Memory Against Culture

Memory Against Culture
Author: Johannes Fabian
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2007
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780822340775

Recent essays by prominent anthropologist on questions of time, memory, and ethnography.

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage
Author: Veysel Apaydin i
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2020-02-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1787354849

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage focuses on the importance of memory and heritage for individual and group identity, and for their sense of belonging. It aims to expose the motives and discourses related to the destruction of memory and heritage during times of war, terror, sectarian conflict and through capitalist policies. It is within these affected spheres of cultural heritage where groups and communities ascribe values, develop memories, and shape their collective identity.

Memory in Culture

Memory in Culture
Author: A. Erll
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2016-04-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0230321674

This book questions the sociocultural dimensions of remembering. It offers an overview of the history and theory of memory studies through the lens of sociology, political science, anthropology, psychology, literature, art and media studies; documenting current international and interdisciplinary memory research in an unprecedented way.

Death, Memory and Material Culture

Death, Memory and Material Culture
Author: Elizabeth Hallam
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2020-05-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000184196

- How do the living maintain ongoing relationships with the dead in Western societies? - How have the residual belongings of the dead been used to evoke memories? - Why has the body and its material environment remained so important in memory-making? Objects, images, practices, and places remind us of the deaths of others and of our own mortality. At the time of death, embodied persons disappear from view, their relationships with others come under threat and their influence may cease. Emotionally, socially, politically, much is at stake at the time of death. In this context, memories and memory-making can be highly charged, and often provide the dead with a social presence amongst the living. Memories of the dead are a bulwark against the terror of forgetting, as well as an inescapable outcome of a life's ending. Objects in attics, gardens, museums, streets and cemeteries can tell us much about the processes of remembering. This unusual and absorbing book develops perspectives in anthropology and cultural history to reveal the importance of material objects in experiences of grief, mourning and memorializing. Far from being ‘invisible', the authors show how past generations, dead friends and lovers remain manifest - through well-worn garments, letters, photographs, flowers, residual drops of perfume, funerary sculpture. Tracing the rituals, gestures and materials that have been used to shape and preserve memories of personal loss, Hallam and Hockey show how material culture provides the deceased with a powerful presence within the here and now.

Cultural Memory and Early Civilization

Cultural Memory and Early Civilization
Author: Jan Assmann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2011-12-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521763819

Pt. 1. The theoretical basis -- Memory culture -- Written culture -- Cultural identity and political imagination -- pt. 2. Case studies -- Egypt -- Israel and the invention of religion -- The birth of history from the spirit of the law -- Greece and disciplined thinking -- Cultural memory : a summary.

Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory

Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory
Author: Astrid Erll
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110204444

The specific concern of this collection is linking the use of media to the larger socio-cultural processes involved in collective memory-making. The focus rests in particular on two aspects of media use: the basic dynamics of mediation and remediation. The key questions are: What role do media play in the production and circulation of cultural memories? How do mediation, remediation and intermediality shape objects and acts of cultural remembrance? How can new, emergent media redefine or transform what is collectively remembered?

Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture

Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture
Author: Birgit Neumann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2012-10-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3110227622

Bringing together innovative and internationally renowned experts, this volume provides concise presentations of the main concepts and cutting-edge research fields in the study of culture (rather than the infinite multitude of possible themes). More specifically, the volume outlines different models for the study of culture, explores avenues for interdisciplinary exchange, assesses key concepts and traces their travels across various disciplinary, historical and national contexts. To trace the travelling of concepts means to map both their transfer from one discipline, approach or culture of research to another, and also to identify the transformations which emerge through these processes of transfer. The volume serves to show that working with (travelling) concepts provides a unique strategy for research and research design which can open up a wide range of promising perspectives for interdisciplinary exchange. It offers an exemplary overview of an interdisciplinary and international approach to the travelling concepts that organize, structure and shape the study of culture. In doing so, the volume serves to initiate a dialogue that exceeds disciplinary and national boundaries and introduces a self-reflexive dimension to the field, thus affording a recognition of how deeply disciplinary premises and nation-specific research traditions affect different approaches in the study of culture.

Ethnography as Commentary

Ethnography as Commentary
Author: Johannes Fabian
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2008-08-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822381206

The Internet allows ethnographers to deposit the textual materials on which they base their writing in virtual archives. Electronically archived fieldwork documents can be accessed at any time by the writer, his or her readers, and the people studied. Johannes Fabian, a leading theorist of anthropological practice, argues that virtual archives have the potential to shift the emphasis in ethnographic writing from the monograph to commentary. In this insightful study, he returns to the recording of a conversation he had with a ritual healer in the Congolese town of Lubumbashi more than three decades ago. Fabian’s transcript and translation of the exchange have been deposited on a website (Language and Popular Culture in Africa), and in Ethnography as Commentary he provides a model of writing in the presence of a virtual archive. In his commentary, Fabian reconstructs his meeting with the healer Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel, in which the two discussed the ritual that Kahenga performed to protect Fabian’s home from burglary. Fabian reflects on the expectations and terminology that shape his description of Kahenga’s ritual and meditates on how ethnographic texts are made, considering the settings, the participants, the technologies, and the linguistic medium that influence the transcription and translation of a recording and thus fashion ethnographic knowledge. Turning more directly to Kahenga—as a practitioner, a person, and an ethnographic subject—and to the questions posed to him, Fabian reconsiders questions of ethnic identity, politics, and religion. While Fabian hopes that emerging anthropologists will share their fieldwork through virtual archives, he does not suggest that traditional ethnography will disappear. It will become part of a broader project facilitated by new media.

Time and the Other

Time and the Other
Author: Johannes Fabian
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2014-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0231537484

Time and the Other is a classic work that critically reexamined the relationship between anthropologists and their subjects and reoriented the approach literary critics, philosophers, and historians took to the study of humankind. Johannes Fabian challenges the assumption that anthropologists live in the "here and now," that their subjects live in the "there and then," and that the "other" exists in a time not contemporary with our own. He also pinpoints the emergence, transformation, and differentiation of a variety of uses of time in the history of anthropology that set specific parameters between power and inequality. In this edition, a new postscript by the author revisits popular conceptions of the "other" and the attempt to produce and represent knowledge of other(s).