Jan Assmann, "Communicative and Cultural Memory" (Summary)

Memory serves as the foundation for both personal and collective identity, operating on three distinct levels. At its innermost level, memory functions within our neuro-mental system, constituting our personal memory. On the social level, memory becomes a matter of communication and interaction, as demonstrated by Maurice Halbwachs, who emphasized the social nature of memory. Meanwhile, psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung explored collective memory within the human psyche's unconscious depths.

 

Aby Warburg expanded the concept of memory to the cultural realm, introducing the term "social memory." He examined how cultural artifacts, particularly images, serve as carriers of memory. Warburg's "Mnemosyne" project explored the enduring influence of classical antiquity on Western culture. Similarly, Thomas Mann's novels delved into cultural memory, focusing on the Late Bronze Age in Palestine and Egypt while reflecting on European cultural heritage and its Jewish roots.

 

The distinction between "communicative memory" and "cultural memory" clarifies the relationship between memory and tradition. While Halbwachs focused on collective memory as shaped by social interactions, cultural memory extends beyond communication to encompass institutionalized forms of memory preservation and transmission. External symbols, such as monuments and museums, play a crucial role in shaping cultural memory, serving as reminders across generations.

 

Unlike cultural memory, communicative memory lacks institutional support and relies on everyday interactions and communication. It is sustained by familial and communal ties and tends to have a limited time depth, typically spanning three generations. The durability of communicative memory depends on the continuity of social bonds and frameworks of communication.

 

Halbwachs's later work highlighted the institutional and power dynamics involved in shaping collective memory. His examination of Christian memory in Palestine during the Roman Empire's adoption of Christianity revealed the influence of theological dogma and the church's power structure on the construction of official memory.

 

Jan Vansina, an anthropologist renowned for his work with oral societies in Africa, identified a tripartite structure in the representation of the past within these societies. He observed that recent events, prominently featured in everyday communication, gradually recede into the background over time. Information about the recent past becomes scarcer and less precise as time passes. In contrast, the most distant past, including narratives about the world's origins and the tribe's early history, is extensively formalized and institutionalized, preserved through rituals, songs, and other cultural practices. This formalized aspect of memory, termed "cultural memory," involves specialized individuals and requires specific occasions for its activation.

 

Vansina's concept of the "floating gap" highlights the divide between the informal memory of recent events and the formalized cultural memory of the distant past. This gap shifts with each generation, influencing historical consciousness in oral societies, which typically operates on two levels: the time of origins and the recent past.

 

In oral history, the communicative memory pertains to memories of the recent past shared among contemporaries. This aligns with Halbwachs's notion of collective memory, focusing on memories passed down through oral tradition rather than written sources. Cultural memory, on the other hand, relies on fixed points in the past, represented through symbols and rituals that illuminate the present. In cultural memory, the distinction between myth and history blurs, emphasizing the subjective interpretation of the past rather than its objective reconstruction.

 

Memory, particularly cultural memory, is closely tied to identity, shaping individuals' sense of self within various social, cultural, and political contexts. Memory serves as a repository of identity, reflecting one's diachronic identity as an individual or member of a group. The dynamics of memory formation are influenced by affective ties and social obligations, driving individuals to remember in order to maintain a sense of belonging. Conversely, the transition from one group to another often involves forgetting the memories associated with the original identity, highlighting the complex interplay between memory and identity formation.

 

The distinction between communicative and cultural memory is also evident in the social dynamics of participation. In communicative memory, group participation is diffuse, with individuals acquiring knowledge through everyday interaction and socialization. There are no specialized custodians of informal memory; rather, knowledge is collectively shared among community members. Conversely, participation in cultural memory is highly differentiated, even within oral and egalitarian societies. Historically, the preservation of cultural memory was entrusted to specialized individuals such as poets or griots, who served as guardians of the group's cultural heritage.

 

These cultural memory specialists, found in both oral and literate societies, include a diverse array of figures such as shamans, bards, priests, and scholars. In oral traditions, the specialization of memory carriers depends on the demands placed on their memory, with some rituals requiring verbatim transmission and strict adherence to oral scripts. For instance, in ancient Rwanda, the memorization of ritual texts was a highly esteemed task, with specialists risking severe consequences for errors.

 

Rituals often gave rise to mnemonic techniques, such as knotting cords or other forms of pre-writing, to aid in memorization. Interestingly, attitudes toward writing varied among different religious traditions. While some, like the Indo-European traditions, distrusted writing due to fears of dissemination and loss of secrecy, others, such as ancient Near Eastern societies like Mesopotamia, embraced writing as a means of codifying and transmitting sacred knowledge.

 

Moreover, cultural memory participation is often structured by notions of secrecy and esotericism, leading to elitism within society. Certain areas of knowledge are restricted to select individuals, requiring initiation or specialized training for access. This inherent tendency toward elitism results in systematic exclusions, such as the exclusion of women in certain historical contexts or lower classes in societies dominated by an educated bourgeoisie.

 

Additionally, the media of cultural memory often exhibit a form of intra-cultural diglossia, reflecting the distinction between a "great tradition" and several "little traditions." Traditional societies commonly use different languages or linguistic varieties for formal versus everyday communication. However, modern societies introduce further linguistic varieties through cultural media like film and television, complicating this binary structure.

 

The dynamics of cultural memory are marked by transitions and transformations, which hold structural significance and merit brief discussion. One direction involves the transition from autobiographical and communicative memory to cultural memory. Another direction within cultural memory involves moving from the background to the foreground, from the periphery to the center, and from latency or potentiality to manifestation or actualization, and vice versa. These shifts entail crossing structural boundaries: the boundary between embodied and mediated forms of memory, and the boundary between what we term "working" and "reference memories," or "canon" and "archive."