Embodied Collective Memory

Embodied Collective Memory
Author: Rafael F. Narváez
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2013
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0761858792

The human body is not a given fact-it is acquired, achieved, and learned. The body remembers, and it does so in collectively relevant ways. This book discusses how, why, and to what extent corporeal memories are constructed but also resisted, modified, or created anew.

The Archive and the Repertoire

The Archive and the Repertoire
Author: Diana Taylor
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2003-09-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822385317

In The Archive and the Repertoire preeminent performance studies scholar Diana Taylor provides a new understanding of the vital role of performance in the Americas. From plays to official events to grassroots protests, performance, she argues, must be taken seriously as a means of storing and transmitting knowledge. Taylor reveals how the repertoire of embodied memory—conveyed in gestures, the spoken word, movement, dance, song, and other performances—offers alternative perspectives to those derived from the written archive and is particularly useful to a reconsideration of historical processes of transnational contact. The Archive and the Repertoire invites a remapping of the Americas based on traditions of embodied practice. Examining various genres of performance including demonstrations by the children of the disappeared in Argentina, the Peruvian theatre group Yuyachkani, and televised astrological readings by Univision personality Walter Mercado, Taylor explores how the archive and the repertoire work together to make political claims, transmit traumatic memory, and forge a new sense of cultural identity. Through her consideration of performances such as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s show Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit . . . , Taylor illuminates how scenarios of discovery and conquest haunt the Americas, trapping even those who attempt to dismantle them. Meditating on events like those of September 11, 2001 and media representations of them, she examines both the crucial role of performance in contemporary culture and her own role as witness to and participant in hemispheric dramas. The Archive and the Repertoire is a compelling demonstration of the many ways that the study of performance enables a deeper understanding of the past and present, of ourselves and others.

The Embodied Mind

The Embodied Mind
Author: Thomas R. Verny
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2021-10-05
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1643138006

As groundbreaking synthesis that promises to shift our understanding of the mind-brain connection and its relationship with our bodies. We understand the workings of the human body as a series of interdependent physiological relationships: muscle interacts with bone as the heart responds to hormones secreted by the brain, all the way down to the inner workings of every cell. To make an organism function, no one component can work alone. In light of this, why is it that the accepted understanding that the physical phenomenon of the mind is attributed only to the brain? In The Embodied Mind, internationally renowned psychiatrist Dr. Thomas R. Verny sets out to redefine our concept of the mind and consciousness. He brilliantly compiles new research that points to the mind’s ties to every part of the body. The Embodied Mind collects disparate findings in physiology, genetics, and quantum physics in order to illustrate the mounting evidence that somatic cells, not just neural cells, store memory, inform genetic coding, and adapt to environmental changes—all behaviors that contribute to the mind and consciousness. Cellular memory, Verny shows, is not just an abstraction, but a well-documented scientific fact that will shift our understanding of memory. Verny describes single-celled organisms with no brains demonstrating memory, and points to the remarkable case of a French man who, despite having a brain just a fraction of the typical size, leads a normal life with a family and a job. The Embodied Mind shows how intelligence and consciousness—traits traditionally attributed to the brain alone—also permate our entire being. Bodily cells and tissues use the same molecular mechanisms for memory as our brain, making our mind more fluid and adaptable than we could have ever imaged.

Embodied Memories, Embedded Healing

Embodied Memories, Embedded Healing
Author: Xinmin Liu
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2021-10-28
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1793647607

Embodied Memories, Embedded Healing critically engages with the major East Asian cultural knowledge, beliefs, and practices that influence environmental consciousness in the twenty-first century. This volume examines key thinkers and aspects of Daoist, Confucianist, Buddhist, indigenous, animistic, and neo-Confucianist thought. With a particular focus on animistic perspectives on environmental healing and environmental consciousness, the contributors also engage with media studies (eco-cinema), food studies, critical animal studies, biotechnology, and the material sciences.

Performance, Embodiment and Cultural Memory

Performance, Embodiment and Cultural Memory
Author: Colin Counsell
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2009-10-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1443814717

The subject of cultural memory, and of the body’s role in its creation and dissemination, is central to current academic debate, particularly in relation to performance. Viewed from a variety of theoretical positions, the actions of the meaning-bearing body in culture and its capacity to reproduce, challenge or modify existing formulations have been the focus of some of the most influential studies to emerge from the arts and humanities in the last two and a half decades. The ten essays brought together in Performance, Embodiment and Cultural Memory address this subject from a unique diversity of perspectives, focusing on topics as varied as live art, puppetry, memorial practice, ‘cultural performance’ and dance. Dealing with issues ranging from modern nation building to the formation of diasporic identities, this volume collectively considers the ways in which the human soma functions as a canvas for cultural meaning, its forms and actions a mnemonics for constructions of a shared past. This volume is required reading for those interested in how bodies, both on stage and in everyday life, 'perform' meaning.

Weimar Cinema, Embodiment, and Historicity

Weimar Cinema, Embodiment, and Historicity
Author: Mason Kamana Allred
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2017-01-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351858483

In its retrieval and (re)construction, the past has become interwoven with the images and structure of cinema. Not only have mass media—especially film and television—shaped the content of memories and histories, but they have also shaped their very form. Combining historicization with close readings of German director Ernst Lubitsch's historical films, this book focuses on an early turning point in this development, exploring how the medium of film shaped modern historical experience and understanding—how it moved embodied audiences through moving images.

Mapping Memory

Mapping Memory
Author: Kaitlin M. Murphy
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2018-10-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823282554

In Mapping Memory, Kaitlin M. Murphy investigates the use of memory as a means of contemporary sociopolitical intervention. Mapping Memory focuses specifically on visual case studies, including documentary film, photography, performance, new media, and physical places of memory, from sites ranging from the Southern Cone to Central America and the U.S.–Mexican borderlands. Murphy develops new frameworks for analyzing how visual culture performs as an embodied agent of memory and witnessing, arguing that visuality is inherently performative. By analyzing the performative elements, or strategies, of visual texts—such as embodiment, reenactment, haunting, and the performance of material objects and places Murphy elucidates how memory is both anchored in and extracted from specific bodies, objects, and places. Drawing together diverse theoretical strands, Murphy originates the theory of “memory mapping”, which tends to the ways in which memory is strategically deployed in order to challenge official narratives that often neglect or designate as transgressive certain memories or experiences. Ultimately, Murphy argues, memory mapping is a visual strategy to ask, and to challenge, why certain lives are rendered visible and thus grievable and others not.

Cultural Memory and Popular Dance

Cultural Memory and Popular Dance
Author: Clare Parfitt
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2021-12-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3030710831

This book focuses on the myriad ways that people collectively remember or forget shared pasts through popular dance. In dance classes, nightclubs, family celebrations, tourist performances, on television, film, music video and the internet, cultural memories are shared and transformed by dancing bodies adapting yesterday’s steps to today’s concerns. The book gathers emerging and seasoned scholarly voices from a wide range of geographical and disciplinary perspectives to discuss cultural remembering and forgetting in diverse popular dance contexts. The contributors ask: how are Afro-diasporic memories invoked in popular dance classes? How are popular dance genealogies manipulated and reclaimed? What is at stake for the nation in the nationalizing of folk and popular dances? And how does mediated dancing transmit memory as feelings or affects? The book reveals popular dance to be vital to cultural processes of remembering and forgetting, allowing participants to pivot between alternative pasts, presents and futures.

Collective Memory and the Historical Past

Collective Memory and the Historical Past
Author: Jeffrey Andrew Barash
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2020-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 022675846X

There is one critical way we honor great tragedies: by never forgetting. Collective remembrance is as old as human society itself, serving as an important source of social cohesion, yet as Jeffrey Andrew Barash shows in this book, it has served novel roles in a modern era otherwise characterized by discontinuity and dislocation. Drawing on recent theoretical explorations of collective memory, he elaborates an important new philosophical basis for it, one that unveils profound limitations to its scope in relation to the historical past. Crucial to Barash’s analysis is a look at the radical transformations that symbolic configurations of collective memory have undergone with the rise of new technologies of mass communication. He provocatively demonstrates how such technologies’ capacity to simulate direct experience—especially via the image—actually makes more palpable collective memory’s limitations and the opacity of the historical past, which always lies beyond the reach of living memory. Thwarting skepticism, however, he eventually looks to literature—specifically writers such as Walter Scott, Marcel Proust, and W. G. Sebald—to uncover subtle nuances of temporality that might offer inconspicuous emblems of a past historical reality.