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 organised 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, emphasising 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.
• The first book to address individual and historical (collective) memory as a single phenomenon • Can be used as an undergraduate introduction to the field of human memory – and as an illustration of the state of the art in the field • For educated readers, this is an entry-point into the large domain of how memory builds the self, cultures and societies
Contents
Part I. In Mind, Culture and History: A Special Perspective: 1. What are memories for? Functions of recall in cognition and culture Pascal Boyer; Part II. How Do Memories Construct Our Past?: 2. Networks of autobiographical memories Helen L. Williams and Martin A. Conway; 3. Cultural life scripts and individual life stories Dorthe Berntsen and Annette Bohn; 4. Specificity of memory: implications for individual and collective remembering Daniel L. Schacter, Angela H. Gutchess, and Elizabeth A. Kensinger; Part III. How Do We Build Shared Collective Memories?: 5. Collective memory James V. Wertsch; 6. The role of repeated retrieval in shaping collective memory Henry L. Roediger III, Franklin M. Zaromb, and Andrew C. Butler; 7. Making history: social and psychological processes underlying collective memory James W. Pennebaker and Amy Gonzales; 8. How does collective memory create a sense of the collective? Alan Lambert, Laura Nesse, Chad Rogers, and Larry Jacoby; Part IV. How Does Memory Shape History?: 9. Historical memories Craig W. Blatz and Michael Ross; 10. The memory boom: why and why now? David W. Blight; 11. Historians and sites of memory Jay Winter; Part V. How Does Memory Shape Culture?: 12. Oral traditions as collective memories: implications for a general theory of individual and collective memory David C. Rubin; 13. Cognitive predispositions and cultural transmission Pascal Boyer.
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