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الذاكرة الحضارية: الكتابة والذكرى والهوية السياسية في الحضارات الكبرى الأولى
This book presents a groundbreaking theoretical analysis of memory, identity and culture. It investigates how cultures remember, arguing that human memory exists and is communicated in two ways, namely inter-human interaction and in external systems of notation, such as writing, which can span generations. Dr Assmann defines two theoretical concepts of cultural memory, differentiating between the long-term memory of societies, which can span up to 3,000 years, and communicative memory, which is typically restricted to 80 to 100 years. He applies this theoretical framework to case studies of four specific cultures, illustrating the function contexts and specific achievements, including the state, international law, religion and science. Ultimately, his research demonstrates that memory is not simply a means of retaining information, but rather a force that can shape cultural identity and allow cultures to respond creatively to both daily challenges and catastrophic changes.
552 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
59 people are currently reading
603 people want to read
About the author
Jan Assmann
123 books101 followersAssmann studied Egyptology and classical archaeology in Munich, Heidelberg, Paris, and Göttingen. In 1966-67, he was a fellow of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo, where he continued as an independent scholar from 1967 to 1971. After completing his habilitation in 1971, he was named a professor of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg in 1976, where he taught until his retirement in 2003. He was then named an honorary professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Constance, where he is today.
In the 1990s Assmann and his wife Aleida Assmann developed a theory of cultural and communicative memory that has received much international attention. He is also known beyond Egyptology circles for his interpretation of the origins of monotheism, which he considers as a break from earlier cosmotheism, first with Atenism and later with the Exodus from Egypt of the Israelites.
In the 1990s Assmann and his wife Aleida Assmann developed a theory of cultural and communicative memory that has received much international attention. He is also known beyond Egyptology circles for his interpretation of the origins of monotheism, which he considers as a break from earlier cosmotheism, first with Atenism and later with the Exodus from Egypt of the Israelites.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
November 11, 2016
One of the best books I've read about cultural memory theory. Super interesting and vividly written with clear examples. A must-read if you're interested in memory cultures, the formation of identities and nations/ societies, and practices of remembrance in the Ancient world.
October 1, 2021
In many respects, Jan and Aleida Assmann revitalized memory studies in the late twentieth century and introduced the work of Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory to a wider scholarly audience. While, in this book, Jan Assmann adopts many facets of Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory—above all that the subject of memory is the individual whose memories are nevertheless conditioned by social structures and communal norms—he complicates the sharp division Halbwachs maintains between memory and history, where the former is subjective in relation to past events and the latter objectively encompasses all past events in a positivistic sense. For Assmann, memory and history are not so easily differentiated: “The forms of the remembered past entail myth and history without any distinction between them,” he writes (59). Historical narratives reconstruct the past from the memorial perspective of specific communities and, vice-versa, communities remember the past in conjunction with authorized historical narratives they have inherited from their forebears. In accordance with this more nuanced view on the relation between memory and history, Assmann adopts the notion of collective memory from Halbwachs and expands it by division into two parts: communicative and cultural memory. The former denotes the shared historical experiences of individuals whose memories are conditioned by activated collective identities. Its time span is 80-100 years and its carriers are nonspecific, contemporary witnesses within a memorial community. The latter refers to the mythic foundations of a memorial community and encompasses its entire literary, mythic, and historical past. Its temporal horizon terminates in what Assmann calls an absolute past that remains fixed and its carriers are “specialized tradition bearers” who participate in formal commemorative practices (41). With the concept of cultural memory, Assmann emphasizes how mythic history—which, for him, need not be fictional, but merely “foundational” for a community (61)—exercises immense influence on present-day collective memory and by extension helps orient contemporary beliefs and actions. For Assmann, this means that cultural memory offers a potential source of temporal disruption in relation to the present: its content may subvert dominant expressions of culture and moral norms insofar as it calls to mind a past that is perceived to be superior to the present and projects it into the future “as a social and political Utopia toward which one can direct one’s life and work” (63). This “contrapresent” function complements cultural memory’s “foundational” function: it establishes a non-simultaneity that disrupts one-dimensional, everyday time via festivals, rituals, and other forms of commemoration (62). Consequently, while cultural memory is often linked with the expression and consolidation of power, it can also be the basis for resistance to oppression and domination.
Beyond this division of collective memory into cultural and communicative memory, Assmann presents a series of dualisms that further clarify the phenomenon of collective memory. For example, he expands upon Claude Levi-Strauss’s distinction between hot and cold societies: whereas cold societies strive to resist the effects of history on their equilibrium and continuity, hot societies internalize history as the principal force behind their development over time. First, Assmann stresses that this does not mean that cold societies have no collective memory; they “simply live with a different kind of memory, and in order to do that, they must block out history” (52). Assmann cites the example of medieval Judaism, which he claims resisted the penetration of history in order to preserve another, more foundational memory: the Exodus. Second, Assmann insists that “societies or cultures need not be completely cold or hot,” but may contain elements of both (53). Societies may opt for cold memory techniques for the purposes of stabilization or preservation in times of crises; in different circumstances, they may opt for hot memory techniques to stimulate cultural enhancement and political development. The distinction between hot and cold societies and their concomitant memory techniques is helpful because it makes salient different kinds of memorial practices with distinct objectives. Cultural memory is not, as some may claim, inherently conservative or retrospective; while it is necessarily oriented toward the past, societies and their individual members may utilize cultural memory either to reinforce continuity with the past or introduce a radical disjuncture with it.
The difference between hot and cold societies is related to another important distinction Assmann makes between textual and ritual continuity in cultural memory. In the use of these terms, Assmann differentiates how cultural memory is transmitted over time—either via ritualistic or textual commemorative practices, or perhaps some combination of both. He claims that the transition from ritual to textual continuity in societies alters the time-structure of cultural memory: when ritual is the primary form of commemoration, one must wait for the ritual itself to access its memorial content. On the other hand, when texts principally serve the commemorative function, one need not wait for the next ritualistic performance, but can simply read the relevant texts (74-75). For Assmann, this means that cultural memory transmitted via texts is more susceptible to modification: texts must be interpreted, and in order to ensure the continuous readability of texts over time, interpretations must be adapted to different circumstances and cultural needs. Cultural memory transmitted via ritual practices is less volatile: ritual continuity is based on repetition where “variations are not allowed” and so meaning stays the same (81). While Assmann does not mention it, I wonder if another difference between textual and ritual continuity in the transmission of cultural memory lies in who is permitted to communicate its meaning: ceremonial repetition seems to rely more heavily on specialized tradition bearers than textual interpretation, which in some sense any literate person can perform. If this is correct, we see once more why textual continuity is more variable, since it opens the domain of cultural memory and its meaning to many more participants and practitioners. Somewhat peculiarly, Assmann claims that “sacred texts” pertain to the realm of ritual continuity and repetition rather than textual continuity and variance “because they are not open to development or to any kind of intertextual variation” (86). For my part, while I concede that most sacred texts, once canonized, cannot be amended (at least in accordance with authoritative norms), interpretations of these texts are most certainly susceptible to variation over time. This is plainly evident in the interpretation of the New Testament from the time of the early Church to the Reformation to our modern era, for example.
In the second part of the book, Assmann mobilizes his theory of collective memory to examine four case studies, all from antiquity: Egypt, Israel, Mesopotamian and Near Eastern societies, and classical Greece and the broader Hellenistic world. These case studies allow him to demonstrate the applicability of his concepts: he describes, for example, the process of canonization in the Jewish and Greek contexts, both of which witnessed the production of foundational texts from the 8th-5th centuries BCE. In both societies, these texts helped preserve cultural memory across social ruptures and discontinuities and thus contributed to the concretion of collective identity. “The Torah plays the same role as a crystallizing nucleus (a canon within a canon) in the Hebrew canon as Homer does in the Greek,” Assmann asserts. “And just as the Homer tradition functioned as a process of ethnogenesis in Greece, so too did the Torah in Israel” (254). In these two case studies, Assmann exemplifies his earlier theoretical claim that “ethnic identity and durability depend on cultural memory and the form of its organization” (140). The canonization of the Hebrew Bible and the Greek classics, which captured and preserved the cultural memories of these societies, was the condition for the possibility of durable Jewish and Greek identities that oriented themselves around these texts.
When it comes to the persistence of cultural memory, Egypt and Babylon stand in contrast with Israel and Greece: while their respective written traditions were much older than those of Israel and Greece, these streams of tradition ultimately disappeared with the spread of Christianity and Islam. To explain this phenomenon as it concerns Egypt, Assmann makes a persuasive case for the late period Egyptian temple as “nothing other than the three-dimensional, monumental transposition of a book [that] has all of the characteristics of a canon” (157). Whereas written texts primarily preserved cultural memory in Israel and Greece, the temple preserved cultural memory in late period Egypt, such that Assmann refers to the temple as “built memory” (160). However, despite notable parallels between the temple and written text, the temple transmitted cultural memory via ritual, rather than textual, continuity. Here, Assmann makes use of his previous discussion of ritual continuity as static and textual continuity as dynamic insofar as the latter invites interpretation and modification. The temple, on Assmann’s view, was not interpreted, and thus Egyptian culture “was not in a position to create those forms of interpretive culture that were predominant in the axial cultures and were thus able to preserve their semantic formation right up to the present day” (174).
The explanation for why Mesopotamia’s many forms of cultural memory did not perdure is somewhat more complicated. Assmann claims that “historical memory, as it originated in the Ancient East, is connected to guilt and an awareness of guilt from the breaking of oaths and contracts. Because an oath is especially sacred, history also takes on a kind of holiness that creates an obligation to remember” (231). Put differently, the imperative to remember in ancient Near Eastern cultures derived from guilt associated with failures to honor sacred contracts sanctioned by the gods; this sense of guilt motivated commemorative practices that helped make sense of present circumstances, understood to be caused by the retributive will of an angry god or gods (Assmann here takes a cue from Nietzsche’s thesis that memory was born from the spirit of the law, not at the level of the individual but of the collective and its contractual duties). Memory here works to answer how a society has offended its deities and what can be done to atone for its previous breach of faith. In Mesopotamian societies, Assmann maintains, this interpretive memorial work primarily operated at the level of discrete events, whereas in the Jewish biblical tradition, by contrast, multiple events coalesced into a comprehensive history from the standpoint of Israel’s covenantal relationship with God. “In Mesopotamian history there is still a rhythm of good and evil, grace and wrath,” Assmann explains, “whereas in the Bible profane history is seen ever more radically as an expression only of wrath, against which is set the one and only form of redemption, the Kingdom of God, as a kind of antihistory” (233). While one wonders whether a certain kind of supersessionism has infiltrated Assmann’s construal of biblical history, this juxtaposition helps explain why various forms of Mesopotamian cultural memory did not survive sociopolitical upheaval: without one memorial axis around which all of history was interpreted, history started anew with each new set of rulers (Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Chaldean, etc.) and the establishment of new written traditions. Still, unlike Egypt, Assmann concedes that Mesopotamia’s many forms of written culture “were then continued by Greek and Jewish traditions; therefore Babylonian culture seemed to have had a more profound influence on later and more enduringly successful traditions than Egyptian culture” (145).
One question that remains for me is the extent to which Assmann’s conceptual schema of collective memory applies to modern societies. While Assmann occasionally makes reference to modern life, his case studies exclusively come from ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures. Prima facie, I see no serious barrier to the application of communicative and cultural memory to contemporary societies: modern nation-states have their own mythic foundations (Assmann references modern Israel in connection with Masada, for example) and ritual continues to serve commemorative purposes in many different types of communities. Assmann himself insists on the universality of memory culture across time and place (16). Still, much more must be said about modern media in the dissemination of cultural memory in contemporary contexts. Assmann is, of course, aware of the key role various media play in memorial practices: he explicitly focuses on how written texts transform cultural memory and establish a fixed canon by which the remembered past is passed down. Yet the evolution of mass media has exerted its own unique influence on how cultural memory is preserved and communicated and so must be treated more systematically.
Beyond this division of collective memory into cultural and communicative memory, Assmann presents a series of dualisms that further clarify the phenomenon of collective memory. For example, he expands upon Claude Levi-Strauss’s distinction between hot and cold societies: whereas cold societies strive to resist the effects of history on their equilibrium and continuity, hot societies internalize history as the principal force behind their development over time. First, Assmann stresses that this does not mean that cold societies have no collective memory; they “simply live with a different kind of memory, and in order to do that, they must block out history” (52). Assmann cites the example of medieval Judaism, which he claims resisted the penetration of history in order to preserve another, more foundational memory: the Exodus. Second, Assmann insists that “societies or cultures need not be completely cold or hot,” but may contain elements of both (53). Societies may opt for cold memory techniques for the purposes of stabilization or preservation in times of crises; in different circumstances, they may opt for hot memory techniques to stimulate cultural enhancement and political development. The distinction between hot and cold societies and their concomitant memory techniques is helpful because it makes salient different kinds of memorial practices with distinct objectives. Cultural memory is not, as some may claim, inherently conservative or retrospective; while it is necessarily oriented toward the past, societies and their individual members may utilize cultural memory either to reinforce continuity with the past or introduce a radical disjuncture with it.
The difference between hot and cold societies is related to another important distinction Assmann makes between textual and ritual continuity in cultural memory. In the use of these terms, Assmann differentiates how cultural memory is transmitted over time—either via ritualistic or textual commemorative practices, or perhaps some combination of both. He claims that the transition from ritual to textual continuity in societies alters the time-structure of cultural memory: when ritual is the primary form of commemoration, one must wait for the ritual itself to access its memorial content. On the other hand, when texts principally serve the commemorative function, one need not wait for the next ritualistic performance, but can simply read the relevant texts (74-75). For Assmann, this means that cultural memory transmitted via texts is more susceptible to modification: texts must be interpreted, and in order to ensure the continuous readability of texts over time, interpretations must be adapted to different circumstances and cultural needs. Cultural memory transmitted via ritual practices is less volatile: ritual continuity is based on repetition where “variations are not allowed” and so meaning stays the same (81). While Assmann does not mention it, I wonder if another difference between textual and ritual continuity in the transmission of cultural memory lies in who is permitted to communicate its meaning: ceremonial repetition seems to rely more heavily on specialized tradition bearers than textual interpretation, which in some sense any literate person can perform. If this is correct, we see once more why textual continuity is more variable, since it opens the domain of cultural memory and its meaning to many more participants and practitioners. Somewhat peculiarly, Assmann claims that “sacred texts” pertain to the realm of ritual continuity and repetition rather than textual continuity and variance “because they are not open to development or to any kind of intertextual variation” (86). For my part, while I concede that most sacred texts, once canonized, cannot be amended (at least in accordance with authoritative norms), interpretations of these texts are most certainly susceptible to variation over time. This is plainly evident in the interpretation of the New Testament from the time of the early Church to the Reformation to our modern era, for example.
In the second part of the book, Assmann mobilizes his theory of collective memory to examine four case studies, all from antiquity: Egypt, Israel, Mesopotamian and Near Eastern societies, and classical Greece and the broader Hellenistic world. These case studies allow him to demonstrate the applicability of his concepts: he describes, for example, the process of canonization in the Jewish and Greek contexts, both of which witnessed the production of foundational texts from the 8th-5th centuries BCE. In both societies, these texts helped preserve cultural memory across social ruptures and discontinuities and thus contributed to the concretion of collective identity. “The Torah plays the same role as a crystallizing nucleus (a canon within a canon) in the Hebrew canon as Homer does in the Greek,” Assmann asserts. “And just as the Homer tradition functioned as a process of ethnogenesis in Greece, so too did the Torah in Israel” (254). In these two case studies, Assmann exemplifies his earlier theoretical claim that “ethnic identity and durability depend on cultural memory and the form of its organization” (140). The canonization of the Hebrew Bible and the Greek classics, which captured and preserved the cultural memories of these societies, was the condition for the possibility of durable Jewish and Greek identities that oriented themselves around these texts.
When it comes to the persistence of cultural memory, Egypt and Babylon stand in contrast with Israel and Greece: while their respective written traditions were much older than those of Israel and Greece, these streams of tradition ultimately disappeared with the spread of Christianity and Islam. To explain this phenomenon as it concerns Egypt, Assmann makes a persuasive case for the late period Egyptian temple as “nothing other than the three-dimensional, monumental transposition of a book [that] has all of the characteristics of a canon” (157). Whereas written texts primarily preserved cultural memory in Israel and Greece, the temple preserved cultural memory in late period Egypt, such that Assmann refers to the temple as “built memory” (160). However, despite notable parallels between the temple and written text, the temple transmitted cultural memory via ritual, rather than textual, continuity. Here, Assmann makes use of his previous discussion of ritual continuity as static and textual continuity as dynamic insofar as the latter invites interpretation and modification. The temple, on Assmann’s view, was not interpreted, and thus Egyptian culture “was not in a position to create those forms of interpretive culture that were predominant in the axial cultures and were thus able to preserve their semantic formation right up to the present day” (174).
The explanation for why Mesopotamia’s many forms of cultural memory did not perdure is somewhat more complicated. Assmann claims that “historical memory, as it originated in the Ancient East, is connected to guilt and an awareness of guilt from the breaking of oaths and contracts. Because an oath is especially sacred, history also takes on a kind of holiness that creates an obligation to remember” (231). Put differently, the imperative to remember in ancient Near Eastern cultures derived from guilt associated with failures to honor sacred contracts sanctioned by the gods; this sense of guilt motivated commemorative practices that helped make sense of present circumstances, understood to be caused by the retributive will of an angry god or gods (Assmann here takes a cue from Nietzsche’s thesis that memory was born from the spirit of the law, not at the level of the individual but of the collective and its contractual duties). Memory here works to answer how a society has offended its deities and what can be done to atone for its previous breach of faith. In Mesopotamian societies, Assmann maintains, this interpretive memorial work primarily operated at the level of discrete events, whereas in the Jewish biblical tradition, by contrast, multiple events coalesced into a comprehensive history from the standpoint of Israel’s covenantal relationship with God. “In Mesopotamian history there is still a rhythm of good and evil, grace and wrath,” Assmann explains, “whereas in the Bible profane history is seen ever more radically as an expression only of wrath, against which is set the one and only form of redemption, the Kingdom of God, as a kind of antihistory” (233). While one wonders whether a certain kind of supersessionism has infiltrated Assmann’s construal of biblical history, this juxtaposition helps explain why various forms of Mesopotamian cultural memory did not survive sociopolitical upheaval: without one memorial axis around which all of history was interpreted, history started anew with each new set of rulers (Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Chaldean, etc.) and the establishment of new written traditions. Still, unlike Egypt, Assmann concedes that Mesopotamia’s many forms of written culture “were then continued by Greek and Jewish traditions; therefore Babylonian culture seemed to have had a more profound influence on later and more enduringly successful traditions than Egyptian culture” (145).
One question that remains for me is the extent to which Assmann’s conceptual schema of collective memory applies to modern societies. While Assmann occasionally makes reference to modern life, his case studies exclusively come from ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures. Prima facie, I see no serious barrier to the application of communicative and cultural memory to contemporary societies: modern nation-states have their own mythic foundations (Assmann references modern Israel in connection with Masada, for example) and ritual continues to serve commemorative purposes in many different types of communities. Assmann himself insists on the universality of memory culture across time and place (16). Still, much more must be said about modern media in the dissemination of cultural memory in contemporary contexts. Assmann is, of course, aware of the key role various media play in memorial practices: he explicitly focuses on how written texts transform cultural memory and establish a fixed canon by which the remembered past is passed down. Yet the evolution of mass media has exerted its own unique influence on how cultural memory is preserved and communicated and so must be treated more systematically.
August 6, 2020
Ιδιαίτερα τεχνικό και ιδιαιτέρως δύσκολο, ακόμη και για όσους έχουν ειδικό ενδιαφέρον για τη συλλογική μνήμη και τις συλλογικές ταυτότητες. Το θεωρητικό τμήμα αποτελεί λίγο πάνω από το μισό του βιβλίου και ειναι ίσως ό,τι καλύτερο έχει γραφτεί για τη συλλογική μνήμη. Το δεύτερο μισό συγκροτείται από μελέτες περιπτώσεων, όπου δυστυχώς αποκαλύπτεται η ηλικία του βιβλίου, μιας και λείπουν, αναπόφευκτα, οι εξελίξεις των τελευταίων δύο δεκαετιών. Όχι κατάλληλο για τον ανυποψίαστο αναγνώστη, αλλά απόλυτη ανάγκη να διαβαστεί από τους ειδικούς.
May 5, 2014
منذ أن قرأت فرويد لم يصدمني كتاب كما فعل يان أسمن في "الذاكرة الحضارية"
أحد أفضل المحاولات التحليلية للفكر الجماعي من أجل مد قنوات لتفسير الفعاليات الطقسية المؤثرة على فكر الجماعة..
المنهجية والسوية العلمية عالية جداً والكتاب يحتاج قراءة متأنية جداً من أجل اكتشاف أفكاره..
كتاب ملهم جداً ومؤثر جداً..
سعيد بأنني قرأته :)
أحد أفضل المحاولات التحليلية للفكر الجماعي من أجل مد قنوات لتفسير الفعاليات الطقسية المؤثرة على فكر الجماعة..
المنهجية والسوية العلمية عالية جداً والكتاب يحتاج قراءة متأنية جداً من أجل اكتشاف أفكاره..
كتاب ملهم جداً ومؤثر جداً..
سعيد بأنني قرأته :)
August 13, 2017
1) Я не уверена, что существуют книги по культурологии, не содержащие цитат из "Протестансткой этики и духа капитализма".
2) Несмотря на то, что это научный труд, ощущения как в детстве, когда читаешь про древних египтян и греков, и тебе очень интересно.
3) Ассманн - учёный того уровня, когда можно позволить себе написать в своей научной работе, что кто-то из классиков твоей темы не прав.
4) Кстати, он раскрывает и то, что такое "классика", и много других важных и интересных моментов про связь истории, литературы, политики, национальной идентичности и способов коммуникации.
5) Если прочитать заключение, то можно не читать всю книгу, но об этом узнаёшь, только когда уже её прочитал.
2) Несмотря на то, что это научный труд, ощущения как в детстве, когда читаешь про древних египтян и греков, и тебе очень интересно.
3) Ассманн - учёный того уровня, когда можно позволить себе написать в своей научной работе, что кто-то из классиков твоей темы не прав.
4) Кстати, он раскрывает и то, что такое "классика", и много других важных и интересных моментов про связь истории, литературы, политики, национальной идентичности и способов коммуникации.
5) Если прочитать заключение, то можно не читать всю книгу, но об этом узнаёшь, только когда уже её прочитал.
Read
October 28, 2013هذا الكتاب من الكتب الرائعة التى قراتها مؤخرا مترجم وصادر عن مكتبة الاسرة في مصر..وهو بالفعل ينشط الذالكرة الحضارية .وابرز ما لفت النظر فيه تخصيصه فصلا كاملا عن الحضارة المصرية القديمة وكيف انهم اول من اخترعوا مفهوم الدولة في التاريخ ( الاخوان كانوا عاوزين يهدموها في سنة ) زو
February 13, 2023
fürs Studium Kapitel 2.1 Von ritueller zu textueller Kohärenz gelesen
Wichtige Punkte:
- Vergangenheit bzw. Identität entsteht durch kulturelle Konstruktion und Repräsentation --> Wiederholung (Zirkulation) als Mittel für kulturelle Kohärenz --> über Generationen hinweg Identität und Kontinuität
- Übergang von ritueller zu textueller Kohärenz: unterschiedliche Formen der Sinnerhaltung; um beim Text Zirkulation zu gewährleisten, Interpretation nötig
- Kanon: zum Wiedergebrauch bestimmte Texte aus dem "Strom der Tradition", die präsent und anschlussfähig bleiben; Zusammenstellung wechselnd --> Bewusstsein für Gegenwart und Vergangenheit
--> Interpret als Dritter zw. Text und Hörer, der die Distanz zwischen unveränderlichem Text und sich verwandelnder Welt überbrückt
Wichtige Punkte:
- Vergangenheit bzw. Identität entsteht durch kulturelle Konstruktion und Repräsentation --> Wiederholung (Zirkulation) als Mittel für kulturelle Kohärenz --> über Generationen hinweg Identität und Kontinuität
- Übergang von ritueller zu textueller Kohärenz: unterschiedliche Formen der Sinnerhaltung; um beim Text Zirkulation zu gewährleisten, Interpretation nötig
- Kanon: zum Wiedergebrauch bestimmte Texte aus dem "Strom der Tradition", die präsent und anschlussfähig bleiben; Zusammenstellung wechselnd --> Bewusstsein für Gegenwart und Vergangenheit
--> Interpret als Dritter zw. Text und Hörer, der die Distanz zwischen unveränderlichem Text und sich verwandelnder Welt überbrückt
September 1, 2023
The first part (the theoretical basis) was highly interesting and really opened up some new avenues of thought for me. The second part (case studies) was highly technical and hard to follow as a layman. I’d rate the first part a 8/10 and the second a 4/10 so that comes out to be 6/10 or 3 stars. Still, if you’re interested in the topic I would definitely recommend this book for the first part!
July 25, 2022
Uno di quei testi trasversali, capaci di rispondere a domande che non sono chiuse nei confini di una sola disciplina ma che appartengono all'umanità tutta. Gigantesco.
Want to read
July 21, 2017Il "emprunte au sociologue français Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) les notions essentielles de "mémoire collective" et de "construction sociale du passé"" (...) Il "élabore les concepts de "figures-souvenirs", de "mémoire communicationnelle" ou de "mémoire culturelle".
En savoir plus sur http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/...
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En savoir plus sur http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/...
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February 28, 2016
As for this book, it is a further exploration in memory, obviously in light of collective memory. Unlike a socialist, author persuades it into case study and wider sphere in the very beginning of his study. Clearly, this book is divided into two parts by himself, the former is the system of theory, extends from primal collective memory to politic imagination while latter is case study.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews