without any formalised structure of preservation or transmission? This type of question can have relevance toward many types of study.

Connerton's distinction between social memory and historical reconstruction is an important one. We might know the factual (or, at least, the conjectured factual) details of lost cultures and societies, but their social memory is, by virtue of their disappearance, inaccessible to us, save in the possible elements that have been continued in present cultures or societies. However, I am not sure I can subscribe to Connerton's complete application of the principle of historical reconstruction being necessarily removed from social memory. Connerton writes, `A historically tutored memory is opposed to an unreflective traditional memory.' (p. 16) We none of us operate as pure historical reconstructionists; our social memory influences even the manner in which we pursue an historical memory; surely there is a cross-influence as work as some level (and perhaps often different levels).

Connerton works with distinctions: distinctions between myths and rites; distinctions between gestures referential and notational; distinctions between rites as symbolic, rites as quasi-textual, rites only in context; distinctions between literate and oral cultures and cultural aspects. However, it is in the blending of these elements that most of life is lived. For instance, Connerton states:

`The impact of writing on social memory is much written about and evidently vast. The transition from an oral culture to a literate culture is a transition from incorporating practices to inscribing practices.' (p. 75)

However, our culture is not an exclusively literate culture; it has not become a non-oral culture. Perhaps the most non-oral, literacy-dependent aspect of modern culture and information/learning transmission is the advent of the internet, yet even here, the trend even in the infancy of the internet is toward an incorporation of oral aspects - from examining aspects as formal as those internet teaching methods that are most effective to as simple an analysis of which websites are most popular, those which are text-only seem to be less effective and have less impact, whereas those which have `multi-media' elements (voice, music, etc.) are more effective.

Still, one must not neglect the very different character of certain kinds of information. Particularly when examining the past, the difference between oral-based cultures and oral/literate cultures (there have been no exclusively literate-based cultures in history), the kind of history formed, maintained and transmitted is different.

`The oral history of subordinate groups will produce another type of history: one in which not only will most of the details be different, but in which the very construction of meaningful shapes will obey a different principle.' (p. 19)

One of the difficulties with much religious study (which is the lens through which I approach this work) is the problem of dealing in a predominantly literate way with cultural aspects that were originally oral. This is true even of those groups that arise in a culture with literate base - groups may have foundational documents (a literate device), but the formulation of those foundational documents is often an oral recollection, rarely committed to paper, and even if such deliberations are committed to paper, such as gets recorded is selectively chosen, and important elements are frequently omitted.